It’s exhilarating this book will have a life and readers, so many nights over years and years it felt like going no further than the end of the pencil. I wanted to write nonfiction that resists summarisation, and has in it loss and time, cricket, and energies that run in waves with the feeling I and the phenomenal people I met channelled into it. – CR 

OUT AUGUST 2026 IN THE UK AND SEPTEMBER 2026 IN AUSTRALIA

A gripping eleven-sided biography and audacious rereckoning of nonfiction’s velocities

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 destines don’t make sense.

Ask, was there a minute when the decline of West Indies cricket didn’t have to turn out that what? What can be gained poring over the crooked lines of lives forged by, or infiltrated by, cricket?

This book moves like no other with humour and verve and tragedy. Frank. RR. Vowles. Carmino.

“Groundbreaking, brilliant and unforgettable. Christian Ryan 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, author of The Life and A Private Man

“The ideas dazzle … 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. Book of the Month

“A masterful, poetic book that connects cricketers to each other and the reader to the soul of the game. Ryan is a sportswriting genius, the best we have.” – TONY WILSON, author of Players and 1989. Ex-Race Around the World winner

“Most certainly like nothing else I have read on the subject of cricket or indeed anything else.” – MARTIN CHANDLER, CricketWeb. Five stars

“An interesting and different way of portraying a story … Delves into the human aspect and not just the usual cricket numbers.” – MICHAEL HOLDING, 249 Test wickets. Best Sports Presenter, Commentator or Pundit, Royal Television Society Awards

“Not only does the book’s structure abandon linear progression, so does its language, words arriving in an unexpected order, jolting complacent expectations. Don’t, though, think of the book as simply a formal experiment: the depth of the research that has gone into it, years of digging and delving and interviewing, is extraordinary. There are few books on cricket that reveal things that aren’t already known; here, you learn something new on every other page.” – MAX BONNELL, Cricketweb. Five stars