Michael Wagg

Each Reading Book in the Rapid Plus stages 10-12 series is finely levelled for KS3 students, and includes: E ngaging texts with mature topics and themes to appeal to older readers . Accessible layout with a dyslexia-friendly font and colour scheme. A diverse range of characters which all students can identify with. Quiz sections and recap pages to help learners develop their comprehension skills and reading stamina.

When he inherits a special football badge, German teenager Adi sets off on a mission to fulfil his grandfather's dying wish and return the badge to its rightful owner, former England footballer, Edgar Kail. After tracking Edgar down, Adi gets the chance to learn more about the achievements of his grandfather, Adolf Jager, and the story unfolds of a special friendship that spanned twenty years and survived the horror of the Second World War. Edgar Kail and Adolf Jager played for their respective clubs in the early twentieth century and they remain folk heroes even now. Perfect for less-confident readers, this is a fictional tale of two real-life footballing heroes, and the moving story of a friendship forged by the beautiful game.

In The Turning Season, Michael Wagg goes in search of hidden histories and footballing ghosts from before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He revisits the 14 clubs that made up the 1989 DDR-Oberliga, East Germany's top flight. From Aue in the Erzgebirge mountains to Rostock on the Baltic Sea, this quirky account of his whistle-stop tour is for fans who know that football clubs are the beating hearts of the places they play for. There are portraits of the lower levels as well as the big league, stories of then and now that celebrate the characters he met pitch-side. There's Mr Schmidt, who's found a magical fix for the scoreboard at Stahl Brandenburg; Karl Drossler, who captained Lokomotive Leipzig against Eusebio's Benfica; and the heroes of Magdeburg's European triumph, last seen dancing in white bath robes, now pulling in to a dusty car park by the River Elbe. The Turning Season turns its gaze on East German football's magnificent peculiarity, with 14 enchanting stories from a lost league in a country that disappeared.