This is one of the books recommended to me when I visited the Oxford Bookstore in Delhi, just before the Covid pandemic put a stop to travel. I wasn’t sure at first whether this novel would be a little too much cricket for me. My previous understanding of the game was limited to knowing Sir Geoffrey Boycott was the greatest batsman ever (I was born in Yorkshire, and met him when I was a boy!) and that the best wicket keeper is Johnny Bairstow (he happened to be my mum’s next-door neighbour). Needless to say, my knowledge of cricket (and arrack) has been greatly expanded thanks to Shehan Karunatilaka’s charming debut novel “Chinaman”.

WG Karunasena, or Wije, is a retired cricket journalist, active alcoholic and unreliable narrator. Aspiring to add a crowning achievement to his faded career, he sets out with his friend Ari to track down the little known but legendary bowler Pradeep Mathew. Wije claims that Mathew was a cricketing genius, expert at bowling the tricky left-hand spin “chinaman” delivery. Their quest to find him appears to be constantly thwarted by cricket officials, coaches and ex-players and leads us to doubt whether he still lives in Sri Lanka, if he is alive or, indeed whether the elusive Mathew ever really existed.

This is ultimately a novel that tells us as much about Sri Lanka, a country I love, as it does about cricket. Apart from cricket coaches and officials, we meet seedy bookmakers, government ministers, gangsters and terrorists.