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Cover image courtesy of publisher.
y separately published work icon Willowman single work   novel  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Willowman
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'From the critically acclaimed author of Mr Wigg comes an enthralling literary novel about a batmaker and a gifted young cricketer, set around the time the game began changing. For fans of Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Joseph O'Neill's Netherland.

'Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have tried everything, crafting bats from birch, maple, ash, even poplars . . . After two hundred years, cricket bat making is still beholden to a single species: salix alba caerulea - or white willow

'Reader Cricket Bats, one of the last traditional batmakers back in the old country, has a contemporary home in the Antipodes, with Allan Reader keeping the family business alive in a small workshop. Allan lives alone, all but estranged from his adult daughter, quietly going about his days with the cricket commentary for company.

'When Todd Harrow, a gifted young batter, catches Allan's eye, a spark is lit and Allan decides to make a Reader bat for him, selecting the best piece of willow he's harvested in years to do so.

'As Harrow charts a meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the sport, leaving his equally talented sister's dreams in his wake, Allan's magical bat takes centre stage as well, awakening something in Allan and bringing him back into himself. But can Allan's fledgling renaissance - hanging as it does on the magic of that bat - carry on after Harrow is cursed by injury and a strained personal life?

'Set as the new short form of the game began to gain prominence, Willowman is a love letter to the art and beauty of cricket and a meditation on the inner lives of certain kinds of men and women, for whom it is a way of life. Award-winning author Inga Simpson writes exquisitely about a national sport you will never view the same way again.' (Publication summary)

Notes

  • Epigraph: The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses. - Neville Cardus

    For all its apparent artificiality, cricket is a sport in nature. - Joseph O'Neill, Netherland

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Hachette Australia , 2022 .
      image of person or book cover 1507611216809143262.jpg
      Cover image courtesy of publisher.
      Extent: 304p.
      Note/s:
      • Published 26 October 2022
      ISBN: 9780733634550, 9780733634567
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Hachette Australia , 2023 .
      image of person or book cover 2847573986505910518.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 416p.
      Note/s:
      •  Published September 2023

      ISBN: 9780733649592
Form: audiobook
    • Sydney, New South Wales,: Hachette Australia , 2022 .
      image of person or book cover 2613080406721907936.jpg
      Image courtesy of publisher's website.
      Extent: 12 hrs and 15 minsp.
      Note/s:
      • Published 25 October 2022
      ISBN: 9780733649929

Other Formats

Works about this Work

The Perfect Bat : That Rarity, a Cricket Novel Diane Stubbings , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 449 2022; (p. 44)

— Review of Willowman Inga Simpson , 2022 single work novel

'In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.' (Introduction) 

Fine Delivery : a Novel on Our Summer Game Peter Lalor , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 12 November 2022; (p. 16)

— Review of Willowman Inga Simpson , 2022 single work novel
Fine Delivery : a Novel on Our Summer Game Peter Lalor , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 12 November 2022; (p. 16)

— Review of Willowman Inga Simpson , 2022 single work novel
The Perfect Bat : That Rarity, a Cricket Novel Diane Stubbings , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 449 2022; (p. 44)

— Review of Willowman Inga Simpson , 2022 single work novel

'In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.' (Introduction) 

Last amended 21 Jun 2024 11:55:00
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