Cricket is a game for those with lots of time on their hands. This may be one of the reasons it never took off in the USA: it requires a more studied temperament than the go-get-’em swagger of the American Dreamer. Yet surprisingly, and quite successfully, Joseph O’Neill has discovered in the game a means of envisaging and re-imagining America’s relation to the rest of the world in the twenty-first century.

His protagonist, Hans, does not come from one of the famed cricketing nations. A Dutchman, he played in his youth for a respectable bourgeois sports club in The Hague. Now he works for a New York bank, and tries to rescue his failing marriage to his English wife, Rachel, who