Like most novels about sport, Chris Cleave's Gold isn't really about sport. Sport as an activity, of course, is unbeatably thrilling if you're a participant or a fan. The problem is, if you're neither of those things, it can be the most astonishing bore. Twitter, for example, is a lonely place on a Saturday afternoon if you happen to find football a bit dull. Sports as a prism, however  of personality, of nationhood, of drama and sacrifice and humanity  can take some beating. Raging Bull is most certainly not just a film about boxing, though it is that, too.

Gold, Cleave's first novel since his bestseller The Other Hand, is about Olympic cycling, which is to say it's really about people. British cyclists Zoe Castle and Kate Meadows are  despite having names that sound like romance novelist pseudonyms  the world's top two sprint cyclists. Which of the pair is number one, however, is a matter that history hasn't quite settled, and it's a question that's heating up as the London Olympics loom.

Having competed against each other since they were 19, they're now, at age 32, both facing their last chance for Olympic gold. Zoe's been there before, having won two gold medals in Athens in 2004 as Kate stayed home with newborn daughter Sophie, and an additional two in Beijing. She's by far the fiercer competitor, not above playing head games with Kate, despite Kate being more or less her only friend in the world. Her coach Tom worries about her, despite her huge endorsement contracts and high-rise flat in Manchester. She's fragile, self-destructive, with a smile that "came out like a newborn foal  its legs buckled immediately".

Kate is the more naturally talented cyclist, but she's sometimes fatally soft. After she takes six months off following the death of her father, Tom describes her  accurately, brutally  as "the kind of girl who would stop training when her dad died", a line that tells you a lot about both Kate and the world of elite athletes. Kate not only missed out on Athens, but had to leave Beijing in 2008 when Sophie was diagnosed with leukaemia. With Sophie in her second round of chemo after a recurrence, is Kate set to miss out one more time to Zoe in 2012?

Things are further complicated by a sudden Olympics rule change  a real one, by the way, that will almost certainly prevent a repeat of Great Britain's 2008 cycling medal haul  whereby the sprint events are now limited to one competitor per country. It doesn't matter that Kate and Zoe are the world's fastest. Only one of them is going to get to compete. But who?

If that summary sounds a bit soapy, well, it is, and the twists and emotional breakdowns that await only get soapier still, finally verging on the implausible, or at least the Hollywood. Cleave, however, is such an energetic writer that most of the time it doesn't matter. Gold flows with the vitality of the sport it covers. Cleave is very good on the mechanics of velodrome cycling and the gruelling training necessary for it, and his supporting characters are fun and memorable, particularly Tom the coach, with his dodgy knees, and Jack, Kate's husband (who also provides an occasional love triangle interest with Zoe). Jack is a cyclist himself, and brilliant with Sophie, feeling that he could "win against leukaemia by being sufficiently Scottish".

In the end, Gold is a bit of a crowd-pleaser, and though I wished things didn't all come together quite so neatly, there's no denying that the novel is, ahem, an entertaining ride.

 Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls is published by Walker Books.

Usually, this is where we'd review the third novel by Chris Cleave. We'd give a brief gloss of his earlier books  Incendiary and The Other Hand  then move on more substantially to the work under consideration: Gold. A summary of the plot would follow, with care taken not to give away any of the story's many twists. We'd quote a decent chunk of Cleave's prose  enough for you to decide if it's the kind of thing you'd like. We'd end with a pithy precis of our thoughts on the novel. But with Chris Cleave it's a bit different.

Cleave's books are almost as well-known for their cover blurbs as for their content. On the back of The Other Hand, his editors at Sceptre declared: "We don't want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it." It was the start of a marketing phenomenon. The Other Hand, known in the US as Little Bee, tells the interwoven stories of a teenage Nigerian asylum seeker and a London magazine journalist. It has sold more than half a million copies in the UK and was No 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It is an example of that rarest and most coveted of publishing sensations  the word-of-mouth hit. In the summer of 2009, its sun-drenched cover seemed to peek from every handbag on the tube, every item of carry-on luggage at the airport, enjoying the kind of ubiquity that David Nicholls's One Day would experience in 2010.

Although Incendiary has now also risen to bestseller status, the birth of Cleave's debut was more troubled. It's an epistolary novel addressed by the mother of a four-year-old boy killed in a terrorist attack to Osama bin Laden. It was published on 7 July 2005, the date of the London bombings. Posters advertising the book showed a smoking London skyline with "What if?" plastered across it. They were swiftly pulled down and the novel disappeared from view, a case of too much real life for the reading public to handle. Cleave apparently gave up writing for a while in the wake of this disappointment.

The early setback may go some way to explaining the extraordinary marketing instinct that continues to drive Cleave's career. Many writers, after penning a runaway bestseller like The Other Hand, would undertake for their next work something more cerebral, weightier, a book to please the likes of the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani (who savaged Incendiary). Cleave has gone in the other direction. It takes some chutzpah to write a book about the Olympics in this five-ringed year. Cleave might be accused of cynically cashing in  or, if the games are the month-long nightmare that many predict, the novel could suffer Incendiary's fate and be cast aside by a jaded public.

Gold recapitulates The Other Hand's singular approach to cover blurb. "Usually, this is where we'd tell you what this book is about. But with Chris Cleave, it's a bit different. Because if you've read The Other Hand or Incendiary, you'll know that what his books are about is only part of the story  what really matters is how they make you feel." This seems a useful way of thinking about Cleave's work. His novels are unashamedly sentimental; their great success comes from an ability to tug on the heartstrings while being well enough written to appeal to an audience who know their Sebald from their Sebold.

Gold is a very good novel. Perhaps I should have told you that earlier, but its publishers seemed so keen on the whole withholding information thing. In the whipsaw ride of emotions that he takes us on over the book's 300-odd tightly packed pages, Cleave positions himself alongside David Nicholls and Rose Tremain as a modern-day novelist of sensibility: their books are driven  as Gold's blurb so neatly surmises  more by what we feel than what we think.

Though you might assume that a book about the Olympics would prove less fertile ground for this kind of heart-tugging, Gold is violently, sometimes absurdly sentimental. At its core, it is as much a domestic drama as a trackside thriller. The novel takes us deep into the lives of three Olympic sprint cyclists in the lead-up to the London games. We have Jack and Kate, less happily married than at first they seem, and Zoe, who says of herself: "I'm ugly on the inside. I'll mess your head up."

Tom, who trains the two girls, is an injury-riddled former cyclist who missed out on an Olympic gold by a fraction of a second and has lived in the shadow of that failure ever since. Jack and Kate have a daughter, Sophie, who is fighting leukaemia. The novel's dramatic tension centres around the tug between Kate and Jack's drive to be world-beaters at track cycling, and their agonised attempts to deal with their daughter's illness. A corresponding arc sees Zoe battling the demons that drive her on the track but threaten to destroy her off it.

Everyone in the novel is marked by tragedy. Not just Sophie and her illness, which is related in lyrically poignant prose, but also  and here I must be careful not to give away those tingling twists of plot  Zoe, whose past is an orgy of death and despair; Tom, whose missing front teeth are a constant reminder of his missing family; and Kate, whose bland amiability is the response to a catalogue of traumas recent and ancient. The suffering that Cleave puts his characters through would be pornographic were Gold not so strikingly well written.

As in The Other Hand, Cleave uses flashbacks and interwoven narrative strands to give us different perspectives on events so that only gradually do we piece together the intricate pattern that he has knitted between his characters. He dances our sympathies between Zoe and Kate, asking us to root for first one and then another, both on the track and off it. The writing about the cycling is suitably fast-paced, and Cleave has clearly done time in the saddle. Zoe is tucked into another rider's "wind shadow"; Kate "pulled every atom of herself inside out from being alongside [her opponent] dropped to an inch back, a wheel-length back, and with a cold, silent flicker of wonder in her heart, Kate realised she was going to win."

Gold will be accused of twin cynicisms  of jumping on the Olympics bandwagon and of manipulating its audience's emotions. Sophie did occasionally call to mind Holden Caulfield's dead brother, Allie, in The Catcher in the Rye, who feels as if he was put into the story merely to stoke our sympathy for the grubbily adolescent Holden. Cleave manages to avoid this by giving us a convincing and fully rounded depiction of Sophie's world, employing some memorable Star Wars-themed flights of imagination. He's always good on childhood (Batman-loving Charlie in The Other Hand is a fine comic creation) and the scenes of Zoe's early bicycling escapades are a sepiatinted delight.

In his 1979 essay In Defense of Sentimentality, John Irving said: "When we writers  in our own work  escape the slur of sentimentality, we should ask ourselves if what we are doing matters." Gold is indeed a sentimental novel but it has that rare gift of getting past the urban sneer to move and gratify, to stir us because it does, indeed, matter. It is bold and brave and, when you're on your way to the games this summer, and the person opposite you on the train is sobbing hot tears on to their Kindle, you'll have a pretty good idea what they're reading.

Alex Preston's most recent novel is The Revelations (Faber)