This is not a book about cricket. It is the story of a man who just happened to play cricket at the highest level.

Through Fire is at times a brutally honest and always fascinating work of introspection and critique that provides readers with unrestricted insight into the mind and heart of one of South Africa’s most interesting and charismatic national captains. There is the public persona of the tattooed, fashionable, mentally tough, immensely popular and yet at times, misunderstood Du Plessis. And then there is the authentic Faf.

Du Plessis reflects on his growth from being a youth with a questionable moral compass outside of cricket, to becoming a leader known for his integrity, values, honesty, and empathy for his teammates and country. He reflects on how influential leaders such as Gary Kirsten, Stephen Fleming, Mohammed Moosajee, Russell Domingo, Ottis Gibson, and MS Dhoni moulded him as a man who leads with grit, purpose, and a love of people. But he also explores destructive relationships, providing his perspective, in devastating detail, on his final years of international cricket. Neither the changing room nor the boardroom is ever off limits.

Through Fire is a no-holds-barred autobiography offering exceptional insight into the core being of an elite sports personality.

South Africa has produced some of the best batsmen in the world, with AB de Villiers and Hashim Amla dominating the recent ICC rankings. Previous teams and generations have included their own legends. But who are the greatest of them all? Following the success of their book Jacques Kallis and 12 Other great South African all rounders, Ali Bacher and David Williams now turn their attention to South Africa’s top batsmen. The book features early legends such as Herby Taylor and Dudley Nourse; the world-beating Graeme Pollock and Barry Richards, whose careers were cut short by isolation; the unshakeable Gary Kirsten and Jacques Kallis, who built the foundation of the Proteas’ postisolation success; the big-scoring captain Graeme Smith and his South African-born England counterpart Kevin Pietersen; and the swashbuckling Hashim Amla and AB de Villiers, who dominate the current game. It also considers two players who, but for apartheid, might have been their equals in the Test-match arena. South Africa’s greatest batsmen provides fascinating insights about each man’s background and career, his batting technique, and his main achievements at the crease. Based on new interviews, the book will take the reader down memory lane as former and current players reminisce about their most important innings, the bowlers they most feared and the teammates they most respected. Written by cricket legend Ali Bacher and top journalist David Williams, this is a book that no cricket fan can be without.

‘Highly readable and packed with fascinating historical detail, this is the compelling story of a ripsnorting South African cricketer whose career was smothered by the shameless colour prejudice of Cecil John Rhodes and his snobbish cronies. By turns formidable, sad, enlivening and enormously informative, this book pays Hendricks the honour that has long been his due.’  – Bill Nasson
 
William Henry ‘Krom’ Hendricks was the first sportsman to be formally barred from representing South Africa on the basis of race. Hailing from Cape Town’s Bo-Kaap, he played in 1892 for the South African Malay team against the touring English, who insisted that he was among the best fast bowlers in the world. This made his exclusion from South Africa’s tour of England in 1894 all the more unjust.
 
Ranged against Hendricks were virulent racism and a political alliance between arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, Afrikaner Bond leader J.H. Hofmeyr, and William Milton, who controlled cricket at the Cape through the Western Province Cricket Union.  Too Black to Wear Whites  documents Hendricks’s tireless struggle for recognition and the public controversies around his exclusion. The book shows how Hendricks was further sidelined as club teams made up of different races were prevented from playing against one another, saving white players the embarrassment of being shown up by the country’s best fast bowler.
 
Considering his importance in South African sports history, surprisingly little is known about Krom Hendricks. The story of his life is told here for the first time in a fascinating drama that describes the formation of a segregated South Africa through the career of an exceptional cricketer who dared to test the boundaries of the system.

From the start of his glittering career in 1992, to his official retirement from all formats of the game in 2013, Shane Warne has long desired to tell his incredible story without compromise. No Spin is that very story. It will offer a compelling intimate voice, true insight and a pitch-side seat to one of cricket’s finest eras, making this one of the ultimate must-have sports autobiographies.

Shane is not only one of the greatest living cricket legends: he is as close as the game has had since Botham to a maverick genius on the field and a true rebel spirit off it, who always gives audiences what they want. Despite being the talismanic thorn in England’s side for nearly two decades of regular Ashes defeats, he was also much loved in the UK where he played cricket for Hampshire. He’s also a much-admired figure in India and South Africa.

Alongside his mesmerising genius as a bowler, Shane has often been a controversial figure, and in this book he's talk with brutal honesty about some of the most challenging times in his life as a player. Honest, thoughtful, fearless and loved by millions, Shane is always his own man and this book is a testament to his brilliant career.

We all know South Africa has problems; we read about them in the newspapers, we see them on the streets and many people experience them in their daily lives. Fortunately, many of these problems can be solved using innovation and science. Innovation takes a look at inventions - developed in South Africa by South Africans - to address issues in the areas of healthcare, energy, environment and industry. Some of these inventions, such as a tea bag created to filter water for communities in rural areas, can save lives; others, such as a unique way to beneficiate titanium, could spell a new era of industry in the country.

The book is broken down into sections on environment, health, energy, industry and education, and in each of those parts are examples of South African innovations, from a satellite system to map fires to the concept of sterilising mosquitoes to stop the spread of malaria.

These have been developed by numerous organisations and institutions and showcase South Africa's excellence.

Cricket is a summer game, intended to be played on green fields under blue skies and warm sun. But, for the first time, a book explores the mesmerising beauty of cricket grounds in winter, carpeted with snow, through remarkable colour photographs depicting grounds from Lord's to the smallest village pitch in Lancashire, and internationally from New Zealand to the Indian Himalayas. For this aspect alone, Snow Stopped Play will be seized upon as the perfect gift for the cricket fan even by those utterly uninterested in the sport. But Snow Stopped Play is also a fascinatingly eccentric and charming disquisition, in the best tradition of cricket classics like Carr's Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers, on the game of cricket itself, through its hitherto unexamined relationship with snow. Did John Arlott really find a snowflake on his sleeve at Lord's in June? Why did a Derbyshire batsman have to take his false teeth out after a snowfall at Buxton in 1975? And has the Sussex fast bowler and poet John Snow ever written a poem about snow?

Surprisingly, perhaps, cricket is a game rich in international history, sporting characters and, on occasions, controversy. Over his long career as a cricket commentator and journalist Ralph Dellor has met some of the greatest exponents of the "summer" game. In the 1990s he conducted a series of face-to-face taped interviews with famous cricketers past and present. Along with Stephen Lamb, his fellow sports journalist and business partner, he has edited and annotated the interviews so they are put into context of time and place. Each chapter is a classic piece of cricketing history and insight into the legends and lore of the game. Featuring such names as Denis Compton, Brian Statham and Cyril Washbrook.

Everyone's image of the ideal cricket ground will be a village field, fringed by trees, the outfield dappled with clovers and buttercups, swallows flitting above... And what of all the other wildlife associated with this most natural of sports? At the Oval these days, Test Match Special's commentators remark on the resident foxes as often as the traditional pigeons. At Teddington Town CC in London's Bushy Park matches are frequently interrupted by incursions of deer; at Lyndhurst in the New Forest by wild ponies. At Kirkby Lonsdale CC in Cumbria the local fungus group found 20 species of waxcap on the outfield. For some reason hoopoes, spectacular orange and black-crested birds from southern Europe, favour cricket grounds on their rare migrations to the UK. This unique, funny, delightful cricket book from left field explores the relationship between cricket grounds and the natural world, from wildlife records to the Edwardian cricket writings of Edmund Blunden, and in many remarkable photos.

This history of Grimsby Cricket Club and Cleethorpes Cricket Club began as a book on cricket in Lincolnshire, but both clubs sent a great deal of information about their history and I decided to combine their history in one book. I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Lifting the Covers is the inside story of South African cricket's journey to reinvent itself after years in the international wilderness. Using key figures, Hansie Cronje, Makhaya Ntini, Ray White and Ali Bacher, the book tells the story of South Africa's national summer game from an insider's perspective. It looks at the debates, the administrative crises and the Cronje affair as key episodes in the unfolding history of game that has struggled in post-apartheid South Africa to keep its traditional constituency on the one hand while embracing a new constituency on the other. The onfield activities during this era are also discussed, with particular attention being paid to South Africa's 1999 World Cup campaign, the tour by England in the summer of 1999/2000 and South Africa's subsequent tour of India, the tour which led to Cronje's fall from grace. The author argues that while the UCBSA (United Cricket Board of South Africa) have had no alternative but to transform the game over which they preside, their noble initiative has sometimes met with disastrous results-the Hansie Cronje affair being the most notable example. Finally, the debate to transform cricket is in many ways also the story of contemporary South Africa, a country that is struggling to transform itself into an enlightened, workable democracy. The lessons learnt by cricket are lessons pertinent to the country as a whole.

This July sees the publication of The Great Romantic, a new biography by Duncan Hamilton of the greatest cricket writer of all time, indeed the man who invented modern cricket writing as we know it: Neville Cardus. Cardus was for many years cricket correspondent of the (then Manchester) Guardian, but wrote for a host of other publications including Wisden. Before him, cricket writing meant rather drybones match reports full of statistics and jargon. Cardus wrote about the event: the sylvan ground, the emotion of watching a great batsman like Victor Trumper in full flow. For everyone who wants to sample his finest writings, Safe Haven now publishes a new volume of Cardus's best cricket writings. Here is Cardus on Don Bradman, Victor Trumper, Denis Compton and Richie Benaud, at Roses matches and the arcadian cricket festival at Dover beneath Shakespeare Cliff, seeing the Australians defeated at Eastbourne - and of course at the home of cricket, Lord's. A handsome small hardback with retro cover illustration, here is a book for every lover of fine writing on the Summer Game.

Cricket is a very old game in Scotland - far older than football, a sport which sometimes exercises a baleful, obsessive and deleterious effect on the national psyche. Cricket goes back at least as far as the Jacobite rebellions and their sometimes vicious aftermaths. It is often felt that Scottish cricket underplays itself. It has been portrayed as in some ways an English sport, a "softies" sport, and a sport that has a very limited interest among the general population of Scotland. This is emphatically not true, and this book is in part an attempt to prove that this is a misconception. Sixty-one games (it was going to be just 60, but one turned up at the last minute!) have been chosen from the past 250 years to show that cricket does indeed influence a substantial part of the nation. The matches have been selected at all levels, from Scotland against visiting Australian teams all the way down to a Fife school fixture. These naturally reflect the life, experience and geographical whereabouts of the author. The games are quirky sometimes, (and quirkily chosen) with an emphasis on important events in the broader history of this country, notably the imminence of wars and resumptions at the end of these conflicts. But the important thing is that every single cricket contest does mean an awful lot to some people.

A one-time Southampton policeman and BBC literary producer working with such writers as E.M. Forster, John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas, who became a close friend, John Arlott has always considered himself lucky. From his first ten-minute summaries of the 1946 Indian cricket tour until his retirement in 1980 he commentated on every Test match England ever played. This autobiography looks at his schooldays, about great cricketers he has known or watched and about his standing for the Liberals in the 1955 General Election.

Every cricket lover, for better or worse, has their year. The year it all fell into place or all fell apart. A year of triumph or disaster; of tragedy or comedy. This being cricket, there's normally a bit of everything. Covering 50 different seasons, from 1934 right up to the weird summer of 2020, a series of journalists, poets, musicians, comedians, and ex-players - plus the odd England captain - have come together to produce a collection of personal essays, using the game of cricket as the backdrop to tell the story of their own Golden Summers. 50 voices for 50 years: each one delving into the year that means the most to them. This is Golden Summers.

Im in the team can you come and watch me play? If you will be sitting by a cricket pitch this summer, mystified by the antics on the field in front of you, Cricket Made Simple is the book for you. Not only will it help to explain what is going on from the spectators viewpoint it will also raise you several notches in your loved ones esteem. After reading Cricket Made Simple, you will be able to talk knowledgeably about spin and swing bowling, off drives, knocking in, and know the difference between a googly and an off-break. You might even enjoy the matches much more as a result. Just as well because they can take up a whole day at junior level, or up to five days for a Test match. The author, a mother who has spent many seasons at her sons playing fields, provides a complete guide to the intricacies of cricket for all those bemused supporters to whom this sport is a complete mystery. She also includes valuable advice on supporter etiquette and preparing cricket teas as well as dealing with the inevitable washing mountain. Cricket Made Simple is for all bemused supporters, male and female, who loyally turn out to cheer in all weathers.

This book is aimed at players and coaches (male & female) of all levels. James Knott and Andrew O'Connor have created a comprehensive and up to date guide to batting for coaches, players and parents featuring photographs and diagrams along with sixty accessible drills. This is an essential guide to the intricate skills required to become a successful batter for both players and coaches. With input from a wide range of elite players and coaches, past and present, this is an invaluable guide to developing batting skills for young and old alike.

Of all the rules governing sport, the laws of cricket are among the oldest. The first written rules of 1744 survive uniquely on the border of a piece of linen at the MCC Museum of Cricket. They were drawn up by certain 'Noblemen and Gentlemen' at a time when gambling on cricket matches was rife. The 'laws' were codified to ensure a fair outcome when so much was riding on the game. The story of the evolution of these laws and how they affected the game is a fascinating and seldom told chapter in the history of cricket. Following on from the success of The Rules of Association Football 1863 and The Original Rules of Rugby, this book reproduces the complete text of the original laws and is illustrated with images from the unique manuscript held at the MCC as well as images of the game from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also includes what is thought to be the first known image of cricket dating from a fourteenth-century manuscript now in the Bodleian Library.