Gideon Haigh on Shane Warne is an irresistible pairing: 'the finest cricket writer alive' (The Australian) on the greatest cricketer of our times. The resulting masterpiece is as much about our fascination with Warnie as it is about the player himself.

Now that the Australian cricketer who dominated airwaves and headlines for twenty years has turned full-time celebrity and media event, his sporting conquests and controversies are receding steadily into the past.

But what was it like to watch Warne at his long peak, the man of a thousand international wickets, the incarnation of Australian audacity and cheek? Our leading cricket writer, Gideon Haigh, lived and loved the Warne era, when the impossible was everyday, and the sensational every other day.

In On Warne, he relives the era's highs, its lows, its fun and its follies. Drawing on interviews conducted with Warne over the course of a decade, and two decades of watching him play, Haigh assesses this greatest of sportsmen as cricketer, character, comrade, newsmaker and national figure – a natural in an increasingly regimented time, a simplifier in a growingly complicated world. The result is one of the finest cricket books ever written, a whole new way of looking at its subject, at sport, and at Australia.

One day, you might be asked what cricket in the time of Warne was like. On Warne is the definitive account.