Godwin

(Paperback)

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Description

The return of Joseph ONeill, with a story on the scale of the international phenomenon Netherland: the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes.
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the UK, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as Godwin an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, the novel is both a tale of family and migration, and an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O'Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

Reviews

Praise for Netherland:

There is a very special sort of gratitude you can feel for a book that is so formidably written that it has you anxious to get back to it and pining a little bit to be away from it Sebastian Barry, author of Days Without End

Too good for the Booker Robert McCrum, Observer

So expertly woven that it is impossible for a reader not to admire what it essentially is a beautifully written exploration of memory and self Sunday Telegraph

'The wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Centre fell. I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn't know I had. O'Neill seems incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought New York Times

'Extraordinary. O'Neill is a writer of dizzying elegance Finanical Times

Author Bio

Joseph ONeill is an Irish barrister living in New York. He is the author of two other novels, Netherland, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and This is the Life, and a memoir, Blood-Dark Track.