I spent the first half of my life in England and the second half in the United States, or more specifically in Venice, California, a unique and unusual community. While working for London University I made several research trips to the US. Eventually, I immigrated to the States, where I taught at several universities in Southern California. Once I stopped teaching full-time, I surprised myself by writing two suspense novels (a genre I had spent most of my life analyzing), Money Matters and Dangerous Conjectures. The second novel was written during the pandemic and takes place during the early rise of the virus.
Oakland, California, 2020. Computer scientist Adam cannot understand the widespread appeal of conspiracy theories popularized by the president. He decides to investigate one, QAnon, which turns out to have hidden connections to the White House intent on subverting the upcoming presidential election. His wife Julia, who works at the ACLU, is terrified by the outbreak of the coronavirus and is drawn to the fake online cures Adam detests. Further threatened by the reappearance of a violent ex-boyfriend, Julia sees her life unraveling and resorts to desperate remedies. Dangerous Conjectures is a powerful, gripping exploration of the inner lives of two Americans living through a pandemic and a culture overrun with misinformation.
This book is about a pandemic. It was published in April 2020, just when Covid-19 was causing worldwide lockdowns. But Wright finished the book well before the outbreak was discovered. What prescience! And it is so meticulously researched (he’s an investigative journalist for The New Yorker). The major character is an epidemiologist at the CDC who witnesses the spread of a virulent virus in Mecca and spends the rest of the novel looking for an antidote. His account of the devastating effects of the pandemic involves bioweapons, cyber warfare, and an apocalyptic finale. It made me grateful that Covid-19 did not turn out to be as destructive as Wright’s imaginary virus.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—a riveting thriller and “all-too-convincing chronicle of science, espionage, action and speculation” (The Wall Street Journal).
At an internment camp in Indonesia, forty-seven people are pronounced dead with acute hemorrhagic fever. When epidemiologist Henry Parsons travels there on behalf of the World Health Organization to investigate, what he finds will have staggering repercussions. Halfway across the globe, the deputy director of U.S. Homeland Security scrambles to mount a response to the rapidly spreading pandemic leapfrogging around the world, which she believes may be the result of an…
During the pandemic, we all found ourselves uncharacteristically isolated from others. Where the Crawdads Sing recounts the life of a young girl abandoned by her family and left to grow up on her own in a stretch of marshland on the North Carolina coast. The marsh acts as her alternative parent. She finds that “it was enough to be part of this natural sequence as sure as the tides.” This unique landscape is evoked in all its beauty and strangeness. But there is a gripping plot - as she matures the marsh girl, as she is known by locals, becomes a murder suspect. Her trial forms the climax of the book. This is easily the most entrancing novel I read during the pandemic and beautifully written.
OVER 12 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE A NUMBER ONE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
For years, rumours of the 'Marsh Girl' have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be…
By 2020 the boundary between fantasy and reality had become virtually erased. Confined to home, we all found ourselves the targets of conspiracy theories. Even the president scoffed at the dangers of the coronavirus. Rushdie’s spoof of Cervantes’ Don Quixote features an updated avatar of Quixote whose reality has been formed by tv soap operas. He is “deranged by reality television,” and in love with a talk show celebrity. Driving across America to reach her he encounters “the pollution of the real by the unreal.” In fact, he himself turns out to be the fictional creation of another major character, an author who is soon exposed to be no less fictional. But this is Rushdie in whose ludic novels the material unreal is the imaginative real.
Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with the TV star Salman R. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where 'Anything-Can-Happen'. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of…
Rachel Kushner and I both live in Los Angeles. We have both written novels set in California. Hers is an impressive act of imagination as most of it takes place in a women’s prison. Although she has visited the Central California Women’s Facility a number of times and befriended an ex-inmate when researching the book, she has never been a prisoner herself. Yet the lives of the prisoners are utterly convincing, especially that of the major character, Romy, a prostitute sentenced to two life sentences for killing her stalker. I particularly admire the way that Kushner, in creating Romy as a believable individual, simultaneously exposes the failings of California’s inhuman prison system.
**SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** **A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER AND CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF 2018**
'An unforgettable novel.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'More knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black]... so powerful.' NEW YORK TIMES 'One of America's finest writers.' VOGUE
Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And…
The pandemic made us ask ourselves how much it would change the future. This novel is set
in a near future that feels much like the present. Still, the narrator is a solar-powered humanoid, manufactured to be a companion to a 14-year-old girl who is confined to her home for schooling on her “oblong.” (Like Lawrence Wright, Ishiguro is remarkably prescient in anticipating a major consequence of the pandemic.) The Artificial Friend is unusually empathetic, more human than some of the humans who prove treacherous. Ishiguro uses this figure to ask the fundamental question – what is it to be human?
*The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller* *Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2021* *A Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick*
'A delicate, haunting story' The Washington Post 'This is a novel for fans of Never Let Me Go . . . tender, touching and true.' The Times
'The Sun always has ways to reach us.'
From her place in the store, Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, watches carefully the behaviour of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges…
Liveaboard sailor Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived when she blags her way into skippering a Viking longship for a Hollywood film. However, this means returning to the Shetland Islands, the place she fled as a teenager. When a corpse unexpectedly appears onboard the longship, she can run from the past no longer: Cass and her family come under intense scrutiny from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Gavin Macrae.
Even if Cass’s local knowledge and sailing wisdom help to clear the Lynch family of suspicion, they may not be enough to stay ahead of the murderer’s game... and avoid becoming the next victim.
Death on a Shetland Longship: The Shetland Sailing Mysteries
When she wangles the job of skippering a Viking longship for a film, Cass Lynch thinks her big break has finally arrived - even though it means returning home to the Shetland Islands, which she ran away from as a teenager. Then the `accidents' begin - and when a dead woman turns up on the boat's deck, Cass realises that she, her family and her past are under suspicion from the disturbingly shrewd Detective Inspector Macrae. Cass must call on all her local knowledge, the wisdom she didn't realise she'd gained from sailing and her glamorous, French opera singer mother…
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