Beach Read Of The Day: Netherland

[Image via The Strand]

Joseph O'Neill's (The Breezes) new one sounds, at the very least, intriguing: a Dutch banker in post 9/11 New York is abandoned by his wife and children, and flounders until he joins the city's cricket league.

"This mesmerizing, powerfully felt novel about a man trying to make his way in an America of shattered hopes and values gives readers both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger and brilliantly achieved ambitions: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st-century America from an outsider's vantage point, if, in fact, it is a vantage point. Most immediately, Netherland is the story of one man - of a marriage foundering and recuperating in its mystery and ordinariness, of the shallows and depths of male friendship, of mourning and memory. And, even more to the point, of the struggle for meaning that governs any single life."