Netherland

In a New York unsettled by the September 11 attacks, Hans van den Broek, a Dutch-born financial analyst, is left alone after his English wife, Rachel, takes their young son back to London. Adrift in a country he had come to treat as home, he turns to the city's cricket scene and befriends Chuck, a charismatic Trinidadian who is part idealist and part operator. Chuck guides him into a Staten Island cricket club whose members are mostly of West Indian or South Asian descent, and introduces him to another New York of immigrants and strivers. The critic James Wood called the novel a postcolonial rewriting of The Great Gatsby, and Joseph O'Neill spent seven years writing it.

Barack Obama's presidential reading list includes it, according to a published roundup of the books he recommended.