Netherland (Hardcover)

Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it is the story of one man--of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.
 
Annotation:
After the 9/11 terrorist attack, Dutch equities analyst Hans van den Broek, his British wife, and his young son are forced to flee their devastated TriBeCa loft and find themselves living in the once-glamorous, now-dilapidated Chelsea Hotel. Hans's wife, horrified at the destruction and appalled at American politics, soon flees back to London with their son in tow. To fill the emotional hole in his life, Hans turns to cricket, that anachronistic and civilized sport, as an escape from his trauma and confusion, and finds himself becoming a friend, and sometimes accomplice, to an ambitious wheeler-dealer from Trinidad with dreams of building a cricket arena in Brooklyn. With a wry sense of humor and occasional unexpected stabs of poignancy, author Joseph O'Neill creates a wonderfully specific novel set against a backdrop of globalized crisis, and fractured, frightened families. Selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2008 and by Publishers Weekly as a Best Book of 2008.