the hc book club, page-58

Returned from the library, call me old fashioned, but I still like a 'real book' with two from this thread plus one on order.

I've got the Book Thief to start, and couldn't get Robert Harris's latest one Chuck, but have "The Ghost" as it's the only one they had that wasn't one of the cicero trilogy.

I believe the latest one that you may have meant is an officer and a spy, as it's his latest?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Harris_(novelist)#Fiction

The Fear Index 2011
His novel, The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators.

An Officer and a Spy 2013
Harris's latest novel is the true story of French officer Georges Picquart, who is promoted in 1896 to run France's Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realizes that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth.

The spiel for The Ghost is:
The Ghost 2007 (I don't know if I"ll get into this)

Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of British Prime Minister Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm.[1] "We had our ups and downs, but we didn't really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me," Harris has said.[2]

In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost. The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances.

The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair.[3] The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. Harris told The Guardian before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."[4]

Harris said in a US National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.

Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel's title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place. Blair, he said, had himself been ghostwriter, in effect, to President Bush when giving public reasons for invading Iraq: he had argued the case better than had the President himself.[5]

The New York Observer, headlining its otherwise hostile review The Blair Snitch Project, commented that the book's "shock-horror revelation" was "so shocking it simply can't be true, though if it were it would certainly explain pretty much everything about the recent history of Great Britain." [1]


Have ordered Shantaram too, so that's going to do me through to the end of the year I expect, being time poor.

I'll order the more recent Robert Harris ones too.