It’s book awards season again.

At the onset of spring it is not just cricket fans who are impatiently waiting for things to kick off, this is also a nervous time for authors who have written cricket books over the last year as judges are starting to deliberate. The Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards in association with the Sunday Times, now in its 23rd year, is perhaps the highest profile of them all, with a gala dinner taking place at The Oval on 1 May. There are six books in the Cricket Book of the Year category and here we run the rule over them all.

GETTING OUT: THE UKRAINIAN CRICKET TEAM’S LAST STAND ON THE FRONT LINES OF WAR

Jonathan Campion

“How will we die,” asks Kobus Olivier on the book’s opening page, “I always just prayed that it was instant: one big explosion and then we’re gone.” So much of the horror of the invasion of Ukraine is held within those few words. Olivier was a burned-out South African pro who sought a life away from cricket in Kiev’s parks and coffee shops but found himself drawn back by the enthusiasm of local children and a big-name supporter in boxer turned mayor, Vitali Klitschko. Campion takes the accounts of those involved in Ukrainian cricket and uses them to humanise the devastation, how living hell came out of clear blue skies.

IT’S NOT BANTER, IT’S RACISM

Azeem Rafiq

It began during lockdown with an interview with Wisden.com about how his food supply business was helping local families and ended with Azeem Rafiq and his own family living in Dubai, their lives, and the lives of scores of others – not least the 16 members of staff sacked by Yorkshire CCC in the wake of the racism scandal – irrevocably changed by what has happened. Except, and this is a point made forcefully by Rafiq’s measured book, that is of course not where it ends, because it hasn’t ended. This is a reckoning as well as a morality tale.

BILL EDRICH: THE MANY LIVES OF ENGLAND’S CRICKET GREAT

Leo McKinstry

Burning through five wives, vats of booze, 20 fags a day, a high-profile trial for drinkdriving and innumerable other scrapes with enraged husbands, uptight tour managers and miffed selectors, Edrich’s story might be simply a series of hair-curling after-dinner anecdotes were it not for his immense personal courage and his restless search for the kind of happiness that consistently eluded him. “Bill was never satisfied with life,” said his daughter Jane Palley. “He always left the wife for a mistress. He never married a mistress because they were not good wife material. Yet when he found a wife, he got bored and wanted a mistress. He never, ever managed peace.” McKinstry is a superb biographer and the perfect man for his subject, both wry and serious. You will read this goggle-eyed with joy and wonder.

ON CRICKET

Sir Trevor McDonald

McDonald’s devotion is clear in this love letter to cricket, as he explores his childhood in the Caribbean – he was just ten and at school in Trinidad when local hero Sonny Ramadhin helped West Indies’ beat England in 1950 – and celebrates his ongoing affection for the sport that followed him no matter where in the world his career took him, including audiences with Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela. He talks about cricket as a common language between England, the West Indies and beyond and celebrates it as a driver of national identity and an essential feature of daily life and community.

RICHIE BENAUD’S BLUE SUEDE SHOES

David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts

This book takes a series and uses it to tell a story of the societal and political environment in which it took place, allowing all kinds of themes, digressions and spin-offs because the cricket is always there to return to. Peter Oborne called it “a work of micro-history”, with that history flowing outwards from the Ashes Test at Old Trafford in July 1961. It’s both a clash of cultures and of the establishment versus the emerging meritocracy, much of which was embodied in the opposing captains, the patrician Peter May of England and Australia’s Richie Benaud. The exploding atom of a single Test match expands in all directions to offer visions of a new horizon.

LARA: THE ENGLAND CHRONICLES

Brian Lara

While Brian Lara batted, you drank it in, you inhaled the feeling of a man on a highwire strung between skyscrapers. And now he retells his story as an older, more experienced human being, in part attempting to understand the sense of failure and of responsibility that his genius bestowed. Here’s the thing, though: for all of the pain in this sometimes epic, fabulously entertaining book, he need not wrangle with history, because history will be kind. Along with Phil Walker, who offers the prose some vivid swagger, the story that emerges has a widescreen sadness. It’s the West Indies region that crumbles through a combination of mismanagement, shifting geopolitical influences and the changing nature of the game. No individual could have possibly held that together.

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