‘What was that book featured on the radio the other day?’
BBC Radio 4’s thrilling ‘A Good Read’ with Harriett Gilbert this week featured crime writer Donna Leon and writer-entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan – both talk with Harriett Gilbert about their favourite books.
Donna Leon chooses ‘The Underground Man’ by Ross MacDonald.
When a chance encounter makes him a witness to the abduction of a child, private detective Lew Archer can’t help but be drawn into the case, pursuing a trail that leads all too quickly to murder. While forest fires rage in the hills around Los Angeles, threatening the homes of some of the city’s wealthiest families, Archer unearths a hidden history of failed marriages, runaway children, and a man’s life consumed by a search for the father who abandoned him.
Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald’s insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.
Margaret Heffernan chooses ‘Butcher’s Crossing’ by John Williams
Will Andrews is no academic. He longs for wildness, freedom, hope and vigour. He leaves Harvard and sets out for the West to discover a new way of living.
In a small town called Butcher’s Crossing he meets a hunter with a story of a lost herd of buffalo in a remote Colorado valley, just waiting to be taken by a team of men brave and crazy enough to find them. Will makes up his mind to be one of those men, but the journey, the killing, harsh conditions and sheer hard luck will test his mind and body to their limits.
Harriett Gilbert chooses ‘A Golden Age’ by Tahmima Anam
Spring, 1971, East Pakistan. Rehana Haque is throwing a party for her beloved children, Sohail and Maya. Her young family is growing up fast, and Rehana wants to remember this day forever. But out on the hot city streets, something violent is brewing. As the civil war develops, a war which will eventually see the birth of Bangladesh, Rehana struggles to keep her children safe and finds herself facing a heartbreaking dilemma.
