Chinaman

From author of Booker Prize 2022 winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

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Chinaman

By: Shehan Karunatilaka

Narrated by: Shivantha Wijesinha

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

Discover the blazing debut novel from the Booker Prize winning author.

'A crazy ambidextrous delight' Michael Ondaatje

Where is Pradeep S. Mathew - spin bowler extraordinaire and 'the greatest cricketer to walk the earth'?

Retired sportswriter W. G. Karunasena is dying, and he wants to know.

W.G. will spend his final months drinking arrack, making his wife unhappy, ignoring his son and tracking down the mysterious Pradeep. On his quest he will also uncover a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, a Tamil Tiger warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

'Bristling with energy and confidence' Sunday Times

Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature

©2011 Shehan Karunatilaka (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Shehan KarunatilakaShivantha WijesinhaVintage Digital

Family Life

Fiction

Genre Fiction

Literary Fiction

South Asian Creators

Sports

World Literature

Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction South Asian Creators Sports World Literature

Critic reviews

The strength of the book lies in its energy, its mixture of humour and heartwrenching emotion, its twisting narrative, its playful use of cricketing facts and characters, and its occasional blazing anger about what Sri Lanka has done to itself... (Kamila Shamsie)

Carries real weight...a mixture of, say, CLR James, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Fernando Pessoa and Sri Lankan arrack...essential to anyone with a taste for maverick genius

Karunatilaka has a real lightness of touch. He mixes humour and violence with the same deftness with which his protagonist mixes drinks

Chinaman is a debut bristling with energy and confidence, a quixotic novel that is both an elegy to lost ambitions and a paean to madcap dreams

Chinaman's free-wheeling, zany tempo is part of its charm too. Its picaresque action, mainly based in Colombo and narrated in short bite-sized chunks, gives a vibrant comic pulse to Sri Lankan life, even though Karunatilaka's portrait of the country is scathing...it confirms that cricket, a game that is largely played in the head and inhabits a bizarrely detailed parallel world to our own, is ideally suited to the purposes of fiction

A Great Cricket Novel. For a game without much great fiction, that's a reason to applaud with drums - and forget the rules the marshals impose at Lord's (Salil Tripathi)

It's funny and original, extremely revealing about Sri Lanka, and as for the cricket, in the author's own words: "If you can't understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you." Brilliant (Kate Saunders)

At an early stage, I will confess that I was very close to typing 'Pradeep Mathew Cricinfo' into Google just to check whether there was indeed a Sri Lankan cricketer of that name ... that may be a recommendation of the book; it may be a condemnation. But I have always had a soft spot for Sri Lankan cricket (Steve James)

A hugely entertaining read

Confident and poignant debut

Featured article: Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka on a rare Sri Lankan story that didn’t involve the civil war

We absolutely loved listening to Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, so when his debut novel Chinaman was released as an audiobook earlier this year, we couldn’t wait to ask him about it.

Most relevant

This is a book filled with conversations, contradictory stories, where the reader's perception of reality is constantly challenged by unreliable narrators. I enjoy being misled as such and listening to these stories and discovering every character.