Matt Coyne’s new novel about a group of young boys in 1980s Yorkshire who form an unlikely bond with a chain-smoking nun opens with an epigraph stating: “Some of this is true”.

The Trouble With Sister Francis follows the boys after they end up at a youth club run by the aforementioned nun following a run-in with local bullies, with the story’s timeline shifting between their battle to save the club from closure and diary entries made by a World War II evacuee who also attended the club decades earlier.

Coyne – the man behind the well-known ‘Man Vs. Baby’ social media pages which have more than 500,000 followers – admits that “an awful lot is based in truth” with the story set in a town called Stockston, a lightly fictionalised version of the real-life Stocksbridge where Coyne grew up.

"It's largely based on my childhood really,” the author tells The Yorkshire Post. "The characters in it are amalgamations of my pals growing up. I come from quite a large Irish Catholic family, so my entire life was based around the church growing up.

Author Matt Coyne says his latest novel was inspired by his childhood in South Yorkshire.

placeholder image — Author Matt Coyne says his latest novel was inspired by his childhood in South Yorkshire.

"That idea of being on an estate during the summer holidays and trying to occupy yourselves after being released from the door at 7am and then returning 12 hours later, hopefully with all your limbs intact, that's very much my experience of growing up on a Sheffield estate.”

Sister Francis herself had a real-life inspiration.

"I did have an auntie who was a nun and she left her order in the 1980s after meeting someone. She was a great character, smoked and enjoyed a drink and the bookies and I could never quite imagine her in her habit, as a nun. So I wondered what if she’d have stayed a nun but had the same irrepressible, no-nonsense personality that I knew and loved. I guess that was the inspiration for Sister Francis.”

Coyne adds: "An awful lot of people will recognise that idea that the church is everything and you are deferential to any priest or nun. But there's much more personality to the priests and nuns if you want to scratch beneath the surface, good and bad. Flaws are the most interesting things about people."

This book is Coyne’s second novel, following his acclaimed first fiction book Frank and Red which came out in 2024 and followed the friendship between a grumpy widower in London and his six-year-old neighbour.

He says had been nervous about setting The Trouble With Sister Francis in his native South Yorkshire but has been delighted by the reaction to it so far – even if some readers need assistance with some of the local dialect used by the characters.

"I worried with this one that condensing it down to Yorkshire might prove its undoing but it has turned out to be the exact opposite. The reaction has been amazing and you get messages asking what particular phrases mean. I almost put a glossary in it but if I’m reading a book by an American author and don’t understand something, I’ll look it up. I think people should be expected to do that when they read a book about us as well.”

Coyne’s journey to becoming a successful novelist has been a unique one. He had been a freelance graphic designer when in 2015 he went viral around the world with a self-effacing and sweary Facebook post about the unspoken realities of becoming a father.

It led to the creation of the Man Vs Baby Facebook page and two non-fiction books about raising children; the first called Dummy and the second Man vs. Toddler. Coyne says while writing novels is a “very different experience” to the observational skills required for non-fiction, it is something he ‘absolutely adores’.

"If I could have started in fiction, I would have done, but no one was going to let me write until I demonstrated that somebody was going to buy something that I wrote. So non-fiction was really my gateway into being able to do what I want to do, which is fiction. I can't imagine not doing it now, it's amazing to get paid for it and long may it continue.”

Coyne says one of the big inspirations for the book was seeing Pete McKee’s exhibition, The Boy with a Leg Named Brian, which focused fondly on the Sheffield artist’s own working-class upbringing.

“There's a character in the book who's got a Raleigh chopper that he pushes everywhere because he's never been taught how to ride it. That entire character came out of one of Pete's paintings, with a kid on a chopper overlooking Sheffield. I thought, no matter what happens, I'm going to base it in in Sheffield this time around.”

He says writing the book led him to reflect on his own childhood.

"One of the really interesting things was remembering how great it was. Working-class novels set on estates can be terminally miserable. Don’t get me wrong, it had its challenges but it is fed back into culture that everything was so dour.

“Then you actually look back and remember how much fun you had, and the community that existed, and how everybody knew each other. That way to grow up wasn't as bad as as people make out, it was an awful lot of fun.

“The book is a love letter to to my childhood and it's a love letter to Sheffield and it's a love letter to those estates that people think of as as grim and rough and overly northern. I absolutely adored growing up like that, and I think if we can get some of that community back, that'd be amazing.

"But more importantly, I write books because I want people to be entertained and enjoy them. I'm not trying to like bang a drum or anything and the comedy is a really important part of it.

"It is a uniquely Northern thing, the idea you can never be too down because someone will come along and pick you up but you can never be too up because someone will come along and burst your bubble. I want people to walk away from the book and think, ‘I enjoyed it and I recognise some of the people I grew up with in it’.”

The Trouble With Sister Francis by Matt Coyne (published by Wildfire) is out now