The Rider

You'll rarely find a novel so straightforward: a single cyclist, a single race; 137 kilometers in 148 pages. Like the racers themselves, it's stripped down for speed, every gram weighed against necessity. Krabbé himself was, like his main character (who shares his name), a competitive amateur racer, and his lean and thoroughly compelling account inhabits the strategies, the impulses, the frustrations, and the pain-is-pleasure joys of a driven, focused athlete. And perhaps best of all, in constructing his fictional race he convinces you of the result, but also that, given the collection of racing personalities he presents, and the turns of chance, it could have turned out many other ways. You never know what will happen when you clip your feet onto the pedals and set off.