Eleven

Dream/remember this: hands holding radios to eardrums, beating in the rhythm of ball-by-ball description. Cricket, the way it catches human life like light.





Follow the trails of eleven whose destinies don't make sense. See what it says about living with failure, the limits of nonfiction and fiction, how the fall of West Indies is cricket's tragedy and how but for a freak minute there may have been no fall. Raja. RR. Jane (i). Shirvan.





Instead of 'this book is about -' a better word's into: one thought into another, one person into another, one moment into... A life's (messy) undertaking, this is an audacious re-reckoning of nonfiction's potentialities and velocities, and joy



Christian Ryan is the author of Feeling is the Thing that Happens in 1000th of a Second, longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year, and Golden Boy, winner of the Cricket Book of the Year and voted by Wisden Cricket Monthly the 'best cricket book ever'. He lives in Melbourne.



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?



Heartbreaking to read but such is the quality of Ryan's work you can't stop