With a foreword by Lee Child.
Andy Martin spent a year in the company of Lee Child, creator of
tough-guy hero Jack Reacher. With Child is the diary of their
adventures, tracking the publication and reception of Make Me, the
writing of Night School at an apartment in Manhattan, the filming of
Never Go Back in New Orleans, all the agony and ecstasy of the
creative process and the sheer hard work of selling a bestseller. They
go on the road together, from TV studios to bookstores, from Harvard to
Stockholm, amid literary conferences and gunshows, rivalries and reviews
ranging from adulatory to murderous. We meet fellow writers like Stephen
King and David Lagercrantz and Karin Slaughter, and dissect the latest
novel from Jonathan Franzen.
But Martin also reaches out to Child's legion of readers in America and
around the world. He tracks down a woman in Texas whose name appears in
the home invasion scene in Make Me; he goes up a mountain in Montana
in search of the only reader who thinks Reacher is a "lightweight"; and
he talks to obsessive fans from Europe to South Africa who find
salvation or consolation in the colossal form of Jack Reacher.
This compelling account of life on the road with Lee Child demonstrates
that readers are just as important as writers in the making of modern
fiction.
