Sports and Social comprises thirteen vignettes about the oddities, dramas and victories of everyday life. Following two books of what we might call observations, this is the first fiction collection by Kevin Boniface, a Huddersfield postman with a knack for precise, rhythmical prose. People are his speciality. This is the opening to the seventh story, ‘Jonnie Rabbett’s Shooting Club’: ‘Jonnie Rabbett has a wind-blown complexion and an off-kilter centre of balance. He wears green things and he lives on a hill. He is in charge.’

Some stories are like miniature memoirs. In ‘The Owl Ladies and the 1980s’, the narrator reminisces fondly about his family, particularly his father, whose lessons in unseriousness involved going to football games dressed as an old woman. ‘An Inventory of the Family Rubbish’ is just that, ‘an annotated transcript’