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Godwin  By  cover art

Godwin

By: Joseph O'Neill
Narrated by: Karen Chilton, Kirby Heyborne
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Publisher's summary

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From the acclaimed author of Netherland (a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the year): the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes.

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, Godwin is a tale of family and migration as well as an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

©2024 Joseph O'Neill (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

Named a Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Washington Post, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, and Publishers Lunch

"How to describe Godwin? At once a minute, hilariously observed, and poignant workplace novel about Pittsburgh, and a sweeping postcolonial picaresque novel about the grim fringes of the global soccer industry, replete with laugh-out-loud observations, gorgeously turned phrases, and exhilarating dialogue, pervaded by a winning sense of exasperated humanism. The whole time I was reading, I was thinking 'I wish there were more books like this.'"—Elif Batuman, author of Either/Or

“No one will exit this pinwheeling novel unmoved by its tender and terrible surprises. Reading Godwin, I laughed out loud many times, I felt sick with grief and outrage, and I was shaken by ‘an intensification of reality so strong that I had a touch of vertigo.’ Every sentence is suffused with O’Neill’s capacious intelligence, humor, and care.”—Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

"This novel is so much frickin' fun to read that I didn't want it to end. What chops! What voices! And what an entertainingly dark vision. Do you need to know football (aka 'soccer')? No! But if you know a little football, you absolutely have to read this. What's it like? Nothing except maybe Heart of Darkness and Marlow and Joseph Conrad at his best. What an achievement. Among the best novels I've read in a long time."—Bill Buford, author of Among the Thugs

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