The story is a modern adaptation of Alexandre Dumas's 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo, which was in turn based on a contemporary legend.

The original title comes from a quotation taken from John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, which reads: "We are merely the stars' tennis balls, struck and bandied which way please them."

Wanting to cover-up his hidden familial relationship to a Fenian traitor, Delft decides that Maddstone must disappear.

Over the course of another decade, Babe educates Maddstone, helping him to master chess and teaching him to speak multiple languages, among other things.

Now fabulously wealthy, Ned assumes the identity of Simon Cotter, a famous and mysterious Internet entrepreneur who makes huge profits investing in high-risk ventures.

Due to Ned's intervention, Cade mistakenly sells sherbet instead of cocaine to a group of Turkish drug dealers.

Ashley Barson-Garland is now a backbench Member of Parliament, a rising star in the Conservative Party known for his vocal stance on Internet censorship and the preservation of family values.

Fleeing the television studio during the show, Barson-Garland receives a trojan worm from Maddstone that reveals Ned's true identity and intent as it floods his hard drive with pornographic videos of under-age boys.

Maddstone secretly reveals his identity to Delft's mother, who is paralysed and mute due to a stroke, and describes what he suffered on her account and his intent to utterly destroy her son.

Maddstone discovers that Gordon Fendeman was involved in a swindle in South Africa five years previously, that left an entire African tribe homeless, landless, and mired in poverty and starvation.

He offers Delft a choice: he can spend the rest of his life in the asylum, or commit suicide by swallowing hot coals.

In the novel's afterword, Fry states he tried to make his novel appear more of a conscious homage by changing the characters' names to anagrams or references to Dumas' original work: Reviews of the book were positive.

Jane Shilling declared in The Times "This is an odd, interesting, ambitious book with a complex pedigree" and Harry Mount wrote of Fry in the Daily Telegraph "He seems to be concentrating more on producing a taut thriller.

[1][2] However, Stephen Moss, writing in the Guardian opined that it was a "good read rather than great book, pacy, well constructed and rather gruesome.