* A warm-hearted literary novel centred around college baseball written in a style like Jonathan Franzen's with hints of John Irving and a homage to Herman Melville. More Field of Dreams than Moneyball.
* Henry is a scrawny poor kid with a gift for fielding at shortstop that gets him spotted by visiting college captain Mike Schwarz. His dedication and skill set him on a record-equalling run of error-free games, but is he mentally tough enough to earn the professional fortune the coaches and agents say he can?
* The head of the middling Wisconsin college is Professor Affenlight, a familar figure from campus novels but with a twist. Wise, self-absorbed, an easy-going ladies' man heading for a comfortable retirement. But suddenly head-over-heels in self-destructive love with Owen, Henry's gay room mate and unlikely baseball team mate. Is that really what happens to old American English professors?
* Schwarz is a widow's peaked captain who's already ruined his body playing sports and has half an eye on a law career. His relationship with Henry is at the core of the novel; it makes him joyful, juvenile, and jealous, in contrast to his stuttering relationship with the happy-pill-popping Pella, the Professor's daughter who turns up on the run from a miserable marriage and ends up bed-hopping as gamely as Susan Sarandon in Bill Durham.
* The moment when Henry thinks he's killed Owen with his first ever mis-thrown baseball is a nod to Irving's extraordinary A Prayer For Owen Meany; Meany tragically kills his best friend's mother with a foul ball in a little league match.
* TV news producers everywhere will nod in recognition of Owen's mum's description of her job as a news anchor: "It's really not very glamorous. Sit around all day staring at the internet, then spend an eternity in hair and makeup."
* Harbach has a great ear for sound. This bit reminded be of the pick, pack, pock, puck of the cricket bats in James Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man: "Ping. Ping. Ping. ‘Goddamnit, Izzy. Quit slapping at the ball like that. This isn't a catfight.’ Ping."
* He's also really good at describing dogs: "He was a beautiful animal, old and noble, a sugar-furred husky with one blue eye... Contango settled down on the pale kitchen floor inches from Affenlight's chair, noble head on noble paws."
* Harbach takes us inside the heads of Henry, Schwarz, Affenlight and Pella - but we only get to know Owen through the eyes of others. We never find out what he thinks about the Prof's infatuation with him or anything else. Instead we get a speech: "You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built by effort and error, study and love."
* Melville looms large. Affenlight's discovery of a long-forgotten visit to the college has resulted in a statue, the school trades on the association and the baseball team's nickname is The Harpooners. But the ghost of Emerson is recalled most bizarrely of all in the Burke and Hare finale to a marvellously old-fashioned home run.
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