There’s Always This Year
Hanif Abdurraqib (Allen Lane)
The latest book from US poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib can take its place proudly alongside the Spike Lee movies that the author loves. As a young basketball player growing up in one of the poorest areas in Columbus, Ohio, Abdurraqib had plenty of heroes, from the University of Michigan’s Fab Five to LeBron James – but much of the talent never made it out of the hood. This cultural reflection “on basketball and ascension” blends his own story with the narrative of James’s stellar career: it asks heartbreaking questions, and answers them with the profound intelligence and breathtaking poetry you’d expect of this MacArthur “genius grant” recipient.
Godwin
Joseph O’Neill (4th Estate)
You may wonder, after reading the first chapter, why this counts as a sports book at all. The opening of Joseph O’Neill’s novel follows an earnest writer as the co-operative she helped to found begins to, well, founder. But soon a new storyline emerges: the chaotic efforts of two brothers to find and sign an elusive footballing prodigy. What follows is part shaggy dog story, part devastating social commentary. O’Neill’s first book in a decade is funnier than Netherland, his cricket novel, with characters as recognisable as they are maddening (one is memorably described as “a tornado of unreliability and superfluous scheming”). When people say that sport reflects society, this is what they mean.
My Beautiful Sisters
Khalida Popal (John Murray)
When Malala calls someone “a beacon of hope for women” you know it means something, and the indomitable spirit that emerges from Khalida Popal’s memoir is both an inspiration and a challenge. Facing daily oppression and injustice as a young woman in Afghanistan, she fights back by creating the first football programme for women in a country where even playing out of sight is enough to have her and her teammates abused, harassed, attacked and beaten. Popal has twice had to flee her homeland – first as a 10-year-old, when the war with the Taliban forced her family into a refugee camp in Pakistan, and again as an adult, when her career turned her into a target. If you think you know the story of women’s sport in Afghanistan, read this and think again.
Warming Up
Madeleine Orr (Bloomsbury)
Canadian ecologist Madeleine Orr began studying the effect of the climate crisis on sport after she was hospitalised in a skiing accident: the pistes were overcrowded because the snow had been so late to come. In this vital act of science documentary, she has collated stories from across the world that show just how much the sports industry has to lose. Flooding and rising sea levels are causing clubs and courses to vanish, wildfires and pollution have brought entire programmes to a halt. But it’s the tales of athletes killed by rising temperatures that hit hardest. At a time when governing bodies and private clubs alike continue to chase petrostate dollars, Orr delivers a powerful wake-up call, alongside clear-sighted solutions and a message of hope. A must-read whether you’re helping out at your local club or running Fifa.
Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes
David Kynaston and Harry Ricketts (Bloomsbury)
Six years ago, the historian David Kynaston teamed up with Stephen Fay to produce a beautiful remembrance of cricket commentators John Arlott and EW Swanton. Now he’s pulled a similar trick with co-writer Harry Ricketts, reliving the 1961 Ashes. The opposing captains – old-school Peter May and innovative Richie Benaud – are portrayed as symbols of a changing postwar society, and the prose throbs for the passion the authors still feel for this famously electrifying series. (Those who like their cricket history sepia-tinted should also seek out Giles Wilcock’s Forgotten Pioneers – the rascally tale of the Original English Lady Cricketers, whose professional tours in the early 1890s ended in allegations of embezzlement.)