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Amazons
  • Published: 19 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241849187
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00

Amazons

An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League

Formats & editions
Hardback
19 Dec 2026
EBook
19 Nov 2026
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A wickedly funny satire of sex and sport in 1970s America from one of the most beloved writers of the 20th century

Cleo Birdwell is twenty-four, a schoolteacher’s daughter from Badger, Ohio, and the first ever female recruit to play in the National Hockey League. She is an instant sensation on and off the ice - lauded not only for her mettle on the rink, but also for her honey blonde hair, her milky blue eyes, her style and her stamina. And as she spends her first season travelling across North America, she can’t help but stumble into her own adventures of sex, fun, and scandal.

A cult treasure, re-issued for the first time in fifty years, Don DeLillo’s pseudonymous masterpiece offers a gloriously funny skewering of the absurdity of the male gaze, the commodification of sport, the booming culture of 70s America – and of one young woman determined to make her way on her own terms.
  • Published: 19 December 2026
  • ISBN: 9780241849187
  • Imprint: Viking Fiction
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $45.00

About the authors

Cleo Birdwell

Cleo Birdwell is a pseudonym. She is the fictional first woman ever to play in the National Hockey League
CB

Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo was born and raised in New York City. He has written fifteen novels and three stage plays and has won many honours including the National Book Award for White Noise, the International Fiction Prize for Libra, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Mao II, the Jerusalem Prize, the Howells Medal for Underworld and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
DD

Praise for Amazons

Written with bone-dry wit, pitch-perfect dialogue and edgy social satire

New York Times

Light on its and feet and lethally funny... If you’re a careful reader of DeLillo's work, his wit is absolutely delicious, and he can do a comic scene that will have you rolling on the floor, and that’s an aspect of his worldview that he let off the leash for AMAZONS

Bookforum

Closest thing we have to a great American hockey novel

Keith Gessen

I don't want to talk about it

Don DeLillo, epigraph to AMAZONS

By featuring a woman in a hypermasculine environment, the novel revels in opportunities to explore gender roles and lust as comic themes

The Times

A funny, racy hockey novel DeLillo published under a pen name, be reprinted for the first time in 46 years... a faux memoir written from the perspective of the first woman to play in the NHL, full of jokes, weird asides and social satire, and a fair amount of sex. There’s hockey too, of course.

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