Henry is on the point of being snapped up by a major league team for a six-figure sum when he falls victim to a sudden, inexplicable and total loss of form. Under Schwartz's tutelage, Henry bears out his promise, galvanising the baseball team, the Westish Harpooners, into its best results in living memory, and personally chalking up the longest streak of error-free games since the great Aparicio Rodriguez (also fictional), the author of a quasi-philosophical tome called The Art of Fielding (sample quote: 'Death is the sanction of all that the athlete does'). Schwartz, a budding baseball Svengali, immediately discerns a 'transcendent talent' and decides to bag him for his university, Westish, an idyllic if slightly inglorious (fictional) liberal arts college on the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. He is Henry Skrimshander, the shortest member of an undistinguished team of South Dakota farm boys. The story begins at an amateur baseball tournament in Peoria, Illinois, where Mike Schwartz, an outsized college athlete, notices 'a scrawny novelty of a shortstop' – the shortstop is a crucial fielding position, right in the firing line of right-handed batsmen – fielding practice balls with an almost superhuman grace. It's easy to see why The Art of Fielding has done so well: it is charming, warm-hearted, addictive, and very hard to dislike. It has been riding high in the US bestseller charts. Then, in late 2009, after endless setbacks and rejections, a young agent took on the book, and a bidding war ensued, with Little, Brown stumping up an advance of $665,000. In October, Harbach's friend Keith Gessen, author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, gave the publicity campaign a mighty push by publishing a long article in Vanity Fair, now an ebook, which told the stirring story of the book's genesis: Harbach, a quiet, unassuming young literary man from Racine, Wisconsin, had toiled away on the novel for 10 years, while doing the Brooklyn equivalent of starving in a garret – working on a small literary magazine and supporting himself as a copywriter while fending off the debt collection agencies. Enthusiastically plugged by everyone from Jonathan Franzen to James Patterson, John Irving to Téa Obreht, praised to the skies by the New Yorker, GQ, the Oprah Magazine and the Milwaukee Sunday Journal-Sentinel alike, it was also chosen by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2011. C had Harbach's debut novel of baseball, friendship and late-flowering love has been a great success in America.

The art of fielding by chad harbach