Wanted to share a happy little news.
I have co-written a book on the evolution of Indian cricket through 50 touchstone moments / matches, with my friend Titash Banerjea. It’s been picked up by Rupa Publications India , and will be released next week (online + kindle) and mid-November ’23 (on bookstores), and is available for pre-booking at Amazon.
It’s called Of Spins, Sixes and Surprises: 50 Defining Moments in Indian Cricket.
If you visit the cricket / sports section in bookshops, you will find either glossy coffee-table books or ghost-written biographies of cricketers – which have limited long-term appeal to readers, or scholarly tomes on the history of the game, which keep away everyone but the dedicated scholars of cricket. There is however a big population of cricket fans who love and follow the game, who read cricketing sites regularly and are completely in the know, but who are not interested in reading a heavy book on history; and an illustrated photo-biography of your favourite cricketer would not satiate their interest in the game either.
This book is for those lovers of the game. This book tracks the history of the game not in terms of an anthropological/societal study, but instead through matches. For them, we present the 50 matches which, in our opinion, shaped cricket in India. Each of the 50 matches is dealt with in detail – who were the important characters, what happened in the match, what were the critical moments and turning points, and most importantly, what was the impact of the match to the overall cricketing firmament in India. In a nutshell – how this match shaped Indian cricket.
While this is a book on cricket history, the tone is not academic, it is first and foremost a sports book. It could perhaps be a decent gift to family and friends who are interested in cricket too…
Please give it a shot, and let me know how you liked it. Available at the link here.
Shom Biswas 