Description

‘A book that is about vulnerability, failure, chance, fate, the nature of memory, and the fleeting moments that start like any other day but become sliding doors that close behind you with a chilling finality…in its imaginative scope, its daring, its ambition and its skill, it stands apart’ Jon Hotten, Wisden Cricket Monthly

Watk. Raja. Jane (i). Shirvan. Cricket – the way it brings emotion and life and pain and memory and regret all hauntingly and combustively to light. John. Jane (iii). Shivalkar. Men and women whose destinies don’t make sense, scattered across eras and continents, their stories a miraculous tapestry of near misses, strange turns and quiet, unglamorous devotion. Frank. RR. Vowles. Carmino.

From the freakish minute that might have prevented the slow decline of West Indies cricket to the jazz trombonist blocked from the England side, Christian Ryan, award-winning author of Golden Boy, reconstructs forgotten, fragile moments with breathtaking care.

The result is a wildly ambitious, compulsively readable exploration of the strange, luminous ways cricket shapes a life, sizzling with humour and verve and tragedy.

Publisher Review

A book that is about vulnerability, failure, chance, fate, the nature of memory, and the fleeting moments that start like any other day but become sliding doors that close behind you with a chilling finality…in its imaginative scope, its daring, its ambition and its skill, it stands apart — Jon Hotten * Wisden Cricket Monthly * Groundbreaking, brilliant and unforgettable. Christian has aimed to create a certain kind of work of art and he has pulled it off. It is one of those books that will give more and more to the reader each time they go back into it — Malcolm Knox Cricket writing’s most vivid, kaleidoscopic imagination — Gideon Haigh An interesting and different way of portraying a story . . . Delves into the human aspect and not just the usual cricket numbers — Michael Holding At once unputdownable and also unpickupable, because if you pick it up you will eventually finish it and what are you going to do then? * Guardian, on GOLDEN BOY * Heartbreaking to read but such is the quality of Ryan’s work you can’t stop * Telegraph, on GOLDEN BOY *