Netherland, Neill’s third novel, is the story of Hans van den Broek, a Dutch investment banker working in New York, who after the 9/11 attacks finds himself exiled to the Chelsea Hotel, where, as it happens, O’Neill lives with his wife, Sally Singer, an editor at Vogue, and their three sons. (They make a cameo appearance in the novel, a “family with three boys who ran wild in hallways with tricycles and balls and trains”.)

After Hans’s British wife leaves him and takes their child back to England, he finds solace in an unlikely friendship with a Trinidadian wheeler-dealer named Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreams of starting a pro- cricket league in New York. And he finds a second home in the subculture of New York cricket.The idea of publishing a novel in the US about cricket gave him commercial qualms but not artistic ones, O’Neill said in an e-mail message. New York cricket is “bush cricket,” one of the characters in the book complains, played on wickets of cocoa mat instead of grass and on weedy, substandard pitches, where to score a run you need to bat the ball in the air instead of elegantly along the fast ground of a proper pitch. But it has a charm of its own and is played with unusual devotion.

On a recent Saturday morning Staten Island played a “friendly,” or informal, match against the Cosmos, a Queens club with a number of Jamaican players but captained by a Guyanese, Ashmul Ali. The players took the field clad all in white.

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