A love letter to Plymouth, its beloved football team and Home Park

A love letter to a time and place, a city and its beloved football team, Home Park Heaven is uplifting, frequently hilarious, poignant and moving.

Established crime writer, Radu Herklots, revisits his childhood and adolescence in Plymouth with Technicolor clarity.

As well as his Plymouth Argyle heroes, much of 1960’s and early 1970s Plymouth life is here.

Names like Angela Rippon, Sue Lawley, David Owen, Sir Francis Chichester, Robert Lenkiewicz and Beryl Cook bounce off the pages, together with Ivor Dewdney, Mimi Law, Robert Daniel and Gus Honeybun.

We read of the author’s shock at being plucked away from his idyllic home opposite Central Park at the pivotal age of fifteen before we come up to date with an emotional return trip with his late father in 2012, a sixtieth birthday visit with his wife and yet another crucial encounter at Home Park in 2024.

“I hadn’t found any other book that captured the excitement of growing up in Plymouth in the ‘60s and I decided to write one myself," explains Radu. "Having read several ‘misery memoirs’ I wanted to write something happy. Once I started writing the memories started to flood back.”

Radu Herklots grew up in Plymouth and Hampshire. He studied law at Kingston University, London, and the College of Law, Guildford. He retired from full time legal work in 2019, and has successfully published three crime novels, most recently The Turbulent Bishop. His detective hero, John Tedesco, is named after a Plymouth Argyle player. Home Park Heaven is his first foray into non-fiction.