The brilliant Big School is Craig's first novel and third book, after his autobiographical football addiction survival story, Losing My Religion (2002) and Roads to Redemption – A Guide to Major League Baseball (2005). It's fresh and original, also fast, furious, funny, sexy, philosophical and tragic.

The drama takes place in and around a Yorkshire school, The Peregrine Lane Grammar School , known locally as ‘ Peggy Lane ' and is centred on the arrival at the school of two new employees at the start of the 2002 school year. Protagonist Tim Weaver is 28 and taking his first steps in the world of school teaching with the English department, and new headmaster, Michael Peniston arrives at the same time intent on reviving the fortunes of an allegedly complacent, underachieving institution through a bureaucratic revolution.

The resistance to Michael's endeavours appears to be led by the mysterious, ageing Sefton Demmler, but the narrative doesn't quite flow quite so obviously along the expected lines. However, the story does become a battle between Michael and his Peggy Lane foes.

Meanwhile, Tim Weaver's story unfolds: one young man's journey into the workaday world of the Monday-to-Friday grind, looking for somewhere in the world to solidly plant himself for the first time, looking for friendship, looking, inevitably, for love. Big School is also the story of the beginning of this rite of passage journey towards mature adulthood.

The narrative develops into a fast-paced race against the clock to stop Penistone's putting a stranglehold on the school and destroying at least one teaching career in the process. Tim, inevitably, is involved in the drama, while we simultaneously watch his attempt to win the heart of one of his new colleagues.