James recounts the role cricket played in his family's history, and his meetings with such early West Indian players as George John, Wilton St Hill, the great batsman George Headley and the all-rounder Learie Constantine, but focuses on the importance of the game and its players to society, specifically to colonial era Trinidad.

Cricket is approached as a method of examining the formation of national culture, society in the West Indies, the United Kingdom, and Trinidad.

He recounts the importance of cricket to himself and his community, the role it played in his education, and the disapproval from his family of his attempt to follow a sporting life along with his academic career, whom he describes as "Puritan".

James returns to the values imbued with cricket, first into the 19th-century English bourgeois culture of the British public school, and then out into the colonies.

He contrasts this with American culture, his own growing radicalism, and the fact that the values of fair play and acceptance of arbitration without complaint rarely applies in the world beyond the cricket pitch.

He writes, in a chapter entitled "The Light and the Dark": "...faced with the fundamental divisions in the island, I had gone to the right and, by cutting myself off from the popular side, delayed my political development for years.

[10] In August 1996, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a five-part abridgement by Margaret Busby of Beyond a Boundary, read by Trevor McDonald, and produced by Pam Fraser Solomon.