The Boy on the Shed:A remarkable sporting memoir with a foreword by Alan Shearer: Sports Book Awards Autobiography of the Year

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Paul Ferris has written a book that transcends genres...Ferris writes with the sort of fluency that, on the pitch, once impressed peers such as Paul Gascoigne.Ferris has gone beyond standard sports autobiographies. The Boy On The Shed is of a time and place, of Ireland, of Northern Ireland, of growing up a Catholic on a Protestant estate in Lisburn in the 1970s. It is a story of everyday sectarianism and its effects...These books offer a window on another world. Paul Ferris spent much of his childhood in Lisburn looking through one. What he saw, how he understood it and didn't understand it, is gripping. * Irish Times * An early contender for sports book of the year, The Boy On The Shed is not only a great story of a man who came tantalisingly close to making it as a top-flight footballer (and went on to achieve so much else besides), but is simultaneously engaging, well-paced and, like the very best stories, well written. * Press Association * Unique, interesting, extremely emotive and gives some insight that supporters have never heard before...His story is raw and will keep you engaged without using any exaggerations which try to win over readers...Ferris has pushed himself forward extremely well in his new book, so well that any Newcastle supporter's book collection will be incomplete without The Boy on the Shed in it. * Newcastle Chronicle * Despite the heavy loading, and a natural reticence to “push myself forward”, this is a moment he has looked forward to.

I don’t know what possessed me to get this book. I found it online by chance. The title of the book doesn’t exactly give it away, but seeing the familiar name of Paul Ferris, a player around in the time when I was starting to go to St James Park regularly, it was an obvious choice. It’s also been nominated (and I’m guessing won) for the Sports Book Awards, so it was guaranteed to be a good read. Now, through mutual friend Graham Wylie, both are involved in Speedflex, a company that offers high intensity circuit training – Ferris as chief executive, Shearer as a director. Instead, it’s a wonderfully written account of a remarkable life, and a character shaped mostly by his experiences away from the beautiful game. If the same fate befell a young starlet now, they would at least leave the club with enough in the bank to ensure they were comfortable until another opportunity arose. I’m laughing but those two things, they just shake your confidence in everything. Where you didn’t have fear before, you have it. If I get a chest pain now I think ‘oh, what’s that?’ I have three boys and up to that point they think their dad’s invincible.Today was his first climb to the top. He knew if he was there, watching, then she would never leave him. Her name was Bernadette and he climbed the shed every day.~ I have a different story. I was diagnosed with intermediate localised prostate cancer in January 2021, had a mini-stroke the next month just 10 days after the first Covid vaccination, couldn't have a prostatectomy because of the stroke which delayed treatment decisions, had an awful time on statins before discovering that there are alternatives, had the standard 6 months of hormone therapy and standard 20 days of radiotherapy, followed by post-radiotherapy proctitis. My issues and problems are different from his. Paul Ferris has a good story to tell, in fact several, Irish and Geordie, politics and football, and he tells it well, avoiding the obvious pitfalls of trying to be either lyrical or philosophical or too clever. * Hunter Davies * While I still have some issues nearly 2 years later these are much less now than they were, I had an easier time while on holiday this year than last, I'm off the worst of the medications, and I remain in remission from the cancer.

Injury after injury saw Ferris spend more time on the treatment table than on the pitch, and robbed him of the natural gifts of speed and mobility that had set him apart. At 21, he left St James’s Park for the first time.It felt a lot of time was spent on the first half of the book and very little on the second half. The first half was a better book. In particular, his early days as an apprentice footballer are by far the best read. The passing was the dread at the end of it, but the thought of it was there with me from I was six years old. An Irish Catholic mother of seven, she had done it all before but she hadn’t done it all before and been fragile herself. The Magic In The Tin is the 2nd book by Paul Ferris ex professional football player, physio amongst other things. . He wrote his first novel An Irish Heartbeat in 2011. He formed a health and fitness company ( Speedflex) with Graham Wylie and Alan Shearer, with Ferris as Chief Executive.