Home Game

An antic, surreal tale of the greatest baseball game ever played, Paul Quarrington's second novel is both laugh-out-loud funny and a sweet-natured meditation on the importance of home and family. Down and out after his once-legendary baseball career is derailed, Nathaniel "Crybaby" Isbister wanders into a pastoral Michigan village hit hard by both the Great Depression and an increasingly vindictive war of words between a strict religious sect and a now-stranded traveling carnival sideshow. The freaks (who have decided to settle for good in the village) draw Crybaby against his will into an all-or-nothing dare against the strapping, baseball-loving sectarians: one game, losing team has to leave town. Love--or even knowledge--of baseball is not required to sink into this richly-rendered tall tale. Though it's packed with outlandish characters including both the world's smallest and the world's tallest men, the fattest of fat ladies, and the feral Wild Man of Borneo, Quarrington tells his hilariously bizarre story with dignity and grace; even the prim, pious elders of the House of Jonah are treated with sympathy. Home Game stands alongside Bernard Malamud's The Natural as one of the best baseball novels of all time, and baseball is the last thing it's about.