Veteran sportwriter, W G Karunasena is dying. He will spend his final months drinking arrack, irritating his wife, ignoring his son and tracking down Pradeep S. Mathew - "the greatest cricketer to walk the earth."

On his quest to find this unsung genius, WG uncovers a coach with six fingers, a secret bunker below a famous stadium, an LTTE warlord, and startling truths about Sri Lanka, cricket and himself.

Ambitious, playful and strikingly original, Chinaman is a novel about cricket and Sri Lanka and of Sri Lanka through its cricket. Hailed by the Gratiaen Prize judges as 'one of the most imaginative works of contemporary Sri Lankan fiction', it is an astounding book.

Acclaimed across Asia, the UK and the US, it has won the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize, the 2012 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, and was picked as one of the top debuts of 2011 by Waterstones UK.

And now, brilliantly captured in Sinhala by Dileepa Abeysekera, Chinaman opens its strange and wonderful world to whole new Sri Lankan readership.

Chinaman is part-comedy, part-mystery and part-drunken-memoir. A tale that serves as a metaphor for Sri Lanka - a nation blessed with many gifts, and the uncanny ability to squander them.

If you’ve never seen a cricket match; if you have and it has made you snore; if you can’t understand why anyone would watch, let alone obsess over this dull game, then this is the book for you.