In 1975 Patrick Eagar took some photographs unlike any cricket photographs anyone had seen before.
This is a book about photography and what it can do – tell the future and show human beings in ways not available to our eyes. It is part detective story (and reconstruction of an artist's thought processes, and one of cricket's greatest summers), part biography, part wild-roaming conversation, part essay on the power of the image, myth and reality.
Winner of Wisden India Book of the year 2018
shortlisted for sports book of the year awards 2018
shortlisted for mcc/cricket society book of the year 2018
Longlisted for william hill sports book of the year 2017
Published by riverrun (2017)
Designer: Lindsay Nash
Biography of the savaged, thrill-per-minute cricketer Kim Hughes and an investigation into what men can do to men when provoked/unprovoked.
Winner of best cricket book ever, wisden cricket monthly 2019
WINNER OF CRICKET BOOK OF THE YEAR, BRITISH SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2010
SHORTLISTED FOR CRICKET SOCIETY/MCC BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010
Malcolm Knox’s 5 Favourite Sports Books –
A Good Walk Spoiled by John Feinstein
You Know Me Al by Ring Lardner
Open by Andre Agassi
Golden Boy by Christian Ryan
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Published by Allen & Unwin (2009)
32 Writers, 79 Photographers – curated and edited by Christian Ryan
An essay/pictorial cultural sweep of Australian rock & pop
We break up. We love. What else? One big thing: the pure exhilaration that comes from using our bodies or our minds to make something, or simply do something, and for me listening to music is just about – it narrowly beats cricket, and ties with reading – the most magical state of doingness there is. On a perfect day it might happen in the shower, water fast and scalding, and then while you’re shaving or putting paint on your face afterwards. And if, in between reading the stories in this book, you find yourself tinkering with your shower mix – adding, say, “Sad Dark Eyes”, “Looking Through a Window”, “Cattle Train”, “Way of the World”, “It’s Not Easy”, “She Goes On”, “Hold On”, “Shivers”, “Forgotten Years”, “Stayin’ Alive”, “Boys In Town”, “Almost With You”, “Fitzroy Crossing”, “Running from the Body” or “The Weeping Song” – well, that’s another way this book will have worked.
Robert Forster, critic and Go-Between, said: “Rock Country is the most interesting and attractive book on Australian rock ever.”
Published by Hardie Grant (2013)
Designer: Dominic Hofstede
And I just heard on the radio a violinist say he used to practise the violin while watching cricket on TV because the game’s gaps and quietudes let him drift in and out of subconsciousness.
A celebration of the game as it was, isn’t, but could be again.
Shortlisted for Cricket Society/MCC Book of the Year 2011
shortlisted for Most Beautiful Book, Australia & nz 2013
The original essay/pictorial cultural sweep. Essayists include –
Inga Clendinnen, Gideon Haigh, J.M. Coetzee, Robert Forster, Rahul Bhattacharya, Max Bonnell, Malcolm Knox, Kevin Mitchell, Elisabeth Holdsworth, Greg Baum, Tony Wilson, Mike Brearley, Ian Chappell, John Benaud, Jarrod Kimber, Peter Hanlon, Stephen Fay, John Harms, and more.
Published by Hardie Grant (2011)
Designer: Dominic Hofstede