Hans van den Broek knew Chuck when he too lived in New York, a few years previously – the New York of 9/11 and the powercut, of anxiety suffusing the city's streets. Those years were difficult for Hans – his English wife leaves with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spends two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. On a whim one weekend, he decides to play cricket at one of the city's desultory grounds, where the game is adapting to its new, American, environment, and where Chuck cuts an imposing figure as the umpire, his head full of great plans for the transformation of his adopted homeland...
Netherland is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of New York seen through the prism of a European in exile; a novel of how much a place can change you, and how much you can change a place. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.
