NETHERLAND

In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, andremembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New Yorkin which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut and the Iraqwar. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel leftwith their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks andsilences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the ChelseaHotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost ina country he′d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in amost alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New Yorkcricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play abeautiful, mystifying game on the city′s most marginal parks. It wasduring these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed ofestablishing the city′s first proper cricket field. Over the courseof a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck′s dream and Chuck′ssense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darkermeaning of his new friend′s activities and ambitions...′Netherland′ is a novel of belonging and not belonging, andthe uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering andrecuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it,Joseph O′Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our newcentury and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.