There’s a challenge faced by anyone who writes about cricket, and who cares about the writing part as much as the cricket part, which is this – how to rise above the mundane.  There are only so many ways to say that so-and-so scored 17 at Derby.  One way to vault that hurdle – the path taken by Gideon Haigh, say, or Malcolm Knox, before he turned to novels – is to blend together polished prose, sharp insight and a broad frame of reference.  Christian Ryan has taken an even harder road.  Almost nine years have passed since Ryan published his previous book, Feeling is the Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second, and then it became plain that he had left behind the usual formal constraints of cricket-related writing.  Now we have Eleven We Burn Them In the Sun, which expands still further what’s possible.

Asked by one of the (many, many) people he interviewed what the book is about, Ryan records his own response that “People say that this is a book about this.  If you can already say that, there’s no real point in writing it.”  It follows that Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun is a book that defies easy summary, but here goes: it tells the stories of, or at least stories about, eleven cricketers and those stories are interwoven and interconnected in ways that you don’t expect, and also it tells the stories of getting to those stories, which is done by finding and talking to the people themselves and if not the people who knew them.

Maybe no one under the age of fifty remembers what a kaleidoscope is, but it’s the best comparison I can think of for this book.  It twists and turns to reveal a new, beautiful image, each one striking and distinct but also connected to the one that came before and the one that’s going to follow.  There isn’t, here, the standard cradle-to-grave tracing of a life, or lives; instead, Ryan takes fragments from the lives he’s exploring, and connects them with other fragments until they form one pattern, then another.  In the space of a paragraph, you can flit from a woman cricketer driving a bus in Grenada, to a jazz trombonist in the north of England to a man in Newcastle in Australia who played in a Test, once.  Actually, two men from Newcastle who played a Test once: Johnny Watkins and Ray Robinson are two of the subjects whom cricket followers will recognise most readily.  Others include the Indian spinner Padmar Shivalkar, the Pakistani Wasim Raja, and the Lancashire wicket-keeper (and trombonist) Frank Parr – but also John Maley, the groundsman, and Janie Joseph, who played for Trinidad in the Women’s World Cup in 1973 and of whom the only traces are a handful of scorecards and one striking photograph.

If there’s a consistent thread running through these stories, it’s brevity – shortened careers and, in some cases, shortened lives.  Ryan’s language reflects this.  His sentences, mostly, are truncated, superfluous words removed and the syntax often twisted, all to get faster to the point.  There’s a rhythm to Ryan’s writing, or rhythms, the most frequent of which drives propulsively forward, though there are other gears, some of which are gentler and more contemplative, elegiac almost.  It’s the kind of rhythm that, as in a poem, helps to unlock meaning.

Another challenge for nonfiction writers: making sense of it all.  Readers want all those facts to be given shape and structure, to cohere, to unlock answers.  Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun explicitly rejects this notion of a “narrative arc”.  Life, it suggests, isn’t like that, and accounts of life shouldn’t pretend that it is.  So not only does the book’s structure abandon linear progression, but so does its language, words arriving in an unexpected order, jolting complacent expectations.  Don’t, though, think of the book as simply a formal experiment: the depth of the research that has gone into it, years of digging and delving and interviewing, is extraordinary.  There are few books on cricket that reveal things that aren’t already known; here, you learn something new on every other page.

At the heart of the book – after one reading; after the next, I suspect, something else will stand out – is the tragedy of Shirvan Pragg (or Shervan; one of many questions that don’t have a clear answer).  I remember reading in 1982 about Pragg’s random, pointless death in a car accident in Trinidad.  It was sad: he was only twenty, my age, had just come home from a successful tour of England, his possibilities exciting but untested, but I didn’t think much more about it. But Ryan has found Pragg’s friends, the ones who played cricket alongside him in Trinidad, the ones who were in the car with him that night.  A story unfolds of colossal loss – not only the loss of a friend, a son, a vibrant character, but perhaps also of a loss to West Indies cricket, the loss of a cricketer of sufficient talent to demand selection in the great Test teams of the 1980s and beyond.  And who, if so, might have altered the way the game was played in that part of the world.  All that’s speculative, yes, but tantalising nonetheless.  Anyway, Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun lifts Pragg (the last six words of the title are his) out of the peripheral place assigned to him by his three-line Wisden obituary and presents a rich portrait of a vibrant, fully realised character with much still to do.  After more than 45 years, it’s clear that his friends miss him deeply, and the book’s ending, though you know it already, is terribly moving.

It’s not a book for a lazy reader: it asks for concentration and focus.  Anyone who brings that to Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun will be profoundly rewarded.