The Nickel Boys Colson WhiteheadĪ worthy winner of the Pulitzer prize for fiction, Colson Whitehead’s follow-up to The Underground Railroad, is the essential paperback for these times. Hamilton admits to “nostalgically summoning ghosts”, but with no cricket at all at the moment, his work makes for a welcome substitute. So to capture the quirky, kind and stoic people who characterise this receding community, he spent last season luxuriating in cricket at Sookholme in Nottinghamshire, Clifton Park in Yorkshire and Hove’s county ground in Sussex.
In 2019, Hamilton became convinced that the therapeutic “slow trot” of cricket’s sparsely attended but charmingly nuanced county championship was at the point of unwelcome change, with the new white-ball competition the Hundred about to trample all over it. One Long and Beautiful Summer Duncan Hamilton The plotting itself has less mystery, but Arnott writes vibrantly about the harsh wonder of nature, his vivid characters becoming almost animal themselves. Against this mythic backdrop, a survival thriller emerges as a soldier with a troubled upbringing goes on a mission in the dark forest to deliver the bird to her paymasters. A quietly unsettling fable set in a country beset by ecological, political and economic difficulty, the titular shape-shifting bird in Arnott’s second novel acts as a cipher for humankind’s inexorable struggle to tame the natural world.
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