In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, & remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck & the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the powercut & the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans
- his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks & silences in their marriage, & he spent two strange years in New York`s Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he`d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place
- the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia & the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city`s most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriends Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city`s first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck`s dream & Chuck`s sense of American possibility
- until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend`s activities & ambitions.` Netherland` is a novel of belonging & not belonging, & the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering & recuperating, & of the shallows & depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O` Neill has taken the anxieties & uncertainties of our new century & fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty & brilliance.