One of the readers who came to hear David Peace discuss The Damned Utd at the Guardian Book Club called it "the most viscerally exciting book about sport that I have ever read". "I honestly felt, every second I was reading the book, as if you had some direct line into Clough's brain." He was not alone in thinking that it had reached a different audience than the rest of Peace's fiction. Another reader described himself as "generally just a sports book reader - I tend not to read fiction". "What fascinated me about it was that it was almost like being in a Brian Clough simulator." Over and over again, readers spoke of this extraordinary "reality effect". One reader spoke of being able to measure it against her own memories. "I did know Brian Clough - I was a football wife under him for seven years, for my sins." She spoke of him with admiration as "a football purist" who required good behaviour and fair play from his players. She suggested that he was on a "crusade" to transform a side perceived as "dirty" (although the motives of Peace's Clough are altogether more tormented).

There was some debate about whether Peace was somehow infringing the rights of real individuals by naming them as characters in his novel, an argument pursued by contributors to the Guardian Book Club website. "Despite enjoying the book, I felt uneasy throughout the time I spent reading it. It's partly because it's so well done, and it seemed to me that there's a risk that Peace's imagined Clough will overtake the real one." "I think that the writer admired Clough," argued another, "and wanted to write something that was poetic, that was affectionate." And was this so different from much historical fiction? "He has approached 'the facts' very like somebody like Pat Barker", in her first world war novels. "As for the recently dead," pointed out another contributor, "any number of respectable modern authors have used them - Muriel Spark's Aiding and Abetting used the Lord Lucan case, Colum McCann's Dancer used Nureyev, and umpteen authors have used Marilyn Monroe." A member of the audience at the Book Club mentioned Gordon Burn, and Peace acknowledged his admiration for this writer and the particular influence of Alma Cogan

Some of the individuals named in The Damned Utd are still alive. Former Leeds player Johnny Giles has made public his unhappiness with both the novel and its film adaptation. Those opining on the Book Club website were shaken a little when a contributor announcing himself to be John Giles weighed in. "I think it's outrageous and wrong to portray people in the fictitious manner in which they've been portrayed in this book ... He portrayed me in the book as someone who was plotting against Brian Clough to get rid of him, which was totally untrue. He had me, therefore, in conversations with Brian Clough - first-name conversations - that never happened." "I can see why John Giles would want to put his own view of events before the public," responded an admirer of the novel, "but the distinction between John Giles the person and John Giles the fictional character is still valid and ... we should expect people to understand it."

Some did discern the signs of fictional artifice in the novel. "As you get deeper into the 44 days, you begin to share the paranoia, the eerie silence of the corridors and offices of the club. It's an effect that DeLillo would kill for." "There's more than a hint of Beckett in the repetitions, which not only illustrates the obsessive nature of the main character but also the rituals and routine aspects of work." A reader at the Book Club noted the importance of the religious imagery and religious quotation in the novel, calculated to be at odds with Clough's frequent professions of his atheism. "I don't believe in luck, I don't believe in God, I believe in Brian Howard Clough." A reader who was clearly familiar with Peace's whole oeuvre pointed out how, in every one of his novels, narrative intensity was produced by confinement to "a short amount of time" (44 days in the case of The Damned Utd).

Thus also, as Peace himself explained, the novel's insistent present tense: his protagonist was "utterly paranoid that everybody hated him" and the narration was designed to capture this fearfulness. In fact, several of the players named in the book later spoke with apparent sincerity of being happy to have Clough appointed manager. But everything in the book is seen through one character's eyes. Peace rejected the label "faction". "What I do is fiction." In response to a reader who asked whether he had tried to talk to any of the individuals involved, Peace told us that he had had the chance to meet Clough while he was working on the novel. Much as he would have liked to do so, he decided it would be "a mistake". If he had met him, his characterisation would have ceased to be fiction.

 John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week he will be looking at Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle. Join them for a discussion on Tuesday 25 August at the Scott Room, the Guardian, Kings Place, London N1. Doors open at 6.30pm, talk starts at 7pm. Entry is £8 (includes a glass of wine). To reserve a place, email book.club@guardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 2881.

In the summer of 1974, my dad took me to see my first football match; Huddersfield Town v Leeds United. It was a pre-season testimonial game for Town's Steve Smith. It was also, according to my dad, a chance for me to see Trevor Cherry play. Cherry had once played for Town, but now played for Leeds. This fixture had actually been arranged by the previous managers of Town and Leeds, Ian Greaves and Don Revie. Now both Town and Leeds had new managers, Bobby Collins and Brian Clough.

I remember Brian Clough as I stood with my father in the Leeds Road car park and watched the Leeds players and staff get off their coach. Brian Clough looked different. Brian Clough looked friendly. He shook hands with people. He signed autograph books. He ruffled my hair. He winked at me.

He said: "You'll never forget this day."

Or at least I think he did.

Sometime in the summer of 2003, I came to England from Japan to see my mum and dad and also to deliver the final draft of my novel GB84 to Jon Riley, who was then my editor at Faber, and his assistant Lee Brackstone.

Jon had been responsible for bringing me to Faber from Serpent's Tail, following the completion of the Red Riding Quartet. The original plan had been for two novels; The Yorkshire Rippers and GB84. However, following a long, long discussion about the miners' strike, Jon had persuaded me to leave "the Yorkshire Rippers novel" for later and to write GB84 first.

Two years later, GB84 was finished and now, in a pub on Lambs Conduit Street, Jon asked me: "How are the Yorkshire Rippers?"

"Do you fucking care?" I replied, "Or DUFC - an Occult History of Leeds United; a secret grimoire of the Dirty Whites - told through a chorus of voices; Don Revie on his deathbed; Albert Johanneson in his tower-block flat; Brian Clough during his 44 days at Elland Road in 1974; David Harvey in his Sanday caravan on the Orkney Islands, his malt dreams as United Spectres of Leeds past, present and future; a choir of the Damned, conducted by Luchino Visconti. Or something like that ..."

"That's fantastic," said Jon, and that was that. I went back to Tokyo and I began to read; the history of Leeds United and the life of Brian Clough, all the football books and all the local newspapers. And also all the novels that I wanted to pay homage to: Room at the Top, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, This Sporting Life, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry and Alma Cogan.

And then there came a point, when and where I stopped reading and I started writing; different lives, different voices -

There was a very lengthy and very noir prologue entitled "I, Brian Clough, Having Slaughtered Alf Ramsey"; there was also a shifty little character called the Irish Shit-house, a man trapped in a glass box, endlessly giving his commentary and his opinion; and then there was that ghostly voice of troubled-Don.

But gradually, very gradually, day by 44-day, one voice, one life, triumphed over all the other voices, all the other lives; the voice and the life of Brian Howard Clough; a voice I remembered as a caricature; a life I remembered face down in a ditch; but the more I listened to this voice, the more I read about this life, and now the more and more I wrote, the more and more I both admired and feared this Brian Clough; a man of two-halves (at least), as we are all men of two-halves (at least). But always a character. A genuine character -

In the first person present; present in those 44 days in 1974. And in the second person present; present in the memories that brought him to those 44 days in 1974. Present and incorrect. A character in a novel; a novel about a man and a job and a place and a time; Brian Clough as the manager of Leeds United in 1974. And how he came to be there. A novel that was no longer DUFC - Do You Fucking Care? A novel that was now The Damned Utd -

A novel about fact and about fiction, about dreams and about nightmares, about defeat and about revenge, about tragedy and about farce, about wings made of wax and rays made of sun.

In the six years since Jon, Lee and I sat in that pub on Lambs Conduit Street, The Damned Utd has been the subject of a legal action by John Giles, incurred the displeasure of the Clough family, and is now a film starring Michael Sheen and Timothy Spall. Next year, the Damned United musical opens in the West End. Maybe. The Yorkshire Rippers, on the other hand, remains a book-to-come. Still.

 Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses.