Willowman
Inga Simpson
Willowman
Inga Simpson
From the critically acclaimed author of Mr Wigg comes an enthralling literary novel about a batmaker and a gifted young cricketer, set around the time the game began changing. For fans of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Joseph O'Neill’s Netherland.
Cricket has a willow heart. Batmakers around the world have tried everything, crafting bats from birch, maple, ash, even poplars … After two hundred years, cricket bat making is still beholden to a single species: salix alba caerulea - or white willow.
Reader Cricket Bats, one of the last traditional batmakers back in the old country, has a contemporary home in the Antipodes, with Allan Reader keeping the family business alive in a small workshop. Allan lives alone, all but estranged from his adult daughter, quietly going about his days with the cricket commentary for company.
When Todd Harrow, a gifted young batter, catches Allan’s eye, a spark is lit and Allan decides to make a Reader bat for him, selecting the best piece of willow he’s harvested in years to do so.
As Harrow charts a meteoric rise to the highest echelons of the sport, leaving his equally talented sister’s dreams in his wake, Allan’s magical bat takes centre stage as well, awakening something in Allan and bringing him back into himself. But can Allan’s fledgling renaissance - hanging as it does on the magic of that bat - carry on after Harrow is cursed by injury and a strained personal life?
Set as the new short form of the game began to gain prominence, Willowman is a love letter to the art and beauty of cricket and a meditation on the inner lives of certain kinds of men and women, for whom it is a way of life. Award-winning author Inga Simpson writes exquisitely about a national sport you will never view the same way again.
Review
Kate McIntosh
Every now and then you watch or read something that takes you completely by surprise. Maybe it was Friday Night Lights, and suddenly you found yourself caring about American football. Or maybe it was the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive, and now you haven’t missed a Formula 1 Grand Prix all year, even though you hadn’t the slightest interest in motorsport previously.
Inga Simpson’s new novel, Willowman, is exactly like that. Despite my formerly limited enthusiasm for cricket, reading this book has made me eagerly anticipate the 2022–23 season, and I will be watching each match with an entirely new outlook. This book is not just about cricket (that would be terribly boring for some of us), but it does bring the sport to life and makes you think perhaps it really is a beautiful game.
Creating a cricket bat is an art form in and of itself and this age-old craft was passed down to Allan Reader during his time in England as a young man. He makes bats for a living, but also because he believes in the magic of creating something from a single piece of wood. Allan is going through a divorce, about to lose his home, and hardly hears from his only child. Making bats is all he has left. That and the cricket matches, which he attends or listens to religiously. When Allan first comes across a young player by the name of Todd Harrow, he thinks this kid has what it takes to be one of the greats. There is a certain piece of willow he has been keeping for just the right person, and he sends this specially crafted bat to Todd at the beginning of a stellar career, never truly realising the effect it will have on both their lives.
Allan and Todd’s stories run parallel to each other, their only connection the bat and their love of this game. Both men have battles and challenges to face, whether it be on the oval in front of an intense crowd or at home trying to keep their dreams alive, but through it all, you will be cheering for both of them to win.
Inga Simpson creates characters whose lives you will not want to leave, and describes the everyday in ways I adore. Full of sport, trees, family, love, summertime, ambition, beer, heartache and joy, Willowman may well be the perfect Australian novel.
Kate McIntosh is the manager of Readings Emporium.
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