Book description
Striker is the story of a young football player, Prasoon Joshi, whose
father, once a top scorer in the Calcutta League, is completely
sidelined after being accused by the club of deliberately throwing the
winning goal. As a young player struggling to make his mark, Prasoon not
only has to battle the ruthless exploitation of the football clubs, his
family's straitened financial circumstances, and his own development as
a player, but he has also to exorcise his father's ghosts. Stopper, on
the other hand, is the story of the much older Kamal Guha, a veteran
player with an eclectic record, now playing the final game of his
career... Both novellas brilliantly capture the heady highs, and the
crushing lows, the heroism - and the ignominy - of sport. However, it is
always the game, and the action on the field, that is the real hero of
Moti Nandy's writing. Moti Nandy (1931-2010) was one of the few
writers in the world to have created an entire body of fiction centred
on sports. A Sahitya Akademi award winner and former Sports Editor at
the Ananda Bazaar Patrika he wrote more than 25 novels in Bengali for
adults and as many for children and young adults. Nearly all his novels
are set in Kolkata where he lived and capture the struggle and success
of the underdog in sports ranging from football to cricket tennis to
swimming athletics to boxing.>
