Review
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Vogue, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Esquire, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Publishers Weekly, and Publishers Lunch
“Exuberant. . . . A medieval Grail quest reimagined for the 21st century, grounded in race, capitalism, and the scorched-earth legacy of colonialism. . . . O’Neill has produced a dense yet rollicking tale that rises above the literary competition, slapstick and funny but deadly serious, an indictment of how we live now.” —Hamilton Cain, The Boston Globe
“Nobody else’s fiction tears up the ground quite like O’Neill’s profoundly introspective novels. . . . In their careful braiding of anxiety and aspiration, his stories are marvels of narrative magic and stylistic panache. . . . Like Godwin, this novelist is a player whose charges and feints will leave you amazed.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“An exercise in realism by one of its finer contemporary disciples.” —Vulture
“What is most satisfying about Godwin is the range of its interests and themes. Mr. O’Neill is a capable satirist but is also good at quick, affecting secondary character sketches. He reaches for big geopolitical subjects like globalism and immigration but seamlessly shrinks down to dwell on Lakesha’s office conflict and Mark’s disrupted family life. Questions of exploitation and opportunity, greed and collective benefit, play across every scene, acquiring different shadings and ambiguities and, ultimately, affording the reader the same complicated enjoyment as the world’s most popular sport.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Enthralling. . . . O’Neill animates football as a grand metaphor for togetherness.” —Robert Collins, The Times
“O’Neill braids . . . two narratives together with surprising finesse, telling a powerful story about how we treat our fellow man, both within the global macrocosm of commercial sports and within the intimate microcosm of the workplace. Thorny and nuanced, Godwin reminds us that O’Neill is a master of the social novel.” —Esquire, "Best Books of the Summer"
“Bouncing from office politics to families, from global capitalism to colonialism, the novel delivers storytelling with wit and depth.” —Christian Science Monitor
“Crystalline prose and keen observations on family and postcolonialism as seen through the seedier side of the global soccer industry make this a winner.” —Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe
“Exceptional. . . . O’Neill’s storytelling here has an enthralling fireside quality, ushering us with deceptive simplicity into a labyrinth of motive and desire, breathtaking betrayals and artfully twined threads. A book to sink into, in other words, and one not to be missed.” —The Guardian
“Populous, lively and intellectually challenging. . . . Like Netherland, O’Neill’s sprawling tale of cricket and exile in post-9/11 New York, Godwin uses sports as a window on global realities that might otherwise be too vast or too abstract to perceive. This time, the sport is soccer, which draws Mark into a shadowy, transactional world of late-capitalist, post-colonial intrigue.” — A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)
“Absorbing . . . picaresque.” —Vogue
"Joseph O’Neill’s storytelling abilities get pushed to the max with Godwin. . . . A continent-spanning epic about the horrors of white saviorship, colonialism, the ends of capitalism, Godwin is continuously gripping, the type of book to linger in your mind deeply after its last words." —Our Culture Mag
“A wide-ranging inquiry into the ethical demands of the world economy and the viability of the collective ideal, Godwin illustrates another direction for the sports novel—one that takes as a given the international reach of athletics. . . . Godwin expands the reach even further, understanding sport both as a driver of the international marketplace and as a deeply troubling personal question. . . . O’Neill [shows] that the best sports novels both transcend the genre and are interested in doing no such thing.” —Esquire
“Excellent. . . . While the search for a soccer player is the engine of Godwin’s plot, the book is really about power: those who have it, those who don’t and those who scheme to get it.” —Bookpage
“‘The next Pelé’ or ‘the next Messi’ are words sure to ignite the fantasies of soccer fans anywhere. When tech writer Mark is contacted by his sports agent, half-brother Geoff, Mark leaves Pittsburgh to join him on a madcap adventure to find such a phenom: an African teenager known only as Godwin. O’Neill combines the brothers’ exploits with sharp observations about international business and issues like greenwashing and corruption that have tarnished the world’s game.” —Los Angeles Times
“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
“Godwin is a miracle: a gripping novel refracting in clear and poetic language the seemingly incompatible elements of today’s world: Africa, Pittsburgh, workplace intrigues, colonialism, writing, racism, dogs, sibling rivalry, capitalism, modalities of love, all under the splendorous umbrella of soccer as an exploitative business, passion, philosophy, and history. The reader is compelled to keep reading Godwin not only to see what happens next, but to find out how O’Neill is going to pull it all off—only to find out that he succeeds spectacularly. Godwin is a champion book.” —Aleksandar Hemon, author of The World and All That It Holds
“Exciting and incisive. . . . As O’Neill artfully pairs the thrill of the hunt for Godwin with the complex politics of cooperative work, the driving force that connects the twinned narratives is the corruptive power of capitalism. This has all the velocity and swerve of an unstoppable free kick.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“O’Neill has a gift for finding humor in emotional stress, and it shines. . . . The [characters] go through twists and turns, culminating in an African odyssey. . . . An astonishing marathon of storytelling . . . that highlights the avarice of sports recruitment and the legacy of colonialism. . . . Another exceptional entry in the O’Neill corpus.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A wondrous novel, full of insights, one that leaves the reader questioning why there isn't more fiction about the world’s most popular sport.” —Booklist (starred review)
About the Author
JOSEPH O’NEILL was born in Ireland and grew up in Mozambique, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His previous novels include the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning Netherland and the Booker Prize long-listed The Dog. O’Neill’s short fiction appears regularly in The New Yorker and his political essays in The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A few years ago, my phone turned into a device for strangers and robots to butt in between me and whatever I’m doing. Any given caller was very likely a financial-verbal intruder. The simple buzzing of a phone began to frighten me. I decided to shun phone calls systematically, with an exception being of course made for Sushila—and even Sushila knows that, unless it’s urgent, a text is optimal. This decision was overdue. The general history of the telephone call, it can safely be said, is a grim one. Who can begin to measure or even grasp the volume of the calamities reported or produced by this sound-transmission system? It was with very good reason, I now understand, that my father invariably commanded me to ignore the ringing beige gadget stationed in the living-room bookcase. Together he and I would wait, all activity put on hold, for the shrill to stop, an interlude of suspense that could last a minute or more, because in those landline days there was nothing to stop a caller from sticking at it indefinitely, and often the house would be filled with that eerie, seemingly infinite electronic cry, and often this cry would be followed by a second, appellate cry undertaken in the hope, perhaps, that the first call had been misdialed or that my father had just stepped through the door or climbed out of the bathtub. Dad refused to get an answering machine. As a concession to me—I was a high school freshman; it was newly important for me and my friends to be in constant discussion—he permitted me to pick up the phone, but only on the condition that, should the caller ask for him, I would declare him to be “not presently available.” This was the formulation he insisted on.
The point is that I’ve developed my father’s aversion to the phone. It’s two days before I get back to Geoff.
“Hey, Markie,” he says. “Thanks for calling, fam. Sorry to barge in on you.”
“Don’t be crazy,” I say.
I will say that I love my brother’s voice, which I hear so rarely. It is a voice from a complementary, more summery world that once was or could never be. It’s the voice of love long lost or long impossible. That is where things stand in the matter of me and my brother’s voice.
He informs me that he finds himself “in a bit of a tight corner.” He wonders if I might be able to set aside a few days to fly to England in order to help him with “this business opportunity.” He’s had some kind of accident and isn’t able “to do, you know, mobility.” He adds, laughing a little, “It’s a big ask, bruv, I’ll be real. If you can’t come, I’ll understand completely.”
“You’re hurt?”
“Nah, fam, I’m all right.” As he says this, he texts me a photograph of a leg in a cast. Crutches rest against the couch.
“Jesus. You’re really banged up.”
“Yeah, it might be a while before I kick a ball.” He continues, “Fing is, Markie, I need someone I can absolutely trust. I’m not going to lie, there’s a lot riding on this.” He says more, including the assertion that, “if it comes off, there’s going to be a serious— I mean serious, fam—payday down the road for all of us.”
To be polite and for no other reason, I ask him about the time frame.
“We’re looking at a week. Tops. I’ll take care of your expenses, fam. That’s not an issue.” He says this very coolly.
“Let me think about it.”
I’m not going to think about it. A simple rule applies here: no monkey business. An unexplained mission entailing up-front expenditure by me and back-end reimbursement by him? A big payoff that may or may not materialize? That looks a lot like monkey business to me. Geoff is, to the best of my knowledge, a soccer agent. It’s a legitimate line of work, but it’s not exactly a bishopric. More basically, the whole idea is nuts: I drop everything and set off on an exotic self-financed journey to help him? Who does he think I am—Captain Haddock?
To my astonishment, Sushila takes a very different view. “You’ll get to spend time with your brother,” she says. “When was the last time that happened? I think you should think it over.”
We’ve finished dinner. I’m loading the dishwasher. If I have a vocation, it is stacking dishware, glassware, and cookware with maximal efficiency.
Her voice goes on: “Why not go? It’ll be an adventure.”
“An adventure?” I’ve spent years fighting my impulsiveness. Nobody knows this better than Sushila. Now she wants me to fly across the world for an adventure?
When I was ten years old and living in Portland, Oregon, my father announced, “You have a baby brother,” and little by little further specifics reached me, including the fact that he was in “England.” This hearsay bore a fabulous geographic tinge that has never completely faded. I came to believe that this baby was born in a land far away from his true home—that is, from my home—and as far as I was concerned, he was a foundling of sorts and it was my duty to track him down and repatriate him. I got out an atlas and discovered where England was. I determined that with a team of huskies I could quite feasibly navigate the frozen surfaces of Canada and Baffin Bay and Greenland, from where I’d hitch a ride on a fishing boat across the Greenland Sea, to Iceland, from where another trawler would transport me across the nameless and terrible body of water between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. From the Faroes it would be a relatively simple matter to get to the Orkney Islands and, finally, mainland Britain. I had no route planned for the return trip. I did, however, foresee that the two brothers (suddenly and miraculously closer in age) would be involved in great perils and great deeds of bravery. To this day I retain several of those visions and can still see, in the flash frames of a child’s eye, two boys, on foot in the desert, pausing to share water from a flask; the same two boys riding side by side on white horses; and, vividly, a snowy drama in which our heroes for some reason find themselves bobsledding. Their sled races along a pale and curving track. The two boys are crouched very close to one another in the cockpit, and in spite of everything—the icy chute, the stormy and thundering descent, the obscure, determined pursuers—they are warm and safe.
The next day, I inform the people at work that I will be taking my accrued leave. Then I set off on a journey across the Atlantic. It has occurred to me, at long last, that maybe the brother in difficulty isn’t Geoff.
