Natural - Softcover

"A rich original of the first rank" (Saul Bellow)

"One of the best writers in the English language... His work embeds itself into one's consciousness and refuses to be dislodged" (Sunday Times)

"The Natural by Bernard Malamud shows the agony, destruction and pathos that come often with great sports talent" (Sid Waddell, sports commentator Independent)

"This book established that we could have a serious adult baseball novel by playing with the parallels between mythical elements in the game and mythical elements in literature" (Chicago Tribune)

"Bernard Malamud's The Natural that still leads the field [for novels about baseball]. It is one of the landmarks of a period in US fiction when Jewish novelists dominated the scene with work of the highest ambition" (Metro)

This is a book about heroism - of sorts. Roy Hobbs has an immense natural gift for playing baseball. He could become one of the great ones of the game, a player unmatched in his time - a hero. But his first hard-won big chance ends violently, at the hands of a crazy girl, and then it is years before he gets another shot. At last, in a few short seasons, or never, he must achieve the towering reputation that he feels is his right.