Or how about riding with Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show? The Congress of Rough Riders, of course. Want to be a Russian peasant who catches the eye of the doomed Tsar Nicholas and becomes personal guardian to his 11-year old son, heir to all the Russias, while also falling in love with his youngest daughter Anastasia? That's The House of Special Purposes.Ĭare to go on the run with a notorious murderer? Try Crippen. By chance rather than design, the subjects I write about tend to be universal." It opened my mind to the way a novel could work. "With that idea I realised I could remove myself entirely and just tell a story. As the 20th Century ends, he looks back on a life taking in everything from the French Revolution to the birth of Hollywood and the Wall Street Crash. The protagonist in The Thief of Time discovers that his body doesn't age.
"Until I got the idea for my first novel, The Thief of Time, everything I was writing was about my own life, naturally enough for a young man." "But I never planned on writing anything historic," he says. His protagonists are invariably ordinary, slightly naive people caught up in momentous events beyond their control. The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, written for children but appealing equally to adults, topped the New York Times bestseller list and sold over five million copies, becoming a major film and attaining iconic status by showing the Holocaust - hitherto virtually a taboo subject in fiction - through the innocent eyes of a nine-year-old boy who befriends a Jewish boy incarcerated in a Nazi death camp run by his father. His nine novels over the past decade have been translated into 53 different languages. In surprising himself, he keeps surprising readers.
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