Netherland [Paperback]

‘[I have] not read anything that quite so brilliantly captured the exuberant madness and cultural diversity of [New York].’ Jeremy Paxman, Guardian (Books of the Year)

‘There is a very special sort of gratitude you can feel for a book that is so formidably written that it has you anxious to get back to it and pining a little bit to be away from it .’ Sebastian Barry, Guardian (Books of the Year)

‘Dazzling…and told with great grace and daring.’ Kate Summerscale, Sunday Telegraph (Books of the Year)

‘The post-9/11 novel we’ve been waiting for: a witty, vivid, aphoristic, fiercely intelligent narrative.’ Philip French, Observer (Books of the Year)

‘Too good for the Booker.’ Robert McCrum, Observer (Books of the Year)

'"Netherland" is an affecting portrait of constrained love and loss, of cultural and emotional estrangement and of the difficulty of knowing others intimately…a piquant blend of vibrancy and elegy reminiscent of Paul Auster's writing.' FT

'”Netherland” is so expertly woven that it is impossible for a reader not to admire what it essentially is – a beautifully written exploration of memory and self.' Sunday Telegraph

'The wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had. O'Neill seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought.' New York Times

'Elegant and profound.' Sunday Times

'Extraordinary. O'Neill is a writer of dizzying elegance.' FT

'O'Neill's novel was nominated by critics as a book of the year more times than any other title in 2008, and it's not hard to see why. Its perceptiveness and lingering air of sadness will beguile you more powerfully than you may at first expect.' Robert Collins, The Sunday Times

‘Silky, lyrical, vividly alert to the multinational melange of today's New York, Hans's narration – with its detours to London and The Hague – reflects on a question that could hardly be timelier. Who is an American, and can this nation of nations ever stand alone again?' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

‘It is hard to know which is stranger – that a great American novel has been written about cricket, or that a great cricket novel should be set in America. But both are true. “Netherland” is ambitious, intelligent and deeply perceptive.' The Times

'The true beauty of O'Neill's third novel lies in his flawless facility with words. A rare flair for bringing a story to vivid, pulsating life is evident in descriptions of anything from depression to childhood or, most frequently, the rich tapestry that is New York.' Charlotte Heathcote, Sunday Express

‘New York landmarks like the Chelsea Hotel and Times Square shimmer anew as Hans reflects on friendship, memory and displacement.’ Hephzibah Anderson, Daily Mail

'O'Neill writes about cricket with an insider's knowledge and a metaphorical sweep. The result is the first great American novel underpinned by a deep understanding of the complexity of spin bowling. A novel full of vividly descriptive passages that possess a heightened, almost hallucinatory, brilliance. A great American novel with an ordinary European everyman at its centre.' Observer

‘I have to admit that yes, it is as good as people say it is…it’s like Saul Bellow without the sometimes unnerving feeling of de haut en bas…it is a style very well suited to the sidewalks of America…not only do we get New York as seen by both European and Asian immigrants, we get to see a lot of it that tends not to make it into wide-eyed evocations of the city.’ Nick Lezard’s choice of paperbacks, Guardian

‘Despite beginning with a murder, this excellent novel – well worth the plaudits it received on both sides of the Atlantic – does not attempt the treacherous compromise between character and plot that hobbles so much of contemporary literary fiction…Like a batsman on top form O’Neill’s writing embodies a compact between control and flair…and with a truthful open-endedness, “Netherland” coalesces into a magnificent whole.’ The Times

‘It’s all beautifully described, and the ancient game is a pleasing metaphor. But the cricket, like the novel, turns out to be less innocent than you imagined.’ Evening Standard

'New York is not what most people imagine it to be. Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not. “Netherland” is suspensful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory. Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way.' Jonathan Safran Foer

‘O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. O'Neill has succeeded.’ Joseph O’Connor

'Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent…The reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly." Sebastian Barry

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.

In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans – his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents.

Lost in a country he'd regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place – the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city's first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck's dream and Chuck's sense of American possibility – until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend's activities and ambitions.

‘Netherland’ is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

`O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.' Joseph O'Connor

'Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent ... The reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly." Sebastian Barry --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Joseph O’Neill is an Irish barrister living in New York. He is the author of two previous novels, ‘This Is the Life’ and ‘The Breezes’, as well as a memoir, ‘Blood-Dark Track’.