A gripping eleven-sided biography and audacious re-reckoning of nonfiction's velocities by the author of Golden Boy, voted Wisden Cricket Monthly's 'Best Cricket Book Ever'
'Groundbreaking, brilliant and unforgettable. Christian has aimed to create a certain kind of work of art and he has pulled it off. It is one of those books that will give more and more to the reader each time they go back into it.' - Malcolm Knox
Watk. Raja. Jane (i). Shirvan. Cricket – the way it brings emotion and life and pain and memory and regret all hauntingly and combustively to light. John. Jane (iii). Shivalkar. Men and women whose destinies don't make sense.
Ask, was there a minute when the decline of West Indies cricket didn't have to turn out that way? What can be gained poring over the crooked lines of lives forged by, or infiltrated by, cricket?
Hold fast to dreams that stay vivid by disappearing: on Newcastle's streets, Darwin's.
This book moves like no other with humour and verve and tragedy. Frank. RR. Vowles. Carmino.
'A book that is about vulnerability, failure, chance, fate, the nature of memory, and the fleeting moments that start like any other day but become sliding doors that close behind you with a chilling finality . . . in its imaginative scope, its daring, its ambition and its skill, it stands apart.' - Wisden Cricket Monthly, Book of the Month
'A masterful, poetic book that connects cricketers to each other and the reader to the soul of the game. Ryan is a sportswriting genius, the best we have.' - Tony Wilson
'An interesting and different way of portraying a story . . . Delves into the human aspect and not just the usual cricket numbers.' - Michael Holding
Praise for Christian Ryan:
'On one level, this is an incredibly accomplished biography of irreconcilable personality clashes, the sad tale of opportunities missed and promise unfulfilled. It is also the best cricket book in recent years not written by someone called Gideon Haigh.' - Sun Herald on Golden Boy
'Thoroughly researched and eminently readable' - Weekend Australian on Golden Boy
'If this were not a sports book, Ryan's biography of Kim Hughes, a triumph of writing and research, would be recognised as a masterpiece of recent Australian non-fiction.' - Malcolm Knox on Golden Boy
'Ryan's unauthorised biography details the rise and fall of Hughes in compelling fashion.' - Adelaide Advertiser on Golden Boy
'This brilliant book has been acclaimed as a masterpiece—one of the best ever written about Australian cricket—in every review I have seen published, and deservedly so.' - Herald Sun on Golden Boy
'The Hughes era is beautifully covered by Christian Ryan's new book Golden Boy. It is an epic piece ... Ryan's book is one of the best ever written about Australian cricket.' - Daily Telegraph on Golden Boy
'Golden Boy is an insightful and somewhat controversial examination of Australia's cricketing history ... a must-read for the serious cricket fan.' - Bookseller+Publisher on Golden Boy
'What this compilation of essays captures, quite superbly, is not simply the achievements of Australian cricket but the way our culture has been infused with its spirit, often as not providing the focus, the metaphor, through which we define ourselves. And, like the best of cricket writing, it's also elegiac.' - Sydney Morning Herald on Australia: Story of a cricket country
'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 on Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second
'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 on Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second
'Free-thinking, idiosyncratic, slightly off-the-wall and quite brilliant meditation on Eagar, photography, 1975 and a changing world.' - Tanya Aldred, The Guardian on Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second
'Fascinating study of Eagar's art before the internet.' - Mike Atherton, The Times on Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second
'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.' - Wisden Cricket Monthly (Book of the Month) on Feeling Is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second
About the Author
Christian Ryan is the author of Feeling is the Thing that Happens in 1000th of a Second. His book Golden Boy, a biography of Kim Hughes, was winner of the Cricket Book of the Year and voted 'Best Cricket Book Ever' by Wisden Cricket Monthly.
As an essayist his major works include 'Jeff Thomson is Annoyed', 'The Unremembered Six', 'Blew' and 'The Thirty-Ninth Summer of DK Lillee'. He is the author of the essay/pictorial cultural sweeps Rock Country and Australia: Story of a Cricket Country, and was the first editor of The Monthly, the national magazine of politics and the arts. He lives in Naarm/Melbourne.
