Cricket
Series in Cricket
Books in Cricket
Above Average at Games
'Wodehouse would have made an excellent sports writer' Sunday Times As Wodehouse’s biographer Frances Donaldson observed, it was vitally important to the boy Plum that he was ‘above average at games’. Luckily, he was known at school as ‘a noted athlete, a fine footballer and cricketer [and] a boxer’, and sport inspired much of his earliest writings, as well as some of his very finest and laugh-out-loud funniest. Wodehouse wrote with trademark wit on a rich range of games – and on cricket and golf, in particular – as well as anyone ever has, bringing a knowledge and a passion born of practice. English cricket inspired in Wodehouse what he himself long considered to be his favourite work; and yet America (which he first visited keenly and then came to call home) led him to the love of baseball, and golf – enthusiasms that drew him to new tales for new audiences, including the celebrated golf stories which John Updike described as ‘the best fiction ever done about the sport.’ This rollicking anthology, selected, edited and introduced by the novelist Richard T. Kelly, offers a vivid picture of Wodehouse at play – in the ring, at the crease, on the tee – which is guaranteed to please any sporting crowd. Beginning with early journalism, taking in extracts from novels and short stories in their entirety, it all adds up to a medal-winning collection.
Brazen Heiress
Femme Fatale . . . Napoleon lusted for her fortune while Paris swooned at her feet. Adelaide de Chevenoy, claimant to the de Chevenoy fortune, captivated jaded Parisians with her fresh beauty and mysterious past. No one suspected that the newly returned heiress was really Lily D'Artiers Copeland, Adelaide's dazzling double, sent by the British government to retrieve a cache of priceless journals. At her side was the aristocratic adventurer who had lured her into spying, a man she'd spent her whole life trying not to love. . . . Gentleman Spy . . . Bold, dashing Webb Dryden remembered the reckless hoyden who'd pursued him as a child. But this Lily, transformed into a woman who stole his breath away--seemed frustratingly indifferent to his charms. Posing as her fiancé, Webb planned to work undercover, but Lily's brazen ways commanded the attention of Napoleon's intrigue-filled court. Suddenly Lily was more than Webb bargained for, a beauty who touched his heart and haunted his dreams, inciting passions that imperiled their very lives. . . .
WG Grace
From his emergence as a teenage prodigy to well past his 50th year, W.G. dominated the game of cricket, taking 2,876 first-class wickets and scoring 54,896 first-class runs in a career lasting an incredible 43 years, from 1865 to 1908. His beard and massive frame made him instantly recognizable wherever he went, and his gamesmanship and wit were legendary. Using contemporary accounts of W.G.'s greatest innings, many for the first time, Robert Low presents a radically new image of the sportsman who was recognised as the preeminent athlete of his day.