September 9

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Tim Glister

Sometimes my new Decades guest arrives in the week they are celebrating a publication date, it’s almost like I can boast successful planning every now and then.  Let me jump in ahead of Tim and drop a sneaky cover share of his new paperback, Red Corona, before he has a chance to tell you a bit more about it himself.

LUSH!

Before I hand you over to this week’s guest I had better explain what I mean by a “Decades guest”. Every week I am joined by a booklover who is asked to take on my Decades challenge.  I am putting together a collection of unmissable books which should grace the shelves of the very best library collection.

I began this quest back in January and each week a new guest (authors, publishers, bloggers and journalists) select five books they want me to add to the Library. You can see all the previous selections here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/grab-this-book-the-decades-library

Choosing five books isn’t quite the whole story though.  My guests may only select one book per decade from five consecutive decades. So their choices will come from a fifty year publication span. This can cause some gnashing of teeth but the range of books being added to the Library makes my jaw drop each week.

So it’s enough from me, Tim is waiting in the wings to introduce himself and to share his five selections with you.

DECADES

I’m Tim Glister, the author of the Richard Knox Spy Thriller series. My first novel, RED CORONA, is about the secret battle between Britain, America and Russia to control the birth of the global surveillance age. The second novel in the series, A LOYAL TRAITOR, poses the question: duty or honour, which would you betray?

Over the years I’ve been a library assistant, a bookseller, and a literary agent. Now I’m a novelist. I write espionage fiction, and I read as widely as I can for both fun and inspiration.

For my Decades challenge, I wanted to pick five novels that have blown my mind, and changed the way I look at both reading and writing. These are stories I still think about years after reading them, and recommend to anyone who will listen.

 

 

1957 – ON THE BEACH by Nevil Shute

Few novels have given me nightmares. This one has. The 50s and 60s were awash with excellent speculative (and mainly) dystopian fiction, but ON THE BEACH stands out for how devastatingly it explores a world that ends without a bang. It’s all so mannered, so polite, so plausible – it’s utterly terrifying, and extremely, deeply affecting.

 

 

 

 

1962 – LABYRINTHS by Jorge Luis Borges

As Heather Martin has already said, if you could only pick one book for this challenge it would have to be LABYRINTHS. It has no equal. These razor-sharp, mind-bending tales fizz with imagination and vitality, and conjure up entire worlds in just a few pages. Read them and learn the true, awesome power of literature.

 

 

 

 

 

1971 – THE DAY OF THE JACKAL by Frederick Forsyth

THE DAY OF THE JACKAL shouldn’t work. We know Charles de Gaulle isn’t going to die, and his would-be assassin is little more than a hollow puppet somehow pulling its own strings. And yet Forsyth is such a master of the thriller and so skilled at creating tension that you end up glued to the pages and rooting for murder.

 

 

 

 

1984 – HOTEL DU LAC by Anita Brookner

This novel is not what you think it is. It’s shrewd, cunning, deceptive. It takes the best of Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Daphne du Maurier and distills it all down into a biting social commentary driven by a mystery that compels you to keep reading and a heroine that critics have been keen to dismiss but who commands your respect.

 

 

 

 

1995 – BLINDNESS by José Saramago

Another nightmare-inducer to end on. What would happen if a plague of blindness swept through your city? Blending Camus-esque philosophical plotting with a disarming parable-style narrative voice, BLINDNESS grabs hold of you and beats you up until the very last page. Like ON THE BEACH, technically it’s science fiction, but it feels all too real.

 

 

 

 

Five stories which blew Tim’s mind and changed the way he looks at reading and at writing! That’s quite the testimony and exactly what I hope the Decades Library will do for other readers. Just last week I picked up one of the recommendations made by Steven Keddie and my next Decades purchase is guaranteed to be Blindness.

A reminder that Tim’s novel, Red Corona, released this week in paperback. If you want to spot how any of these five books helped shape a new story then here is the link you need to grab your own copy of Red Corona: https://www.waterstones.com/book/red-corona/tim-glister/9781786079435

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

 

 

 

Category: Decades | Comments Off on Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Tim Glister
May 14

Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Helen Fields

The Library is growing and week on week fabulous books are being added to the shelves.  If tentative plans pan out there may even soon be a twist which nobody saw coming.  I am loving inviting guests to join me and share their reading recommendations. I had hoped this feature would allow some fabulous books to be showcased but the enthusiasm I see each week for the new books my guests discuss has far exceeded my expectations.  Thank you all for making each new Decades post the best part of my blogging week.

So what is Decades?

I am curating the Ultimate Library.  I started with no books and have been inviting guests to select five books they would like to see added to the Library shelves so we can compile a collection of the best books.  There are just two rules my guests must follow:

1 – You can select ANY five books
2 – You can only select one book per decade and you must select from five consecutive decades.

Today I am joined by Helen Fields.  Helen is the fourteenth Decades guest and has added five outstanding titles to the Library.  To be honest I cannot believe it took fourteen guests before two of her selections made their way into the Library – Iconic. You can try guess which two I had in mind.

I’ll hand over to Helen and allow her to introduce herself (I never like to do the introductions incase I miss something important) and then she will share her five recommended reads.

DECADES

An international best-selling author, Helen is a former criminal and family law barrister. The last book in her detective series, ‘Perfect Kill’ was longlisted for the Crime Writers Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in 2020, and others have been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize, Scottish crime novel of the year. Helen also writes as HS Chandler, and has released legal thriller ‘Degrees of Guilt’. In 2020 Perfect Remains was shortlisted for the Bronze Bat, Dutch debut crime novel of the year. The series has been translated into 18 languages, and also sells in the USA, Canada & Australasia. Her historical thriller ‘These Lost & Broken Things’ came out in May 2020. Her first standalone thriller – The Shadow Man – from HarperColllins was published in 2021. Her next book comes out in February 2022 but she’s not allowed to tell you the title yet!

Helen can be usually be found on Twitter @Helen_Fields. For up to date news and information her website is at www.helenfields.co.uk. For Facebook check out Helen Fields Author.

 

 

A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute (1950)

Honestly, if this book doesn’t make you cry at least once when you’re reading it, then you have no soul. I will die on this hill. It is one of the most affecting books I’ve ever read. I couldn’t read anything else for months after I finished this book.

 

 

 

 

 

Papillon by Henri Charrière (1969)

I fell in love with the Steve McQueen (original) movie first which prompted me to read the book, and I’m so grateful that I did. A (mostly) autobiographic story of a man incarcerated on various French colony islands who faces cruelty and hardships beyond belief before his death defying escape. I promise, you will join him in that cell as you read.

 

 

 

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson (1971)

More journalism than fiction. An explosively colourful tale of the highs and lows of Vegas. Drugs, sex and rock n roll. It’s seedy, it’s insightful, as well as funny and (in its time) very shocking. Just razor-sharp writing and an unfiltered look at America’s depths.

 

 

 

 

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)

Atwood said she didn’t write anything in this book that hadn’t actually happened somewhere in the world, to the extent that calling it dystopian fiction is almost misleading. One of those books that came around again, and maybe we listened more carefully the second time. Atwood’s writing never gets too clever for itself. She does two things brilliantly in their simplicity: character and plot. This is one of the books that will define humanity in the future.

 

 

 

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres (1994)

Just because I loved it. Stunning escapist fiction with a superlative sense of time and place. For a brief moment in time absolutely everyone was reading this book. Didn’t we all fall just a little bit in love?

 

 

 

 

Did you spot the iconic book of its era?  Yep, could easlily be any of the five.  Thanks to Helen for finding time to share her selections. It never stops being a thrill when my most-read authors join me here at Grab This Book.

If you would like to visit my Library and see all the selections which have been made thus far then you just need to click this link: https://grabthisbook.net/?p=5113

 

DECADES WILL RETURN

 

 

 

Category: From The Bookshelf | Comments Off on Decades: Compiling the Ultimate Library with Helen Fields