Nicholas Hogg – författare

‘An intelligent, gripping and stylish love story set against a beautifully drawn contemporary Japan’ Observer Books of the YearSocial psychologist Ben Monroe has returned to Tokyo after a failed marriage, determined to seek out his former lover Kozue. His estranged teenage daughter Mazzy reluctantly flies from California to join him. On the flight she meets a young Japanese man, Koji, a cult survivor, who tells her the story of the luminous night princess Kaguya, a powerful tale of beauty and obsession. As Ben delves deeper into the underworld in search of Kozue, Mazzy and Koji are compelled to follow, and their four lives dangerously intersect as past and present collide.

‘Cricket is battle and service and sport and art’ says Douglas Jardine as he dreams up brutal tactics tobeat the Australians in the 1930s. It’s also about class and race, language and reflection, it’s timelessand it’s ‘just a game’. It’s Empire and sunset, death and renewal, children and long-ago memories. Sometimes, it’s just dust and sunburn.The fractured dreams of wide-eyed children feature alongside the exploded rhythms of a day spent not watching but feeling the game, measured and deliberate and not always under control. The emotional range of cricket’s living theatre is fully explored as ordinary actions are transformed into myth and back again. The rhythms of play are insisted upon and exploded.