“Brilliant photographer, a brilliant writer – and one of the most startlingly original cricket books ever published.” – Matthew Engel
“Christian Ryan is cricket writing’s most exquisite miniaturist, capable of revealing whole worlds with a knowing glance. In the peerless Patrick Eagar, he finds his perfect subject.” – Gideon Haigh
“Magical, a head rush, a marvel. It takes one summer many summers ago and conjures something timeless and human. Like John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, but wilder, propelled by an unaccountable suspense.” – Rahul Bhattacharya
A book centring on the most significant all-time figure in cricket words and pictures, photographer Patrick Eagar. In particular, on one mid-’70s summer when most mornings it seemed like Eagar was stepping out of the house, into his metallic blue Renault 16 TS, driving to some cricket ground, and taking a photograph unlike any cricket photograph anyone had seen before.
“What makes this book so wonderful, and so unlike anything else, is Ryan’s ability to communicate what he sees in the photographs, which is often beyond the moment itself – character, symmetry, inevitability, foreshadowing.” – Kamila Shamsie, WISDEN CRICKETERS’ ALMANACK
“Ryan is an adventurer, able to create masterpieces out of scraps. Even the best cricket writing tends to be orthodox. Ryan’s is avant garde, but nostalgic, too. Don’t try that at home.” – Greg Baum, THE AGE
“One moment you are being told about the famous Jeff Thomson photograph, and as you settle down you are being taken to Vietnam and Schindler and Hutton and Bedi. Like a Renaissance painting, both the background and the main picture appear in sharp focus.” – Suresh Menon, THE HINDU
“A book of eccentric brilliance, it also aches. The ache is that cricket is dangerously close to becoming more real in distant memory than in the present.” – Malcolm Knox, SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
“Free-thinking, idiosyncratic, slightly off-the-wall and quite brilliant meditation on Eagar, photography, 1975 and a changing world.” – Tanya Aldred, THE GUARDIAN
“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there. We spend years of our lives watching cricket. And then Feeling comes along, which justifies all that time and extends the parameters of our understanding.” – Paul Edwards, ESPN-CRICINFO
WINNER OF WISDEN INDIA BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR CRICKET SOCIETY/MCC BOOK OF THE YEAR 2018
SUNDAY TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2017
LONGLISTED FOR WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2017
SPORTS BIBLIO NOTABLE BOOK OF 2017
“Fascinating study of Eagar’s art before the internet.” – Mike Atherton, THE TIMES
“The photos are spectacular. Ryan’s words elevate them. A wicketkeeper leaping in vain to catch a throw from the outfield is the basis for ruminations on mortality and whether a photograph can foreshadow death.” – Benedict Gardner, WISDEN CRICKET MONTHLY (Book of the Month)
“Feeling reveals Ryan’s own feeling for his subject – not merely the work of Eagar in the 1975 season; not merely a loose biography of Eagar; not merely a historic appreciation of sports photography worldwide, but of the wider potential of the medium, with references to Capa, Lange, Avedon, Winogrand, Leibovitz.” – Bernard Whimpress, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW
“A book with an otherworldly title, talking about what is increasingly an otherworldly exercise. Ryan takes a bunch of photos. He spells out the magic. Leafing through Feeling provides an opportunity to revisit an art form that is currently emitting some kind of death rattle.” – Sharda Ugra, THE CRICKET MONTHLY
“I love this book.” – Ken Piesse, CRICKETWEB.NET