RIPPA Young Pilgram #author PJ Laverty

 Joey Rippa is one of the most naturally gifted footballers England's Second Division has ever seen. He's also one of the least interested in that fact.

When Plymouth Argyle's pre-season tour brings him back to his homeland, Australia, for the first time since leaving his beloved Merri Bay, Rippa arrives late, sunburnt, and carrying an impressive holiday paunch. His long-suffering manager Bobby Noll - the man who discovered him surfing a wave in Western Australia and somehow turned him into Plymouth's Player of the Year - is not impressed.

Back in England, Rippa is navigating his second season as a professional footballer with his trademark combination of natural genius and spectacular indifference. He's living in a backpackers hostel populated by 52 nationalities, moonlighting in an underground lawn bowls operation of questionable legality, and trying to hold together a Plymouth side with genuine ambitions of promotion and a maiden trip to Wembley.

There's just one problem. Actually, there are several.

Rolf Bonkovic, the notoriously unimpressed Australian national coach, is finally paying attention, which means Rippa needs to start performing like someone who actually wants to play international football. His sponsor, the magnificently eccentric Thurston Kwibble, has ideas about how Rippa should spend his spare time that range from the mildly unusual to the potentially criminal. And then there's Ned Buckley - younger, fitter, more dedicated, annoyingly talented, and seemingly sent from the universe specifically to make Rippa's life difficult.

Buckley is everything Rippa is not: disciplined, professional, and disturbingly wholesome. He meditates. He keeps a journal. He volunteers in Kenya during the off-season. He also, infuriatingly, appears to be the better footballer.

As the season builds toward a dramatic cup run against Rippa's old nemesis West Ham United, and with his international future hanging in the balance, Rippa is forced to confront the question Bobby Noll has been asking since the day they met on a beach in Western Australia: does he actually want any of this?

Young Pilgrim is the second book in P.J. Laverty's RIPPA! series, a comedy about football, freedom, and a young man who would rather be anywhere else, doing almost anything else, and who is somehow brilliant at the one thing he can't escape. Set against the backdrop of early 1990s English football, with Italia 90 still fresh in the memory and the Premier League just around the corner, it captures a sport and an era on the cusp of change, filtered through the eyes of someone almost entirely unbothered by either.

Funny, warm, and sharply observed, Young Pilgrim builds on the world established in the first book in the series, RIPPA! while standing fully on its own feet. New readers are welcome. Joey Rippa will eventually get around to welcoming them too, once he's finished his surf.

To conenct with PJ Laverty ....
https://www.instagram.com/p_j_laverty/
https://www.fairplaypublishing.com.au/products/rippa-young-pilgrim 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

That's great.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

It's good morning, PJ Lavity. Welcome to Yellow Shelf.

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hi, Joanna. Thanks so much for having me on the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

It's a pleasure. Congratulations. Your second book. I read this as your second book or third book, is it?

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Uh fourth football sports novel, but the second book that's in what will hopefully be a series. Okay, awesome.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

Ripper. Ripper, tell us all about Ripper. Please share with the Yellow Shelf audience.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Yeah, well, it's based upon the character, Joey Ripper, set in the late 80s, early 90s, and he's a footballer, soccer player.

unknown 0:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

And he's that good that he gets taken over to England to play. The problem is that he doesn't want to be there and he doesn't want to play soccer. He wants to be at home on the beach in Australia surfing. But unfortunately, he's not that good at surfing, but he's very good at football. So he has to stay over there and pursue it. This is in the days before you know Mark Paducah, Mark Bosnich, Ari Kure, those players really made it over there. And he's not really earning that much before wages as well, where you know gangbusters. So he's over there in uh bleak, dreary England, late 80s, early 90s. Doesn't want to be there and um, but he sticks it out.

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Yeah. And who tell me who this book is like targeted at? Because I'm a soccer mum. I live this world through children of soccer, and we've just had the World Cup, so soccer is kind of everywhere. Um, who's reading Ripper? What where are you targeting this at?

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Well, I guess it's a bit of an old adage, but like write where you want to read. I wasn't really seeing the these books on the market, and it's kind of what I like to read. Um, I guess younger people, it's definitely not YA. There is a bit of adult content in there. I guess all I'm targeting at is people perhaps that are uh lapsed readers. Uh, I myself was lost as a reader, is as uh you know, real big reader as a child, but as a teenager, I was lost. There was about 19 or 20, a book by Nick Colby uh called Fever Pitch, which is based around soccer. Yeah, and I I bought that in an op shop, sat down with it, and that was me. I was hooked. And through that, that was a real gateway book for me. I was onto the hobber, Lord of the Rings, train spying, and it opened up this whole new world to me. And now I'm nine books in and I've got a PhD, and you know, it really did change my life. And you know, all the data suggests that the particularly for young males, 15 to 24, I think it's around 9% read regularly, which I think is just so sad. So, my my aim, not just for that demographic, but also older, older people like my my parents as well, just um trying to get the a book that interests them and hopefully it opens a whole new new world, beautiful world for them.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

Yeah, and you know, I'm so glad you touched on that because I don't get to talk about this enough. That that idea of a lapse reader, like that's okay. Like people become lapsed for many reasons, but going back to reading is such an amazing, you know, experience I hear from so many people. And I'm so glad you shared that that was you know one of your triggers to dive into it.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Yeah, I mean, yeah. I don't know about you, but I'm I'm just burnt out from from screens. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

I know my kids are too, and just trying to get them away from that, trying to get them back into reading. And you know, the the data is out there, it's good for your blood pressure, it's good for your mental mental health, will give you something a bit more interesting to talk about down the pub as well. Yeah, um, so just getting people away from Netflix, yeah, back into books. I mean, and and you know, it doesn't have to be physical books, so I I uh you know have a special spot in my heart for that, but just start reading again. And um, I'd like to say that my book is the the be all and end all, but unfortunately it's not. But hopefully they can, you know, that can be a springboard onto uh you know other authors.

SPEAKER_00 4:10

Yeah, and PJ, there's themes in many of your books around football and soccer. Would that be fair to say?

SPEAKER_01 4:17

Yeah, yeah. So my PhD was quite quite serious. It was on I'm from Scotland originally, so Scottish literature in Australia. And this actually cropped up during COVID and it became a bit like my golf, a bit of my escape, just sitting down doing something, writing something a bit different, a bit punchier, a bit uh more dialogue driven. Yeah, and I was just like I said, was just kind of running it for myself. But luckily, I'll be able to find a publisher and a bit of an audience as well, and and hopefully that continues growing.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

Yeah. Well, look, as a soccer parent, that's what I wanted to share earlier. You know, as a soccer parent, I really enjoyed that, you know, feeling of I really want this, do I really want this? No, I don't want this. So, I mean, I think many people can relate to that.

SPEAKER_01 5:02

I hope so. Well, that that's the the idea using football or sports as a vehicle. You know, who doesn't love sport? We're just coming off the back of the World Cup as well. And um, I think particularly for a lot of young males, there isn't enough content um directed at them on book from in the book world. So I'm hoping that you know they can latch on, and perhaps you know, you're seeing your kids, or maybe you know someone, a teenager, well, we'll say uh a later teenager because I don't, it's not necessarily YA. Buy them this, they might be into soccer, and and through this, like I did, you know, start getting into you know widening your scope and getting into the old world of books, yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:42

Yeah, wonderful. And PJ, if we're interested in you, in the book, learning even about your back catalog, how do we connect with you? Are you on socials, Instagram? Like where point us in that direction.

SPEAKER_01 5:56

Yeah, so my publisher is Fair Play Books, based in Sydney. Um sports publisher. So you can find that fairplaybooks, I believe, dot com dot AU, and you can find more about me. Uh probably Instagram be best, uh PJ Lavity under there. I'm also on the dreaded X under the same name, PJ Lavity. So yeah, you can follow me on there and uh find my books through my publisher, Fairplay.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Awesome. And you're gonna keep writing. Is that the plan? Is that the dream?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

It is the dream. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm not there yet in terms of uh book sales, but see how we get it.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

I I would like the yellow shelf audience to help you get there because you know Ripper, it like the title, it's ripper, you know, people and I think so many young men, if anyone's listening, and when I say young men, you know, in your 20s, you soccer players, yeah. Read this, you relate to it, you know, you'll you'll um you'll get a good journey story out of it. PJ, yeah. PJ, thanks so much for joining us. I would love to keep supporting you. So any future books, please come back and share.

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Thanks so much, it's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

Cheers.