• About this Book
• About the Author
• Awards
• Read an Excerpt
• Reader's Guide

Written by Joseph O'Neill

• Format: Hardcover, 272 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon
• On Sale: May 20, 2008
• Price: $23.95
• ISBN: 978-0-307-37704-3 (0-307-37704-0)

about this book

In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans—a banker originally from the Netherlands—finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic and charming Trinidadian named Chuck Ramkissoon, begins to reconnect with his life and his adopted country. Ramkissoon, a Gatsby-like figure who is part idealist and part operator, introduces Hans to an “other” New York populated by immigrants and strivers of every race and nationality. Hans is alternately seduced and instructed by Chuck’s particular brand of naivete and chutzpah—by his ability to a hold fast to a sense of American and human possibility in which Hans has come to lose faith.

Netherland gives us both a flawlessly drawn picture of a little-known New York and a story of much larger, and brilliantly achieved ambition: the grand strangeness and fading promise of 21st century America from an outsider’s vantage point, and the complicated relationship between the American dream and the particular dreamers. Most immediately, though, it 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. Joseph O’Neill’s prose, in its conscientiousness and beauty, involves us utterly in the struggle for meaning that governs any single life.

“With echoes of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, Netherland, provides a resonant meditation on the American Dream.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Exquisitely written...a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read…Netherland has a deep human wisdom.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

“Remarkable...Note-perfect.”—Vogue

“Here’s what Netherland surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell . . . I devoured it in three thirsty gulps, gulps that satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had . . . It has more life inside it than 10 very good novels.” –Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

“Haunting . . . O’Neill’s elegant prose makes for a striking, if challenging, read.”—Entertainment Weekly

“The power and poignancy of this remarkable book derive from his textured prose and his tender, nuanced recreations of places present and remembered: the Hague of his childhood, the London of his early married years, and especially the New York of his unmoored expat odyssey.” —National Geographic Traveler

“Provocative, luminous…Netherland [is a] fine, darkly glowing novel.”—Carlo Wolff, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“No writer since Paul Auster has captured the mystery of the city so well…O’Neill [writes] sentences so beautiful they lodge in the reader’s mind and remind us of the inimitable pleasure of encountering the world through its shapely reflection.”—John Freeman, Newark Star Ledger

“Netherland ends triumphantly, numinously, with two sunsets: one in London, atop the Eye, the other on the Staten Island Ferry, as it approached prelapsarian Manhattan, the Twin Towers looming. In a sustained passages if intense lyric beauty that more than squares any debt to Fitzgerald, O’Neill writes: ‘I wasn’t the only one of us to make out and accept an extraordinary promise in what we saw–the tall approaching cape, a people risen in light. You only had to look at our faces.’”—The Irish Times

“Netherland reels in the reader like a fish caught on a line. It has the depth and vividness which makes for a wholly satisfying read.”—Sunday Sun (UK)

“O’Neill, in this truly original glimpse into the city’s lesser known corners, cuts through the thicket with sharp observations on the quotidian realities of marriage, the thin line between acceptance and settling, and that unique brand of shame felt by good men who get lost.”—Men’s Vogue

“Netherland is a powerful merger of seen and unseen struggles, the unraveling of an American dream, and one man’s rebirth through it all.”—Booklist

“Poignant . . .O’Neill offers an outsider’s view of New York bursting with wisdom, authenticity and a sobering jolt of realism.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This story about a friendship, a place and a marriage is [hard] to stop thinking about.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“New York is not what most people imagine it to be.  Just as marriage, family, friendship and manhood are not.  Netherland is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a wonderful read.  But more than any of that, it's revelatory.  Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new way.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

“O'Neill writes a prose of Banvillean grace and beauty, shimmering with truthfulness, as poised as it unsettling. As well, this is a story that is hard to put down, for its characters are so real and their preoccupations so urgently of the now, that the book has the vividness of breaking news. He is a master of the long sentence, of the half-missed moment, of the strange archeology of the troubled marriage. Many have tried to write a great American novel. Joseph O'Neill has succeeded.”  —Joseph O’Connor, author of Star of the Sea

“Somewhere between the towns of Saul Bellow and Ian McEwan, O'Neill has pitched his miraculous tent. Netherland is a novel about provisionality, marginality; its registers are many, one of the most potent being its extremely grown-up nostalgia. It's the grand effort the book makes to bring constantly expanding points, stars, old selves (Dutchness old and new world, the strange hopeful art of cricketing, the narrator's lost mother) back into some semblance of order that gives it such a generator, like those old generators down at the bottom of Irish farms, powering away in the rain, to give a necessary light and heat to a farmhouse. The dominant sense is of aftermath, things flying off under the impulse of an unwanted explosion, and the human voice calling everything back, and everything seemingly tempted to come back, even if everything can't truly. So that the reader, almost imperceptibly, becomes little by little scorched by the novel's brilliance, irradiated by it, benignly.” —Sebastian Barry, author of A Long Long Way