This beautiful, introspective, fantastically ambitious novel about – among other things – post-9/11 New York and cricket – has received rave reviews. James Wood, in The New Yorker, called it ‘one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read’.

Hans Van Der Broek is a Dutch stock market analyst stranded in New York after his wife and son flee back to London in the wake of the attacks. On alternate weekends, he falls back into a comforting childhood ritual: cricket. Hans, ‘the only white man on the cricket fields of New York’, is befriended by Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian Jay Gatsby figure: a fast-talking entrepreneur with a big American Dream, and a decidedly seedy side. At one level, this is a book about relationships: Hans and his wife, Hans and Chuck. But it’s also about America as a country of immigrants; magnet for dreamers; land of self-reinvention; and the explosion of uncertainty post-9/11.

‘You want a taste of how it feels to be a black man in this country?’ Chuck speechifies. ‘Put on the white clothes of the cricketer. Put on white to feel black.’