There comes a point in every sporting life when the trophies stop mattering and the institutions take over.
In The Fantastic Confabulations of an Ageing Tennis Player, Lord Andrew John Paul George Ringo Murray of Kirkintilloch wakes up to discover that time has moved on without him, by more than a decade. Tennis clubs have changed. Society has changed. Technology has changed. And somewhere along the way, Andy himself has been quietly mislaid.
Set in a Liverpool hospice that may or may not be a prison, a laboratory, or something stranger still, this fourth and final Confessions book follows Andy as he pieces together what happened after Paris, after Melbourne, after Wimbledon and why everyone seems so keen for him to stay exactly where he is.
Populated by club secretaries, rogue care workers, obsessive consultants, resurrected lovers, and an increasingly rebellious fleet of drones, Fantastic Confabulations is part satire, part love story, part institutional nightmare and part last stand.
Tennis is still there. The bar bill certainly is. But this time the real match is against forgetting, control, and being written out of your own story.
Absurd, unsettling, tender and funny, this is the book where Andy finally learns what it means to win – and what it costs to be remembered.