Chinaman

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

Discover the blazing debut novel from the Booker Prize winning author.

'A crazy ambidextrous delight' Michael Ondaatje

Where is Pradeep S. Mathew - spin bowler extraordinaire and 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'?

Retired sportswriter W. G. Karunasena is dying, and he wants to know.

W.G. will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down the mysterious Pradeep. On his quest he will also uncover a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

'Bristling with energy and confidence' Sunday Times

Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

©2011 Shehan Karunatilaka (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself…

    Guardian

  • Carries real weight…a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack…essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius

    The Times

  • Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes drinks

    Observer

  • Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams

    Sunday Times

  • Chinaman‘s free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan life, even though Karunatilaka’s portrait of the country is scathing…it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction

    Financial Times

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