Shehan Karunatilaka was an advertising copywriter who gave up his job to watch cricket and hang out with drunks so that he could write his first novel. Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew tells the story of an alcoholic journalist's quest to track down the greatest thing he’s ever seen: a Sri Lankan cricketer of the 1980s who’s disappeared off the map and appears to have been expunged from historical record. On Sportspages this week, Karunatilika talks about how the story came about over a ten year period, the Sri Lankan civil war, the best that never was, and what it was like to write a novel that Wisden adjudged the second-best cricket book of all time.