December 5

My Five Favourite Audiobooks of 2021

It has been a great year for audiobooks so, after being dropped from the blog for the last couple of years, I am going to resurrect an end of year “Favourite Audiobooks” list for 2021.

This selection of books was brought to you in association with Odin.

No not the craggy, one-eyed Norse deity but a soon-to-be two-year old cockerpoo who needs a couple of good walks each day. My daily dog walking gives me the time and opportunity I need to get lots of listening done and this year I have enjoyed a couple of dozen full books while chucking sticks around a park and trudging up and down woodland paths. So thanks to Odin for bringing back the listening.

I have selected five of my favourites and although they are not in any specific order I will finish with the story I enjoyed the most. These five books are included because of a number of factors, a great narrator, an engaging story or subject matter, a tale I couldn’t stop thinking about or just beacuse I thought it was terrific.  These are the five which I considered the best purchases I made through my Audible account.

 

Far From The Tree – Rob Parker

Brendan Foley has worked to balance the responsibilities of a demanding job and a troublesome family. He’s managed to keep these two worlds separate, until the discovery of a mass grave sends them into a headlong collision….

The juggle for Brendan Foley in this book is brilliantly handled by Rob Parker. Foley’s family have dubious criminal connections as his father is one of the North West’s biggest gangsters. So when Brendan’s nephew is found dead in a mass grave, family loyalty is not high on Brendan’s list of priorities. He is a man under huge pressure and there are a lot of corpses who deserve justice – can Brendan Foley step up for them?

 

 

 

Billy Summers – Stephen King

Billy Summers is a man in a room with a gun. He’s a killer for hire and the best in the business. But he’ll do the job only if the target is a truly bad guy. And now Billy wants out. But first there is one last hit….

How could I not include Billy Summers in my selections? King is the master storyteller and Billy Summers is one of his very best. A hitman with the chance to make enough cash from the next job that he could retire. But there are too many things Billy doesn’t like about the assignment and fate isn’t going to make it easy for him.

This was a book which had me making longer detours on my walks just so I could hear another ten minutes of story. When it was finished I wasn’t – I wanted more.

 

 

The Reacher Guy – Heather Martin

The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher….

I don’t read non-fiction and I certainly don’t read biographies. Well that was true until I listened to Heather Martin’s excellent biography of Lee Child, author of the tremendous Jack Reacher novels.

I thought I knew Reacher well (I’d been reading his story for over 20 years). I knew Lee Child was an alias but that was all I knew. Heather Martin showed me how little I actually knew. She tells the story of three men and she shows how my favourite fiction was shaped by history and experiences and tells the reader about the stubborn determination of a man called James Grant.

This book opened my eyes and gave me an enjoyment of non-fiction which I had not previously experienced. Since reading The Reacher Guy I am now picking up more non-fiction titles and feel I am gaining from each one I read. This is a detailed and fascinating listen.

 

Chasing The Boogeyman – Richard Chizmar

In the summer of 1988, the mutilated bodies of several missing girls begin to turn up in a small Maryland town. The grisly evidence leads police to the terrifying assumption that a serial killer is on the loose in the quiet suburb. But soon a rumour begins to spread that the evil stalking local teens is not entirely human. Law enforcement, as well as members of the FBI, are certain that the killer is a living, breathing madman – and he’s playing games with them. For a once peaceful community trapped in the depths of paranoia and suspicion, it feels like a nightmare that will never end.

The release of this post was delayed 24 hours as I still had 45 minutes of Chasing The Boogeyman to listen to. Even before I had finished the audiobook I knew it was going to be included in my list of five favourites. It’s a story from the late 80’s when for six months a killer attacked a number of teenage girls and held a terror over a small town. The story is told by Richard Chizmar himself, a resident of the town in question, and he plays an integral part of the story even fearing he may become a suspect at one point. It is chilling ficton but presented as a true crime investigation – there is even a PDF of pictures of the characters to accompany the audiobook to allow listeners to see snapshots of the key figures in the story and locations important to the plot. It’s a really clever addition to a brilliant audiobook.

 

56 Days – Catherine Ryan Howard

No one even knew they were together. Now one of them is dead….

It is December 2021 and Covid and lockdown have been present in our lives for over 20 months yet this isn’t being reflected in the fiction I am reading. Who is writing the lockdown stories? Well Catherine Ryan Howard is – 56 Days takes all the anxiety, claustrophobia, tension and paranoia of 2020 and weaves it wonderfully into this murder story.

This is the audiobook I enjoyed most in 2021. The narration was wonderful, the shift in narrative across the 56 days which cover the novel kept the teases and reveals flowing through the story – it isn’t a linear narrative so you realise some characters know more than they are letting on at certain parts of the story and that just throws up more question around why they are behaving why they are. The story hangs on the characters and their actions and Catherine Ryan Howard has crafted a wonderful cast to make this story absolutely shine.

 

So there you have it five wonderful and unmissable audiobooks. Some non-fiction which includes a lot of fictional references, a serial killer thriller, a police investigation with gangland links, a hitman story which is so much more and a clever murder tale hidden from the world during a pandemic lockdown.

I limped over the finishing line with a busted pair of headphones so until I get back to the shops and replace my £10 headphones with a new pair of similar value no new audiobooks will be started. I can be confident, therefore, that no new audiobook will be listened to over the last three weeks of 2021 and that this five really are the best five audiobooks I listened to this year. Now all that remains is for you to seek them out too and see for yourself why I loved them so much.

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October 31

Heather Martin and The Reacher Guy

For the first time in a very long time I am delighted to be able to share an interview here at Grab This Book.

Heather Martin is author of The Reacher Guy: The Authorised Biography of Lee Child.  I reviewed the audiobook of The Reacher Guy (here) and found it to be an engrossing account of an author I have read for years; but actually knew very little about. As TRG has recently released in paperback I was delighted when Heather agreed to chat with me about writing Lee’s biography and I finally got to satisfy my curiosity about how she got accurate answers out of a natural storyteller.

 

Before you met Lee Child and discussed writing about his life I am assuming there was an earlier moment where Jack Reacher first crossed your path. Where did your personal “Lee Child” journey begin? 

They say you remember your first time, but I don’t really. I was in Cambridge. It must have been about ten years before I met Lee Child – One Shot, perhaps, which came out in 2005, so before his first New York Times no. 1 in 2008, before he became a household name, but around the time Tom Cruise signed on and things started getting huge. But one thing’s for sure: Reacher turned up just when I needed him. Doesn’t he always? What’s weird is he kept coming back, not like in book world – twenty-four times I think it was. But I was OK with that. And I do remember where it all started – in the bedroom. I pulled a book off the shelf and hopped into bed and well, let’s just say I didn’t sleep much that night.  

I should add that during this period of innocence the name ‘Lee Child’ meant nothing more to me than the guarantee of a good read. 

 

I had somehow imagined you would have been there from the start. Reacher is one of the few series which I caught early. I was there from Killing Floor and utterly hooked. How I wish I had kept my original copies of the early books (and my Star Wars collection too).  

So, if 2005 was when you first encountered Reacher and it was ten years before you met Lee, where did you finally get to meet the man himself?  

I wish you had too! The thing about the Reacher books is they’re equally addictive no matter where you jump in. The damage is done on page one. Another confession: I wasn’t one who waited on the release date, not at least until I met Lee, and then only because I was curious about the man. But he would never have allowed me to write the biography had I been a classic superfan – it’s in his nature to prefer a degree of scepticism.  

We met over dinner at the old Union Square Café on Manhattan’s East 16th St in the summer of 2015. There were seven of us in total. Lee arrived last and folded himself into the last remaining chair, on my left. He was a little cramped. He surveyed the general scene and said: ‘you should have mentioned my name and we would have got the best table in the house’. Nevertheless we soldiered on. He’d been to the dentist that day and was feeling a little delicate; he drank champagne and had profiteroles for dessert. He lamented the loss of the Labour Party’s original clause IV. Afterwards, one of our group, a brilliant young woman who worked as a parliamentary assistant to Harriet Harman, said she wished he would run for leadership of the party.  

A lucky escape for Lee then as if he HAD run for parliament his popularity would have taken an overnight hammering.  

Was that the dinner where the prospect of writing Lee’s biography was first discussed? How do you get from “pass the breadsticks” to “can I write about your life?”  

And because I am curious – did you know Lee would be there before the meal? Either way I have always thought it to be very cool. 

He was wise to that risk I’m sure. Later he said that if he was made king of the world the first thing he’d do would be abdicate – too much responsibility.   

No mention of biographies, but we got on well and no doubt the seed was sown. We’d already had some correspondence about the Spanish translation of one of his later novels, which I’d critiqued at his request. So yes, I knew he would be there. Our conversation had already begun. After The Reacher Guy was published, Lee told an interviewer for BBC Radio Sheffield it was my commentary on that translation that made him take me seriously as a prospective biographer, because he felt I understood what mattered to him in his writing, what was important. And because I wasn’t afraid to say what I thought. By that point in his career that perhaps wasn’t so common.  

It seems you had established a good relationship with Lee before the biography gained traction. Obviously there came a point where you agreed you would write about his life? I am keen to know where you went from that​ conversation, where do you start?  

Yes, we were already friends. I first heard him speak publicly in 2016 in Cambridge, at the Literary Festival, then Oxford, at the St Hilda’s Crime Conference, in what he affectionately refers to as his ‘establishment year’, when he was also in demand as an essayist from the New Yorker and the New York Times. That was the year in which he was first picked up by the London Review of Books and the TLS. As you know, he’s an enthralling speaker, as good at spinning a historical tale as a thriller. Presumably it was the academic in me, but I found myself taking notes.  

I made the effort to catch up with Lee at festivals and then committed to a couple of short stays in New York so I would have more opportunity to work through my seemingly endless questions. As I’ve said before, the biography arose organically out of a long conversation, and there came a point where we both agreed we thought we could make it work. In between times I covered the obvious bases: I visited the places where he’d lived and worked; I tracked down old friends, teachers and colleagues; I reread all the books, and trawled through the mostly very similar interviews online and on paper, sifting through the evidence and trying gently to separate the man from his persona. Eventually I got access to the archive, which Lee donated to the British Archive for Contemporary Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2018, in advance of his semi-planned retirement. I had most of the first draft done by then, but I think that turned out well for me, because it meant I knew what I was looking for, but also that when I stumbled across something I didn’t know I was looking for it tended to jump out and grab my attention. I loved those weeks, altogether months in the archive – so absorbing, so revealing, both tranquil and exciting.  

Lee is certainly an engaging speaker so I can imagine listening to him at numerous events must have been fascinating. But if he was also promoting the latest book then possibly some repetition would creep in? 

That thought leads me towards something I had wondered about as I read TRG. You often reference his habit of adapting or elaborating on facts. It seemed there was Lee’s version of events and everyone else’s version. Did you see anecdotes being told and tweaked at different events and how does that impact upon a biographer who is trying to nail down facts? 

And that was a highlight of reading TRG, at times you almost sounded vexed with his recounting of events which others would “amend”. 

Such a good question. The repetition itself was interesting, of course. What made him return to those same themes, what made him reach for the same stories? Did it come from within or without? The reasons are many. Some of it was reactive, and over time, as an essentially shy man, he perfected his public persona. But he also refined his thinking around those topics that preoccupy him most deeply: the nature and purpose of fiction, the nature of humanity (which has no purpose), the transaction between reader and writer. I believe he enjoyed that learning process, which is what makes him such a compelling essayist.   

Where you have repetition, variation is also built in. Some of that repetition was willed, some of it unconscious. To an extent it was pragmatic, his performance tailored to suit the time slot allocated, a skill he’d acquired during his years at Granada Television. If he was talking about the distant past – his early childhood, for instance – then by definition he was dealing in stories that had been handed down by parents and grandparents; if he was talking about the present, there was the Reacher brand – and publisher expectation – to consider. Lee was relaxed about it. Nothing he said ever seemed to him contradictory; his brain could reconcile all the angles. He sees all writing as storytelling, and storytelling as among the most ancient of human habits, long preceding the advent of writing, and in tracing the evolution of fiction homes in on the way writers adapt humanity’s best-loved stories to the needs and desires of new audiences. I think this is one of the main reasons he’s a one-draft writer: that’s just how he told the archetypal story that year – he couldn’t go back and change it.  

For the biographer it’s all grist to the mill. Sometimes I would quiz him about the discrepancies between his recollections and those of others. But rather than being daunted by the vagaries of point of view and memory – which I increasingly acknowledged as a condition of the enterprise – I found them liberating. Both Lee and I were aiming for a truthful account, but we both knew it could only ever be an approximation, so then it became more about authenticity, on both sides. I never saw it as my job to pin him down in the manner of a lepidopterist. I don’t like sticking pins in things. I always expected him to elude me, just as Reacher always eludes the reader in the end, and each of us eludes the other. I hope this is something I managed to bring out in the biography, in the later chapters especially, but also in those on the mother figure, and death. 

I would like to pull you back to the writing process and how you took on the challenge of capturing a lifetime. It sounds like you had several conversations with Lee and you hit the books and the archives. Did you tackle your research chronologically and try to work from his childhood or perhaps you worked back from when the books were releasing (when I imagine information became more plentiful)? 

One thing which did strike me – in the early part of the book he is Jim/James but by the end he is very much Lee. You tell two stories. Is he Jim or Lee to you now? 

Many conversations, over years, and a long correspondence too. My approach was less chronological than thematic, and intuitive. Lee would say things; questions would lead to more questions. He told me about his grandparents, and on the Irish side that led back to his great-grandparents. There’d be an anecdote about his father, then gradually we’d fill in the bigger picture. It took longer to get him to talk about his mother. And I only really made significant progress on the school, university and Granada years, when I was able to go back to him with the memories of others. There was a vast amount of information in circulation about his career, a lot of it misleading or erroneous. What I found hardest to work with, ironically, were Lee’s own introductions to special editions of his books: it was difficult to shake off his words.  

When it came to the writing, I tried not to contemplate the enormity of the task, or indeed the temerity. I simply started at the beginning, relying on a particular image, moment, concept or theme to steer me through. Amazingly, it seemed to work, and I grew to trust my own instincts. I liked the idea of each chapter being a self-contained story, which I thought might suit the reader too.  

Lee would always say to me, and to others, ‘a book has to have a beating heart’. So while I approached the subject with due seriousness, it was mostly, in the end, a feeling thing.  

His books were always there and so too his fame. Which I suppose is the beginning of an answer to your second question. I met Lee as Lee, and he’ll always be Lee to me. But it was Jack Reacher I got to know first, so he was there from the start. Jim Grant was the one I knew nothing about. I barely even knew he existed. But what I discovered as I got to know Jim Grant, which I did, to the point where I was comfortable referring to Lee by his given name as necessary and appropriate, was that Reacher had been there from the start for him as well. Not named, not explicitly formulated, but as the archetypal fictional hero, a source of comfort and hope in a miserable childhood, and a fantasy alter ego too. Reacher saved Jim, thanks to Lee Child.  

That’s quite a thought, that before we got to read about Margrave in Killing Floor Reacher had already saved Jim Grant. A ripple effect though, the stone had hit the loch but the ripples would take some time to reach the shore (and Jim/Lee’s future would be secured). 
So we know Reacher’s story as Lee has told us that. And we know Jim and Lee’s story thanks to The Reacher Guy. What about Heather Martin? We are long overdue an introduction.
Well, there’s a reason we’re talking about Lee Child and Jack Reacher, and not Heather Martin. So it’s tempting to evade this question. But I have to admit that one of the sweetest thrills of publishing The Reacher Guy last year was when Lee interviewed me rather than the other way round – I’ll be forever grateful to The Big Thrill (the magazine of the International Thriller Writers association) for that audacious idea.
I don’t see myself writing a memoir, just as Lee doesn’t see himself writing an autobiography. Even so, many aspects of Jim Grant’s life story resonate with me, and it’s not least on that basis that I hope the same might be true for others. I too spent my childhood dreaming of escape: not just from the redback spiders, and not because I was unhappy at home (I wasn’t), but because I’d already been given the taste for adventure and travel by my bold, adventurous parents – in their day it wasn’t common to up sticks as they did and emigrate for two years from the sleepy town of Geraldton, several hundred miles north of Perth on the edge of the Indian Ocean, to Aix-en-Provence on the fringes of the Mediterranean. I’ll always admire my early-twenties mother throwing herself fearlessly into the fray of the Provençal food markets with her minimal and Australian-inflected French. And like Lee too, I’ve spent the major part of my life in a prolonged flirtation with another country, or in my case, other countries – France, Spain, England, the United Kingdom in general. So I’ve shared in the outsider experience with all its insights and highs and lows. Of course, he is of the colonisers and I the colonised … I’ve been ambitious too, like him, with enough drive to survive and get on, but in a less directed, more pluralistic way. I lack his singular vision, his ruthless eye on the prize. When I first met the man who would eventually become my guitar teacher in London, he told me I would have to choose between music and ballet. I was thirteen at the time, and I didn’t want to choose. I can hear his words even now, and though in some ways he was clearly right, I still feel in my heart he was wrong.
There’s a reason, too, that The Reacher Guy is so grounded in social detail. It’s because Lee insisted that he was no more than a product of the time and place in which he was born. He was ‘a perfectly normal guy’ whose experiences growing up would be representative of many thousands of others. In fact, he attributes his extraordinary success to the very ordinariness of his origins – he had his writing finger (or two fingers, since he is a two-fingered typist) on the ordinary pulse. Paradoxically, it was his ordinariness that enabled him to escape the ordinary, and achieve the extraordinary. He sums it up nicely in respect to his wealth, acquired only in the latter third of his life (as measured by his current age): ‘I’m a poor man with a lot of money.’
Perhaps there is a fundamental truth in there somewhere: that we all are extraordinary, in our ordinary way. Or should it be the other way round?

The Reacher Guy is published by Little, Brown Group and is now available in paperback, digital format and as an audiobook (narrated wonderfully by Juliet Stevenson. You can order a copy here: https://www.waterstones.com/book/the-reacher-guy/heather-martin/9781472134233  or from any independent bookseller.

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March 23

The Reacher Guy (Audiobook) – Heather Martin

Jack Reacher is only the second of Jim Grant’s great fictional characters: the first is Lee Child himself. Heather Martin’s biography tells the story of all three.

Lee Child is the enigmatic powerhouse behind the bestselling Jack Reacher novels. With millions of devoted fans across the globe, and over a hundred million copies of his books sold in more than forty languages, he is that rarity, a writer who is lauded by critics and revered by readers. And yet curiously little has been written about the man himself.

The Reacher Guy is a compelling and authoritative portrait of the artist as a young man, refracted through the life of his fictional avatar, Jack Reacher. Through parallels drawn between Child and his literary creation, it tells the story of how a boy from Birmingham with a ferocious appetite for reading grew up to become a high-flying TV executive, before coming full circle and establishing himself as the strongest brand in publishing.

Heather Martin explores Child’s lifelong fascination with America, and shows how the Reacher novels fed and fuelled this obsession, shedding light on the opaque process of publishing a novel along the way. Drawing on her conversations and correspondence with Child over a number of years, as well as interviews with his friends, teachers and colleagues, she forensically pieces together his life, traversing back through the generations to Northern Ireland and County Durham, and following the trajectory of his extraordinary career via New York and Hollywood until the climactic moment when, in 2020, having written a continuous series of twenty-four books, he finally breaks free of his fictional creation.

 

Having read the book before Christmas I then bought the audiobook through my Audible membership – this is an audiobook review with an explanation as to why I doubled up!

 

I don’t really read non-fiction.  There are a number of reasons behind this but key ones are that I am a speed/skim reader and I really struggle to focus on non-fiction books for any length of time (see also short story anthologies).  Secondly, I am TERRIBLE at remembering names so when books dwell on people, as biographies tend to do, I quickly get confused about the players in the chapter and lose interest. Third, I seldom find a person or subject I want to read about in depth.  If those issues were not enough to contend with, I have a fiction TBR which is screaming to be read.

Some time ago, when I was a good deal younger than I am today, I picked up a new book called Killing Floor.  As many people have since discovered it was a brilliant read and the twenty-three subsequent Lee Child novels were pretty darned fine too.  Lee Child has been a regular go-to reading choice in our house and only a new Terry Pratchett Discworld book could rival the anticipation of the next Jack Reacher book.

Over twenty years of Reacher Fandom was a pretty good reason to read The Reacher Guy. I wanted to know more about the man who came up with all those exciting stories, the man who calculates the physics in a fight scene and the man who has a cover quote on quite a few of the books featured in this blog – how can he read so prolifically and still have time to write?  The Reacher Guy answered my questions and gave a remarkably frank insight to the character who is Lee Child and the man he was before the books began.

Heather Martin has been extremely thorough when it comes to getting to the core of James Grant. The early chapters of the book focus on his childhood years and the family around him.  His grandfathers, his parents who let him down at a young age and the friction which seems to have never abated throughout his life, school friends, old teachers – all are explored and there are examples of how their relationship with the young Mr Grant formed the man he would become and influenced the characters he would create.

The early years and Grant’s background are expanded by the author to take in much of the social history of the time and if Jim Grant lived in Coventry then Heather Martin went to Coventry to see where he lived.  It seems to bemuse Lee Child that Dr Martin would visit Jim Grant’s house but that gives you some idea of how this book addresses the relationship between the biographer, the author, his alter-ego and his internationally recongised lead character.

I found the tangents taken in the narrative to be fascinating.  One page you are reading about a family photograph taken by a brick wall then the next page could be about men returning from the war and how they were patched up or left to fend for themselves.  The book takes many unpredicable turns and the only comparison I could draw (from my limited exposure to non-ficti0n) was the narration style of Bill Bryson who can comfortably steer the reader from a paragraph about an attic to five pages on churchyard burial practices in the 18th century. It is engaging and informative and when you have the story being narrated by the wonderful Juliet Stevenson you don’t really want these narrative deviations to end.

As Jim Grant grows older his experiences change and readers are treated to stories of The Beatles and gigs which the music loving Grant was able to attend.  Then comes the meeting with his future-wife and the need to settle and get a job to support a family.  He excelled in his professional career too and hearing how he secured a job he loved and then mastered is oddly abosorbing.  Who enjoys hearing about someone else’s day job?

What struck me throughout The Reacher Guy was the constant reminder that Lee Child makes up stories for a living. He attends many events and has to answer many questions about his background. The book does make it clear that many tales he tells are likely to have been somewhat embellished down the years.  Heather Martin meets old acquintances of Grant/Child and these old friends are quite happy to pop the fictional bubble which has been blown around some of these recollections and clarify some more practical detail.  Nevertheless there is no doubting that Jim Grant had a fascinating life before he first took readers to Margrave, Georgia.

The final third of the book is where we leave Jim Grant and join Lee Child.  The mentions of Jim are much less frequent as once the writing begins Jim Grant is moved to the background and only Lee Child gets to meet publishers, editors and producers.  These are the pages the Reacher fans will be lapping up.  Hearing how the books were formed, how characters got named, where hard work and grafting got a substantial manuscript down to a page-turning sensation.

When I read The Reacher Guy I skimmed too much of the detail. I picked up the audiobook as you can’t skim details in audio – you need to let every word be heard.  What a great decision that turned out to be. Juliet Stevenson has a wonderful voice and she perfectly captures the mood of each chapter.  There are times where Jim Grant does not always come out of a situation looking in the best of lights – Stevenson’s narrative sounds sharp and disapproving almost as though she is not happy with what she is having to relay to us. Yet in times of success and celebration the light congratulatory tones are uplifting.

It’s a weighty book and a lenghty listen but both can be considered time well spent.  The paperback will be out later in the year but a savvy shopper can currently pick up the hardback at less than half of the cover price.  For a guy that doesn’t read non-fiction, I read the Hell out of this book.  Will be recommending this for some time to come.

 

The Reacher Guy is published by Constable and is available in hardback, digital and audiobook format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B086L3VD1T/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Category: From The Bookshelf | Comments Off on The Reacher Guy (Audiobook) – Heather Martin
February 12

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Heather Martin

If you were to fill a library from scratch which books would you put onto the shelves?  That was the question which first crossed my mind one wintery day during the 2020 pandemic lockdown.  I wouldn’t know where to start.

Well that’s not quite true as Terry Pratchett, Lee Child and Agatha Christie could command well over 15o books between them and they are just my first three picks.  But after that I would simply go into a frenzy of dropping author names and a library of nothing but crime novels from Ed McBain to Val McDermid would emerge.  Satisfying, but not really a true reflection of the Ultimate Library.

I decided I needed help.  I would invite book lovers, authors, bloggers and publishers to help me pick the books which need to go into the Ultimate Library.  I have two rules:

Rule 1 – Nominate Five Books which should be included in my Ultimate Library

Rule 2 – You can only select one title per decade and the decades must be consecutive so we get a 50 year publication span.

 

Today I am delighted to welcome Heather Martin to Grab This Book.  As I haven’t given Heather the opportunity to talk about her own book, I asked if she could introduce herself and make sure she took the opportunity to plug The Reacher Guy.

 

I’m an Australian long since settled in England, a willed displacement that I have in common with my biographical subject, Lee Child. Just as he wrote Killing Floor after a long first-act career in television, I wrote his authorised biography The Reacher Guy (out now from Constable at Little, Brown in hardback, ebook and audiobook, with Juliet Stevenson narrating), after many dedicated years as a student and teacher of languages and literature. But there’s one big difference: it’s unlikely my book will be the first in a twenty-four-book continuous bestselling series. The Reacher Guy is the intertwined history of three men: James Dover Grant CBE, and his two great fictional creations, Jack Reacher and Lee Child.

Thank you to Gordon at Grab This Book for inviting me to contribute to the Ultimate Library. Which seductive concept reminds me of one of Lee’s crazier pipe dreams: to build a bespoke library somewhere in the English countryside big enough to house all his books and still leave room for a full-size Bentley parked in the middle.

So … It’s the kind of question that, once asked, you can’t put out of your mind. If you could only choose five books, one from each of five consecutive decades, what would they be? I knew immediately I was doomed to frustration. And much as I respect the literary discipline of working within constraints, somehow that imposition of historical continuity made it all the more difficult. In drawing up this list, I found I spent most of my time thinking of ways to cheat the system. How much could I get away with?

I ruled out the present day: I’ve read too many books in the last year that I loved. Better to go further back, where there was more chance of having forgotten. Back before the nineties, which was when Lee wrote Killing Floor, which could only cause complications. But the eighties … How would I choose between Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, between The Color Purple and Beloved, to (sneakily) name just two?

I love all five of the following books, but a small part of me now hates them as well, because they pushed all the other ones out.

 

DECADES

1930s

Federico García Lorca 1898-1936

Three Tragedies: Blood Wedding, Yerma and The House of Bernarda Alba

I fell in love with Andalusia in my early teens, which was what led me to play the guitar, which was what brought me from Perth to London, and thence to Cambridge to study languages. In the early thirties, Lorca became director of La Barraca, a touring company whose mission was to bring theatre to rural audiences free of charge. Lorca defined theatre as ‘poetry that arises from the book and becomes human’. I love these plays for their lyricism and intensity, their boldness, their powerful portrayal of women. The cheat? A reading of the plays will surely lead on to his poetry.

 

1949

Simone de Beauvoir 1908-1986

The Second Sex

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir was, in her day, the youngest woman ever to pass the fiercely competitive postgraduate ‘agrégation’ examination in France, coming second only to lifelong partner Jean-Paul Sartre. De Beauvoir was fearless, with all the courage of her convictions. And she wrote a big book exploring a very big idea: ‘One is not born a woman but becomes one.’ The Second Sex has extraordinary scope, reaching back to Aristotle and Aquinas and anticipating Germaine Greer and Margaret Atwood, and still holds its own today.

 

1952

E. B. White 1899-1985

Charlotte’s Web

A favourite when I read it as a child, a favourite to read aloud to my own children, and no doubt still a favourite were I to reread it today. Everything about this deeply compassionate book is life-affirming and life-enhancing: the lightness of touch, the playful language, the enchanting line drawings, the humour, the cycle of love and loss. And every single character unforgettable. Cheat: It brings to mind my treasured collection of Puffin paperbacks, many of which I brought with me when I left home years ago.

 

1962

Jorge Luis Borges 1899-1986

Labyrinths

If I’d been allowed only one book, this would have been it. Not because I once met Borges, a few years before he died, and supplied him with a Japanese word he’d forgotten. But because every Borges story, like his aleph, contains ‘the inconceivable universe’. This anthology includes three of the best. ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, a highly condensed thriller and detective story in which all possible outcomes of an event occur simultaneously, with each then leading to further proliferations of possibilities. ‘Funes the Memorious’, my go-to story on memory, whose nineteen-year-old antihero (who for some reason reminds me a bit of Lee) is ‘as monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, older than the prophecies and the pyramids’, and whose poignant moral is ‘to think is to forget’. And ‘The Library of Babel’, ruled by divine disorder, in which is to be found – somewhere, no one knows quite where – the book of books, containing all other possible books. The biggest cheat of all.

 

1979

William Styron 1925-2006

Sophie’s Choice

‘If you read only one book,’ Lee Child once said to me, ‘make it these three’, writing a dedication in a copy of Sophie’s Choice. So I did. And by the time I got to the end I knew exactly what those cryptic words meant. I read it in New York in 2019, while I was deep in writing The Reacher Guy (Lee had told me that the red house of Echo Burning was inspired by Styron’s pink house in Brooklyn). Not much got written that weekend. I didn’t go out. I didn’t eat much either. Not sure I got out of my pyjamas. No matter that the story of Stingo and Sophie and Nathan was more than six hundred pages long, I could barely put it down. And by the end I was heartbroken – in a good way.

 

 

Huge thanks to Heather for adding books six to ten to my Library.  It’s taking shape!  The first five books, selected by Sharon Bairden, can be found here: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5056

I would like to add my personal recommendation to read or (as I am currently doing) listen to, The Reacher Guy: The Authorised Biography of Lee Child.  It’s a terrific book and the audiobook narration by Juliet Stevenson is aural nectar.   You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B086L3VD1T/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

 

Decades will return

 

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