The Following Game

The Following Game is about passion and obsession. It's about cricket, family and poetry, but most of all it's about a father following his son's career in the public eye and the close relationship they share. Jonathan Smith is the father of Ed Smith, a prominent writer and former Kent, Middlesex and England cricketer. The Following Game is a follow-up to Jonathan's critically-acclaimed 2002 book The Learning Game, one of the most talked-about books in education over the last ten years. 'The Following Game is tremendously good. As with his book on teaching, Jonathan Smith seems to have invented a genre to meet his immediate needs. The result is completely natural: talking voice, spontaneity of exposition, insights and connections popping up as and when they need to, candour, uncompromised expressions of feeling all that. So it speaks to me who couldn't be more indifferent to cricket with great directness and passion.' --Christopher Reid, winner of the Costa Book of the Year 2009 'The Following Game is a wonderfully subtle auto-biography, witty, reticent, modest, laugh out loud humorous (on many pages), generous, uncomplaining, self-deprecatory, observant, sensitive, classless, profound, and widely perceptive of ideas, places and people. It is and will remain a classic.' --The Observer. Longlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 2011.