Bookfinder

This is a book about heroism, and it is a strange one. What makes Roy Hobbs potentially a hero is his immense natural gift for playing baseball.

Ultimately, Askwith's message is simple: in our complicated and frenetic world, there is much to be said for taking off into the beautiful hills and mountains of our country and running until your legs turn to jelly. 'Success depends on what you have in your head and your heart; the less you have in your beackpack the better.'

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to.

The sport and one team in particular have crept into every aspect of Hornby's life- making him see the world through Arsenal-tinted spectacles.

A startlingly original, hilariously funny and passionate treatise on cricket and those who worship at its wicket.

Netherland is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between.

A Little Piece of Ground cleverly combines an exciting story with pressing political issues and as such is sure to encourage passionate debate.

As the sun goes down at the end of the match he realises that love, like cricket, is more than just a game. He sees one last chance to get his life into focus, if only there is time.

This is a brilliant portrait of a highly complex man; a feat of literary ventriloquism, and a powerful portrait of another era, when players warmed up with a couple of pints, a game of cards and a packet of fags, before hoofing the ball about for 90 angry minutes in front of the terraces. Winners in those days got two points - not three like now - but losers got a right bloody bollocking from the gaffer.

Sillitoe's depiction of petty crime and deep-seated anger in industrial and desperate cities remains as potent today as it was almost half a century ago.

Packed with hilarious and embarrassing anecdotes about some of the greatest cricketers of the last 20 years.

Norman Mailer's The Fight focuses on the 1975 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire, between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.

The residents of Ennet House, a Boston halfway house for recovering addicts, and students at the nearby Enfield Tennis Academy are ensnared in the search for the master copy of Infinite Jest

The Art of Fielding is the newest heavyweight contender for Great American novel of the world. It arrives on a garlanded float of its own mythology (there’s a companion book detailing the struggles to get it published) and has garnered countless praise from its obvious go-to influences like Jonathan Franzen and Jay McInerney as well as Orange Prize for Fiction winner Tea Obreht. So, now we’ve acknowledged that all signs point to everyone being destined to fall in love with this book, let’s just spoil it for you and say… you are destined to fall in love with this book.

Ever since she picked up a racquet at the age of four, tennis has been Willy's one love, until the day she meets Eric Oberdorf.

End Zone is a clever, playful and, above all, funny novel, which confirms DeLillo's status as one of the great American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

People around the world have found inspiration in the story of Lance Armstrong- a world-class athlete nearly struck down by cancer, only to recover and win the Tour de France

Filled with intimate photographs, incredible musical stories and a powerful ecological message, this is a enchanting celebration of bike riding.

Tinged with the melancholy and nostalgia of early steps into adulthood, it's the story of a young man's first experience of adult love, and of the discovery of his own limitations.