Shehan Karunatilaka's novel about a dying journalist searching for a legendary Sri Lankan spin bowler who disappeared in 1989. The book is ostensibly about cricket but is really about Sri Lanka's civil war, its sports culture, and the particular madness that settles into a society living with prolonged violence. The cricket sequences are among the most accurate and funny in literature; the darker passages are genuinely disturbing.
Karunatilaka went on to win the Booker Prize for his second novel, but Chinaman is the one that captures Sri Lanka with the most specificity and love.