Peter Pan’s First XI was first published in 2010 and was picked by the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Observer and Wisden Cricketer magazine as one of their best books of the year.

The creator of Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie, was a hugely enthusiastic cricketer of very little talent. That didn’t stop him from leading perhaps the most extraordinary amateur cricket team ever to have taken the field. Some of the twentieth century’s most famous writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, A. A. Milne, P. G. Wodehouse and Jerome K. Jerome regularly turned out for Barrie’s team of enthusiastic amateurs between 1890 and 1913. This very Edwardian vision of village cricket was brought to an end by the First World War.

Those years of golden summers were recounted in Barrie’s letters and journals, many revealed here for the first time. Telfer weaves together cricket, literature, history, humour and biography to create an entertaining account of this little-known band of cricketing Peter Pans – and the age in which they lived.

‘This is a wonderful book, written with great elegance and affection, scrupulously researched and packed full of terrific stories’ Spectator

‘A tale of lost innocence and late-flowering grief, wrapped up in a comedy of cricketing manners . . . Telfer’s book is a fine exposition of a little-known subject, one that manages to be more than just a cricketing chronicle, and that uses Barrie’s haphazard team as a prism through which to view the wider pre-war period’ – Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times