It’s three months until Christmas but it’s not too early to start thinking about appropriate presents to buy for golfing family and friends. I have a couple of suggestions for you in the form of two golf-themed books. Neither are about instruction. Neither involve travel. Neither are biographies/autobiographies. They are two works of fiction, both published this past summer.
First to tee-off was The Amateur by an American author, Chris Bohjalian. Mira Winston is an enthusiastic teenage golfer of considerable potential, possibly even a career on the LPGA Tour. One afternoon in 1978 she drives a ball into a practice net at the swish country club of which she is a member. It was a stroke of terrible misfortune. The ball goes through the net and hits a young caddie, Kenny Foster, on the temple. It kills him. It is, of course, a freak accident. It is, of course, also a lot more than that. (If it were not, that wouldn’t be much of a plot.)
For Mira, it’s a kind of karma – a punishment for her involvement with a man her father’s age. (Given some current attitudes in publishing, I am perhaps rather surprised that a novel by a 63-year-old man which includes the under-age sexual behaviour of a schoolgirl got through the process.) The story is told from Mira’s perspective over 40 years after the tragic incident, as she reflects on her lifestyle and contemporary morals back then and relives how what was clearly an accident became blurred with sub-plots and overtones, and eventually court proceedings, as it became clear there was more to Kenny’s death than originally met the eye. The denouement carries all the panache of a finely nuanced thriller.
UK friends, THE AMATEUR is here this week! 💙
Get your copies here: https://t.co/ZWmLxfXr4F pic.twitter.com/e8OaT4priU
— Chris Bohjalian (@ChrisBohjalian) August 17, 2026
There is no doubt that Gordon Simpson’s Four Deadly Swings is a thriller. By the end of the first page we know someone has been done in. Soon after that we are asking about the who and the why. In one of his more recent media-related reincarnations, the author was communications director at the PGA European Tour and his novel is set at Wentworth during the week of the PGA Championship. (JJ Spaun’s wjn there last week carried much less jeopardy than any faced by the protagonists here.)
The two central characters are a freelance journalist, Adam Stringer, and the policeman leading the murder investigation, DCI Jack Hunter. Both are eager, for different reasons, to solve the case, and the prospect of friendly co-operation seems a remote one. Hunter was fundamentally involved in the episode which saw Stringer sacked from the Sunday Times, sending his career into a tailspin, after allegations of serious professional impropriety which he has always denied. Simpson controls the tempo of the book well, as likely suspects and motives emerge and are discarded, until the truth reveals itself – as a good thriller should – after couple of late twists and turns. So do Stringer and Hunter make-up?
View this post on Instagram
Which book to give as a present? Oh go on, push the boat out: give them both.
You can follow Robert Green on Twitter @robrtgreen and enjoy his other blog f-factors.com as well as his golf archive on robertgreen-golf.com
Related: The crazy calendar
Robert Green
Robert Green is a former editor of Golf World and Golf International magazines and the author of four books on golf, including Seve: Golf’s Flawed Genius. He has played golf on more than 450 courses around the world, occasionally acceptably.