Lisbon in the imagination

WRITERS sometimes make out that promoting a book is a chore. This is nonsense. It is a pleasure to finally get out and chat with folk after being immersed in the solitary writing process for so long.

There is also a realisation that, when a book is published, it takes on a life of its own and becomes a vehicle for other people's imaginations. Everyone takes something different from it and that is as it should be.

There is a line from the Scottish author Alasdair Gray, who said of his seminal novel, Lanark, that one of his aims was to create the city of Glasgow in the imagination. One of our aims in The Road to Lisbon was to re-interpret the Lisbon experience in an imaginative way.

Forests have been felled in writing about Celtic's victory in 1967, but much of it is factual and covers similar themes. There is a romance and a mythology to the occasion which we felt had been overlooked.

What is more, we felt that the fans were a huge part of that experience - the ones who travelled to the game, the ones who stayed at home, those who have had the torch passed down to them over the course of the last 45 years. They deserved their place.

Hopefully, we have managed to capture some of the passion and romance of Lisbon. More importantly, it seems to have inspired the people we have met since the book came out to tell us their own Lisbon tales ... tales we hope will continue to echo through the generations.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Road-Lisbon-Martin-Greig/dp/1780270844/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337696542&sr=1-1