Sweet Summers
 The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn
Edited by Duncan Hamilton (Winner of The William Hill Sports Book Prize 2007). Introduction by Geoffrey Boycott. With contributions from today's leading cricket writers, commentators and legendary players.
'He was the very best of cricket writers.'
Dickie Bird
'Nowadays, I believe there are too many writers attached to cricket who know bugger all about it - Jim was different.' Geoffrey Boycott
Capturing a time when the true spirit of cricket existed. Through Kilburn's writing, some of the game's past legends are brought to life among them Donald Bradman, Fred Trueman, Jack Hobbs, Keith Miller, Garfield Sobers, Hedley Verity, Len Hutton and Walter Hammond.
For more than forty summers, J M Kilburn, the Yorkshire Post's cricket writer, captured the spirit and beauty of the game and the legends gracing it, among them Donald Bradman, Fred Trueman, Jack Hobbs, Keith Miller, Garfield Sobers, Hedley Verity and Walter Hammond. He writes of the days when 8,000 people watched Yorkshire's County Championship matches; when he travelled by ship on an Ashes tour with his friend Len Hutton; and of a bygone but beautiful period when one-day matches, coloured clothing and rampant commercialism in cricket simply didn't exist. Now you can explore these summer days in a richly satisfying collection of Kilburn's work gleaned from the Yorkshire Post, Wisden and The Cricketer. Kilburn is worth reading not only because he was a knowledgeable and respected interpreter of cricket - well balanced, tough-minded and scrupulously honest in his verdicts - but also for the valuable historical and social perspective that reading him provides. Most of all he demonstrably cared about cricket. His heart was in it - and belonged to it.
PUBLICATION JULY 2008
Signed and dedicated bookplate offer - Signed by the editor, Duncan Hamilton, with your name or a person of your choice to appear on the plate at the front of the book
Sweet Summers: The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn scoops Wisden Book of the Year.
Sweet Summers The Classic Cricket Writing of JM Kilburn has been well received by the critics....
“those of us who were shamefully unfamiliar with his work are indebted to Duncan Hamilton for compiling and editing Sweet Summers… [Kilburn] wrote with technical awareness, shrewd insight and firm principles. He possessed the eye of a reporter and the soul of a poet. And his love for cricket shines through every elegant sentence. A game richly blessed with fine writers has rarely known his equal.”
Patrick Collins, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
"Hail Kilburn, Coleridge of cricket. Duncan Hamilton's anthology of famed cricket reporter Jim Kilburn is the pick of an excellent seasonal crop of sports nostalgia books . . . Sweet Summers, edited with care and valued esteem by compatriot Duncan Hamilton, is the opportune and timely treasury of [Kilburn's] work and appealingly undated."
Frank Keating, The Guardian
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"This anthology of the great underrated cricket reporter J M Kilburn, amply depicts Kilburn's precise description, deep knowledge and love of the game."
The Independent on Sunday
"An evocative new book [that] captures a time when the true spirit of cricket existed."
Cricketworld.com
"Sweet Summers abounds in pure nostalgia, stirring enjoyable memories of Hutton, Hobbs, Bradman and other legends [it] deserves to, and probably will, win Kilburn many new admirers."
Northern Echo
"Even without cricket, JM Kilburn would have been a poet and artist. With it, he soared. He enriched it with his pen as indisputably as Bradman enriched it with his bat."
Yorkshire Post
"Kilburn's writing evoked Sutcliffe, Hutton and Boycott - sound, hard, correct, rather than flamboyant. Yet, like them he was capable of evoking the occasional gasp of surprise. A collection of his pieces appear in Sweet Summers . . . Thank God for that. "
CricInfo
"At a time when even worthy university professors believe that standard English prose and spelling will have to submit to the mongrelese of e-mail and text language, a collection of Kilburn's work comes as a welcome reminder of the days when writers,sub-editors and publishers all took enormous pride in the style and expression of their work."
Derek Hodgson, Yorkshire County Cricket Club Yearbook 2009
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