The Match
“Timing is the thing, the ageing Hector wrote from his home on the outskirts of Colombo. our troubles may soon be over ... ”
A heart-warming story of finding home and coming home, of cricket, growing up and falling in love.
‘This is a most intimately and precisely imagined novel ... so complete a match between empathy and artistry, between lively observation and intellectual grasp of cultural tensions, always surprises. Henry James said about Balzac’s relation to his characters: "It was by loving them that he knew them." Loving, while remaining in sharp moral control, is a hard business, but it leads to the profoundest kind of knowledge, as The Match so movingly demonstrates.’ Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday
‘Gunesekera is gifted and … has written an engaging, appealing, universal and hopeful book that not only shows what fiction can do, it shows why fiction is written – and read.’ Eileen Battersby, Irish Times
‘Embracing everything from Skants underwear to Cherie Blair’s late baby. Each emerges quite naturally from narrative and dialogue. Time never hangs too heavily on the story ... Few novelists have so skillfully underlined the beauty of patience as a redeeming virtue.’ Jonathan Keates,Times Literary Supplement
‘A compassionate and completely convincing portrait of exile, sobering but oddly and doggedly hopeful. There is something, in fact, of the optimism, the energy, the creative chaos, the fragility, and even the literary awkwardness, of Forster’s A Passage to India about its end, but Gunesekera is the far more natural story-teller. The narrative pace is impeccable, the dialogue accurate, the feel for place certain, the portraits sharp.’ David Crane, Spectator
‘Romesh Gunesekera has that essential gift of the novelist: the ability to make words live, to create life on the page; and he does so with grace and good humour. This is as enjoyable a novel as you are likely to come across this year.’ Alan Massie, Scotsman
Watch a video of a reading of The Spin Doctor, a related story at a Wasafiri event in Canterbury.
In the US try Barnes & Noble or the buy on Amazon link.