Godwin

The return of Joseph O’Neill, with a story on the scale of his Pen/Faulkner Award-winning, NYTBR Best Book of the Year Netherland: the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes.

Mark, a millennial technical writer who lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter, grew up a world apart from his much younger half-brother Geoff. Raised in the UK by the mother who deserted Mark when she divorced his dad and married a richer man, Geoff is now a fast-talking soccer agent, who pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to find an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes will be the next Pele. All they have to go on is a video of Godwin; they don’t even know which country it was shot in. Narrated in turns by the intellectually rigorous yet self-thwarting Mark, and Lakesha Williams, the conscientious leader of the writers’ collective where he works, the novel becomes a twisty international adventure that is part heart-of-darkness and part American Main Street in the 2010s—deliciously far-flung geographically, ethically, and emotionally.
      Godwin immerses us in the hazy world of high-stakes soccer-recruiting and the beautiful game itself, weaving the search for Godwin together with the moving story of Mark’s mixed-race family and Lakesha's surprising path into their lives. As only he can do, O'Neill delivers a critique of colonialism and an exploration of cultural migration and immigration—ever bound up with our essential human needs and desires—as seen through the lens of sport.