Eleven

A too-wild-to-be-real real quest and a gripping eleven-sided biography – by the author of Wisden Cricket Monthly's 'Best Cricket Book Ever'


'Groundbreaking, brilliant and unforgettable. Christian has aimed to create a certain kind of work of art and he has pulled it off. It is one of those books that will give more and more to the reader each time they go back into it.' —Malcolm Knox


Watk. Raja. Jane (i). Shirvan. Cricket – the way it brings emotion and life and pain and memory and regret all hauntingly and combustively to light. John. Jane (iii). Shivalkar. Men and women whose destinies don't make sense, scattered across eras and continents, their stories a miraculous tapestry of near misses, strange turns and quiet, unglamorous devotion. Frank. RR. Vowles. Carmino.


Eleven: We Burn Them in the Sun moves by drift and intuition: one thought into another, one person into another, one moment into ... It's an audacious re-reckoning of what nonfiction can hold – its limits, its freedoms – and a reimagining of nonfiction's velocities.


From the slow decline of West Indies to the freakish minute that might have prevented it, the dreams that stay vivid by disappearing on Newcastle's streets, Darwin's, Christian Ryan, award-winning author of Golden Boy, reconstructs forgotten, fragile moments with breathtaking care. 


The result is a wildly ambitious, compulsively readable exploration of the strange, luminous ways cricket shapes a life, sizzling with humour and verve and tragedy.


Praise for Christian Ryan


'On one level, this is an incredibly accomplished biography of irreconcilable personality clashes, the sad tale of opportunities missed and promise unfulfilled. It is also the best cricket book in recent years not written by someone called Gideon Haigh.' —Sun Herald on Golden Boy


'Thoroughly researched and eminently readable' —Weekend Australian on Golden Boy


'His interviewing and Haigh-like construction of narrative provide an untarnished classic not only of Hughes but also of Western Australian cricket.' —Cricinfo on Golden Boy


'If this were not a sports book, Ryan's biography of Kim Hughes, a triumph of writing and research, would be recognised as a masterpiece of recent Australian non-fiction.' —Malcolm Knox, Independent Weekly on Golden Boy 


'Ryan's unauthorised biography details the rise and fall of Hughes in compelling fashion.' —Adelaide Advertiser on Golden Boy


'This brilliant book has been acclaimed as a masterpiece—one of the best ever written about Australian cricket—in every review I have seen published, and deservedly so.' —Herald Sun on Golden Boy


'The Hughes era is beautifully covered by Christian Ryan's new book Golden Boy. It is an epic piece ... Ryan's book is one of the best ever written about Australian cricket.' —Daily Telegraph on Golden Boy 


'Golden Boy is an insightful and somewhat controversial examination of Australian's cricketing history ... a must-read for the serious cricket fan.' —Bookseller+Publisher on Golden Boy 


'Many a detour can be taken while meandering through this story of a cricket country; each is rewarding in its own way and needn't be taken in a particular order. Few of its destinations can be found along pathways or in strategic plans, and that is the beauty of it.' —ESPN Cricinfo on Australia: Story of a cricket country


'What this compilation of essays captures, quite superbly, is not simply the achievements of Australian cricket but the way our culture has been infused with its spirit, often as not providing the focus, the metaphor, through which we define ourselves. And, like the best of cricket writing, it's also elegiac.' —Sydney Morning Herald on Australia: Story of a cricket country 


'Eccentric but brilliant ... As a writer, Ryan is an adventurer, able to create masterpieces out of scraps.' —Sydney Morning Herald on Feeling is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second