'Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.'

As an earnest golfer for over forty years, John Updike wrote frequently about the game. In Golf Dreams, Updike directs his inimitable style, his humour and shrewd insights towards a sport that, in turns, enthralled and infuriated him. This gathering of his pieces covers everything from the peculiar charms of bad golf and the satisfactions of an essentially losing struggle to the camaraderie of good golf and its own attendant perils.

Praise for Golf Dreams:

'John Updike has anatomized the greatness of golf with an eloquence only Wodehouse, in a lighter vein, has matched. It makes for a lyrical book which is also thought-provoking . . . his lowest handicap was 18, but, in this delightful book, he has not dropped a stroke' Max Davidson, Daily Telegraph

'A stylish celebration of golf's propensity to transmogrify perfectly normal people into gibbering wrecks; not just 28-handicap novices but superstars, too' Jeff Randall, Sunday Times

'There's a crafty pastiche of golf coaching manuals . . . and there's a delicious rumination on the dazzling green luxury of televised golf. There are high, arching flights of fancy concerning swing thoughts, the moral aspects of golf, the etiquette of the gimme . . . It is a treat both for Updike fans and for golf nuts' Robert Winder, Independent on Sunday

John Updike's first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, was published in 1959. Other novels by Updike include, Marry Me, The Witches of Eastwick, the Rabbit series and Villages. He has also written a number of volumes of short stories such as My Father's Tears and Other Stories and a poetry collection entitled Endpoint and Other Poems. His criticism, essays and other non fiction appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. He died in January 2009.