Imagine that you are a paediatrician and the coroner in a small American town in ‘Grant County.’ You’re recently divorced from you police-chief husband (even though you secretly still love him); you take a routine lunch break at a diner with your sister, only to discover that in the toilet there is a woman bleeding to death. Later, you discover not only that she has been ritualistically murdered but also she was the twin sister of your ex-husband’s top detective, who has always shown a somewhat prickly animosity toward you … you are entering the first novel of crime-author Karin Slaughter, Blindsighted.
Slaughter has a knack for making the implausible seem rivetingly plausible. Her Grant County series, featuring paediatrician-coroner Dr Sara Linton, are riveting who-dunnits, fusing precise forensic science with a wildly inventive speculative imagination, which unerringly culminates in superbly chilling crime fiction.
Karin Slaughter’s burgeoning imagination has also created another compelling character, Will Trent, who made his first appearance in her novel Triptych published in 2006. Despite his dyslexia and abusive childhood history, Trent has become the Georgia Bureau of Investigation’s most intelligently intuitive crime-solving officer. Ashamed of his literacy problem, he is movingly blind to his genius as a detective. In her latest work, entitled Genesis and published in July 2009, Karin Slaughter brings the flawed and wounded heroes, Will Trent and Sara Linton, together in a desperate and heart-stopping effort to solve a grisly murder.
Slaughter’s main characters are hurt, betrayed and even self-destructive human beings who even so display an inspiring commitment to truth and justice.
Lives riven with impossible choices, invisibly scarred with regret and charged with hope, dread, love and trauma – these constitute the stuff and substance of so much of human life. Jodi Picoult fashions them into beautifully poignant prose.
An author who has produced fifteen novels in seventeen years, Picoult writes about exceptional subjects in a way that touches us all. Her capacity to evoke powerful identifications with the dilemmas and issues of her stories, if not the individual characters, show her as a novelist who can speak to everyman, from postal worker to high court judge, bus-driver to billionaire banker.
Picoult’s debut novel Songs of the Humpback Whale uses marine biology to render a profoundly human tale in which sudden loss brings new understanding and love. None of us are free from contingency, from the unexpected and unbidden. An oceanographer is forced to use his intuitive knowledge of tracking whales to re-find his abruptly departed wife and daughter, realising that he must, as with whales, try to imagine the world (and himself) through his wife’s eyes.
Her most recently published novel, Handle with Care, seems to deal with a rare infantile illness which will inevitably result in a future of broken bones and physical agony, but it also powerfully addresses us all with a fateful question: what would we do? Would we risk poisoning our deepest friendship in order to secure legal compensation? Would we have terminated the pregnancy if we’d known? Picoult uses the extraordinary to confront us ordinary people with profound ethical issues we might otherwise ignore.
If, like me, you came across Louise Rennison’s Confessions of Georgia Nicolson series through your teenage children, you’ll readily confess to your helpless absorption in the hilarious, infectious and simply compelling nature of the stories. You just have to keep reading them, if only to see what preposterous predicament Georgia will find herself (or place herself) in next.
It is, of course, not just the comically (and movingly) fraught scenarios, the ups and owns of adolescent romances, but Georgia’s unique thought processes that beguile and uplift you. Based on the author at the age of 14, Georgia is not an angel – she is prone to be self-obsessed, even a little stupid on occasions – but is fundamentally a good-hearted youngster who tries to make the right decisions.
Another of those rare authors who seem to write for teenagers but who are eagerly read by adults, too, Louise Rennison combines a light-hearted wisdom about adolescent turmoil with a simply fabulous sense of humour. These books make you laugh out loud and have you holding your breath in anticipation about how the next awkward dilemma will be survived.
Louise Rennison graduated from Brighton University and by the 1980s was touring the comedy circuit in the UK with her show Stevie Wonder Touched My Face. The show revealed Louise’s shining comedic talent. The first and second novels in the nine-book (and counting) Confessions series, Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging and It’s OK, I’m Wearing Really Big Trousers was made into a successful comedy movie (Angus Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging) in 2008.
Dan Brown leapt to fame and fortune in 2003 with his fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, which was made into a big-budget Hollywood movie in 2006.
Brown has come in for some criticism, notably from the Catholic Church and some Christian groups: feathers were ruffled by his depiction of the Catholic organisation Opus Die in The Da Vinci Code as a sinister underground organisation full of secrets, riddles and even ruthless assassins, bent on preventing scandalous ancient truths becoming public.
Perhaps the most important point to remember is that no one reads a Dan Brown novel for religious enlightenment, or even for literary finesse: he is a story-teller extraordinaire, with a fantastic talent for keeping you frenetically turning his pages until the book is finished. Fascinated by cryptology (the art of concealing secret messages in symbols), Brown places this subject at the heart of his Robert Langdon novels, the fictional Professor of Symbology from Harvard University. The stories offer compellingly enigmatic examples of covert ingenuity and coded concealment, whilst yielding abundant edge-of-the-seat, heart-pounding thrills along the way. Brown’s novels are lengthy, but his prose style is addictive: he writes in short bursts, a technique that keeps you compulsively glued to the text.
The success of Da Vinci boosted the sales of Brown’s earlier works, including Digital Fortress and the first Robert Langdon novel, Angels and Demons. The third Robert Langdon novel, The Lost Symbol, is reportedly due for release in September 2009; set in Washington DC, it apparently features the byzantine secrecy of the Freemasons.
This young mother of three is a ‘demon writer’ as well as writer of demons. In other words, she is a most readable prose stylist who also writes darkly romantic stories about demons. Her first novel, ‘Twilight’ written in 2005 has been made into a blockbuster movie and began as a dream – literally.
Stephanie Meyer dreamt of a teenage girl who became the focus of a vampire’s romantic longing – even though he also longed for her blood. The tension between the vampire’s two appetites – for love and for destruction – haunts the novel compellingly. Whilst it is a rattling good read and is almost impossible to put down once you start reading, Ms Meyer drew from numerous literary works for inspiration, including Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for the first novel in the three-book series; Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet for the second (New Moon), and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights for the third (Eclipse).
The stories bring to the fore the often impossible contradictions love seeks to navigate – between good and evil, the permissible and the forbidden, the safe and the dangerous – and it may be that in narrating these irreconcilable tensions, the novels touch all of us who sense them at work in out own loves and life paths. That they have sold in their millions suggests a universal appeal.
In writing novels for teenagers, which can be (and are) read avidly by adults, Ms Meyer’s extraordinary literary talents and excellent story-telling powers are a dark delight. A graphic novel of Twilight is about to be published.
Some of the most recurrent news issues to hit the headlines in recent times are panics over health – MMR vaccines causing autism, obesity epidemics, bird flu, most recently swine flu, often accompanied with fearful warnings about mass contamination and incalculable death tolls. Most of which, it would appear, fail to materialise.
For those who are becoming sceptical about the latest media frenzy about health, Ben Goldacre is the perfect antidote. His book Bad Science, published in 2008, is an extended and revised compilation of the weekly columns he writes for The Guardian newspaper, in which he insists on using sound, scientific fact to debunk and refute spurious claims and unnecessary panic. In these articles you will find Goldacre’s forensic analysis of the distorting effects on real science of consumer product marketing, the pharmaceutical industry’s often far too cosy relationship with some prominent medical journalists, and of pseudo-science and plain quackery masquerading as fact. With the satirical astringency of a radical pamphleteer, he famously exposed the scientific limitations of a certain celebrity ‘health expert’ by obtaining a ‘certified professional membership’ from the American Association she claimed membership of – for his pet cat.
Goldacre is not merely an amateur sceptic – he knows what he is talking about. Working as a junior hospital doctor in the NHS, he is also a qualified psychiatrist. Having won numerous awards for his medical journalism, Goldacre substitutes the voice of truthful reason in place of fear, inaccuracy and, on occasions, sheer falsification.
Aravind Adiga was born into a comparatively prosperous Indian family in Chennai (formerly Madras), India in 1974. Despite his privileged origins, his awareness of – and refusal to ignore – the brutalising and endemic poverty in the country he loves (and wishes to reform) became the focus for his Man Booker Award-winning debut novel, The White Tiger in 2008.
The novel vividly illustrates the contrast between objective measures of a ‘healthy economy’ and the harsh, bare privations this generic term often means for vast numbers of people. Through letters written late at night to the Premier of the People’s Republic of China on the eve of his visit to India, the novel’s main character Balram Halwai (the ‘white tiger’ of the novel’s title), describes his rise from a childhood of abject poverty to an adulthood of scheming and criminally acquired wealth. Adiga is not really condemning prosperity – he is attacking the co-existence of surreal wealth with grotesque poverty, which he feels sponsors ruthless and unprincipled individual acquisitiveness at least as much as the noble altruism and solidarity it is often sentimentally supposed to produce.
Aravind Adiga is a calm but passionately engaged voice for justice, a man who fervently believes that superb writing (like that of Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, and, we must now add, that of Adiga) can help reform societies for the better. Aravind Adiga currently writes on a freelance basis and lives in Mumbai, India.
If you have not started reading the three Millennium novels chronicling the ingenious and daring investigations of the oddest private detective couple in fiction, you’re missing a literary treat as well as a thrillingly paced narrative.
The author, Stieg Larsson, was a radical journalist who spent the latter years of his professional life exposing fascist and far-right activity in his native Sweden. He completed what became the Millennium trilogy as a hobby during the evening, after work!
The first novel in the series, published in English as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, introduces Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and amateur sleuth, and Lisbeth Salander, a violent young social misfit who happens to be both dazzlingly intelligent and a brilliant hacker, to boot. The two investigate the disappearance of a 16-year-old girl forty years earlier at the request of her wealthy uncle – and expose corporate trickery and serial murder along the way. Beginning as hunters, they become the hunted, pursued by some powerful and ruthless characters with a lot to hide.
Tragically, Larsson died aged only 50 of a massive heart attack just before these novels were published and never lived to see their immense success: in 2008, he was the second best-selling author in the world, with only Khalid Hosseini ahead of him. Two subsequent novels featuring the unusual sleuths, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, (published in Sweden in 2006 and 2007) are set to be released in English translation in July 2009 and October 2009 respectively.
A distinguished military historian who writes like a gifted novelist, Antony Beevor has accrued an impressive array of awards and honours during his scintillating career. A former officer with the 11th Hussars cavalry regiment, Beevor served in Germany and England before devoting himself to writing some the most compelling and evocative histories of the Second World War and more broadly, of the Twentieth century) to be published in recent times.
His most famous works; Stalingrad (which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature) and Berlin – the Downfall (which won the first Longman-History Today Trustees’ Award), portray the massive struggles between fascism, communism and liberty in terms of the moving and human stories of ordinary combatants, without ever losing sight of the bigger picture, of what was really at stake for all us. Disliking the triumphalism of ‘victory’ history, he brings out the flaws and weaknesses – the bouts of spite and vengeance – that bitter warfare often brings out in ordinary soldiers, as well as their evident heroism and altruism.
Most recently, his D-Day: The Battle for Normandy (published in May 2009) became a Number 1 bestseller in Britain, France and three other European countries. He has been likened to Tolstoy, creating literary masterpieces out of the history of our times, although his craftsmanship as a great story-teller never compromises his scrupulous attention to the facts. Today, he combines writing with a visiting professorship at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at Birkbeck College, University of London.