The best books about cricket

A novel set in the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city's most marginal parks.

An affectionately satirical inter-war comic novel first published in 1933, particularly famed for its portrayal of a village cricket match.

The haunting story of a young boy's awakening into the secrets of the adult world and an unforgettable evocation of the boundaries of Edwardian society.

The elegant, intelligent amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey is one of detective literature's most popular creations.

George was born into a world of village cricket matches and fox-hunting, but his failing income and the onset of war threatens his way of life. A touching depiction of pre-First World War Britain.

When Psmith finds himself working in the City for the pompous Mr Bickersdyke, he makes it his mission to bring a little sweetness and light into the bank manager's life.

Stranded in a damp cave on prehistoric Earth, Arthur Dent is suddenly hurled through an eddy in the space–time continuum. He lands on Lords Cricket Ground – swiftly followed by a gang of robots who steal the Ashes before departing.

C L R James was devoted to the game of cricket. In this classic summation of half a lifetime spent playing, watching and writing about the sport, he recounts the story of his overriding passion and tells us of the players whom he knew and loved, exploring the game's psychology and aesthetics, and the issues of class, race and politics that surround it.

Mike Brearley is one of the most successful cricket captains of all time. In The Art of Captaincy, his treatise on leadership and motivation, he draws directly on his experience of man-managing a team to explain what it takes to be a leader on and off the field.

A true-life sporting memoir of one of the best batsman in the game who stunned the cricket world when he prematurely ended his own England career.

In 1993, while everyone else was learning Oasis lyrics and crushing on Kate Moss or Keanu, Emma John was obsessing over the England cricket team. Nearly a quarter of a century on, Emma John wants to know why she spent her teenage years defending such a bunch of no-hopers, so she seeks out her childhood heroes.

AB de Villiers is one of the finest batsmen ever to play cricket. This is the story of a modern sporting phenomenon, in his own words.

A tribute to the finest writers on the game of cricket, including P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Conan Doyle and V. S. Naipaul.

Aravind Adiga's Selection Day, a novel of boyhood, Bombay and batsmanship is out now.

A moving and beautifully observed new novel, of adolescence, ambition and self-realization, of fathers and sons, set in contemporary Bombay, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The White Tiger and Last Man in Tower.

'The most exciting novelist writing in English today' - A. N. Wilson