i am pilgrim book review guardian

Thrillers – review roundup

As a screenwriter, Terry Hayes gave us Mad Max 2 and Dead Calm . His debut novel has been hyped as "the only thriller you need to read this year", and for once that isn't nonsense. I Am Pilgrim (Bantam, £12.99) makes moussaka of its rivals, not because it does anything so radical as reboot the genre – a claim that's been made for it – but because it features a solid, credible hero (a US intelligence agent codenamed Pilgrim) moving through a solid, credible world; a worthy adversary in the Saracen, a jihadist doctor radicalised by watching his father's beheading; and a dazzling structure that fuses the micro plot (what looks like the perfect murder has been committed in a run-down Manhattan apartment) with the macro plot (the Saracen has created a version of smallpox with which he hopes to destroy America) into a Möbius-like loop of pure narrative pleasure.

Hayes gives Pilgrim a superhero's background – after his mother's murder he was adopted by a well-meaning billionaire – and as an agent he is at the top of the pile, answerable only to the president. Yet where most spies are sociopathic, Pilgrim is capable of both loyalty and an intense cross-cultural empathy, which gives him the edge over his colleagues.

A progressive hero, then, but one adrift in a novel whose engine is an invidious post-9/11 paranoia. Pilgrim acknowledges in an offhand way that the US does shady stuff it shouldn't, but in the broader context of a plausible novel about a terrorist spectacular, the message that the NSA should have carte blanche to intercept and imprison is beamed out loud and clear.

Bored with vampires? Stephen Lloyd Jones's chilling The String Diaries (Headline, £14.99) invents a whole new eastern European folk mythos: a subset of the Hungarian nobility called hosszu eletek (it translates as "longevity") who have the ability to "supplant", taking over people's bodies and characteristics. Those who suspect they may have hosszu eletek in their midst must constantly "verify" their loved ones to make sure they are the genuine article. They aren't generally dangerous in themselves, but one of their number, Jakab, is a bad seed who will wreak deadly mayhem on successive generations of one family.

For the most part The String Diaries is a neo-gothic treat; original, richly imagined and powerfully told, especially the historical Hungarian sequences. It's so nearly brilliant, in fact, that its shortcomings – wobbly characterisation and odd lurches in tone – are all the more frustrating. An early Oxford-set chapter featuring a library meet-cute between an obsessive-compulsive professor and a woman who insists on sitting at "his" desk is pure Richard Curtis.

Oxford crops up again in Christopher J Yates's Black Chalk (Harvill Secker, £12.99). Some students at the fictional Pitt College in the early 1990s devise a game of dares and forfeits that goes so badly wrong that its chief inventor, narrator Jolyon, drifts even further off the rails than he is already. Clearly, we're in Secret History territory – again. There's a lot of stoned riffing, but on the whole Yates' take on the Oxford experience (he was a student there himself) is more astringent than nostalgic. Jolyon's account of his present-day life in Manhattan – hermetic and dominated by baroque OCD rituals – is compelling, though elsewhere the writing can be strained and sophomoric.

Koethi Zan's The Never List (Harvill Secker, £9.99) seems destined for "If you liked Gone Girl ..." status on Amazon. It's about a group of women who were imprisoned in a cellar by a psychopathic academic called Jack. Narrator Caroline survived; her best friend, Jennifer, did not, but Jack was never charged with her murder – which explains why, after only 10 years, he is due for parole. The opposite of torture porn, The Never List is a thoughtful, profoundly unnerving psychological thriller whose real focus is the prickly relationship between Caroline and another survivor, Tracy, as they try to prove Jack's guilt using the taunting letters he sent them from jail.

First published in 2001, Lisa Appignanesi's atmospheric Paris Requiem (Arcadia, £11.99) gets a deserved reissue. An American lawyer arrives in a fin-de-siècle Paris bitterly divided over the Dreyfus affair to fetch home his invalid sister Ellie and journalist brother Raf, only to find that Raf's Jewish friend Olympe has been killed and dumped in the Seine. There's a sense of all Appignanesi's vast interests as a non-fiction writer – women, prostitution, hysteria, antisemitism – being brought simultaneously into play; but that's no bad thing. Paris Requiem teems with telling details and mordant insights. It's exciting, too.

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Terry Hayes on The Year of the Locust

Article | Issue: Nov 2023

Finally the long awaited follow-up to global bestseller I am Pilgrim is here. Good Reading chatted with TERRY HAYES about the second book, The Year of the Locust and to find out what makes a compelling villain.

About the book.

But some places don’t play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane’s experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place. A place where violence is the only way to survive.

Kane travels there to exfiltrate a man with vital information for the safety of the West. But instead he meets an adversary who will take the world to the brink of extinction. A frightening, clever, vicious man with blood on his hands and vengeance in his heart …

Q&A WITH TERRY HAYES

Your debut novel I Am Pilgrim was published in 2013. When did your urge to write fiction begin and what prompted the inspiration of your first book?

I wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember! I was a migrant kid and I was quite lonely and confused about arriving as a five year old in a strange and very different country. My dad was an avid reader and, influenced by him, I soon started reading everything I could find. It seemed natural because I was spending all my time reading other people’s stories, that I would start to create and write my own. My poor parents having to listen and read that stuff! I had always loved spy stories – the really good ones, at least. It seemed to me that the landscape of adventure was really interesting. Exotic places, dangerous situations, huge stakes. It also provided the opportunity for a lot of morally complex decisions. Having the opportunity to create a hero with whom the audience could identify also seemed a huge advantage. So – considering all of those things – I naturally gravitated to creating a story in that vein.

How did the process of writing The Year of the Locust compare to that of your debut?

It was little different – unfortunately! They are both long, sort of epic stories that required an enormous amount of research and very complex plotting. It is very time consuming – and, at times, extremely frustrating. With both of them I got to the point of continually asking myself: Why did I ever start this?! Of course by then I was so deep in the tunnel I had no choice but to keep going and hope that I would sooner or later see some light. That, in both cases I did, still seems like a miracle to me.

The Year of the Locust has been described as a follow up to your first novel – what can you tell us about it?

The Year of the Locust is the story of what is known in the secret world as a ‘Denied Access Area’ spy. They are men and women who specialise in crossing borders into the most dangerous and forbidden parts of the world. Places like Iran and North Korea, Russia and parts of China. Our spy is swept into an epic mission that means he is the only person able to save the world from wholesale destruction. His code name is Kane, he hunts a mysterious man whose back is dominated by a tattoo of a black locust, and he is pushed beyond the limits of what he believes he can endure or survive. A lot of terrible situations, strange and dangerous places and – hopefully – nail-biting escapes in other words.

What kind of research did you undertake to capture covert operations and agents?

The research is enormous, of course, because I never grew up in that world so I had to learn about it all. I have done that for many years and – luckily – I started my career as a journalist and I did quite a few stories on the intelligence world so I had a bit of a head start. It also taught me how to research and then the internet transformed everything. It is always amazing to me how much information is available if you are patient, follow the leads and are willing to keep diving deeper.

Can you tell us about some of the challenges Kane will face in this story?

Staying alive far, far behind enemy lines – alone and being hunted – is probably the greatest challenge. He only has his training, his courage and his ingenuity to keep him alive. He almost dies of thirst but finds a way to find water, he is captured, he escapes, he almost drowns, he is shot, he ends up in a cage! The poor guy! It is pretty relentless and he is in some form of jeopardy for most if the story. No wonder I am exhausted.

What makes a compelling villain?

Intelligence mostly. If the villain is really dumb, it doesn’t take much for the hero to outwit and defeat him. It is one of the problems with many Hollywood movies. The hero can only ever be as good as the villain. In Locust, Kane had to really rise to the occasion to deal with a villain who had long been thought to be dead but comes back to life. So he has a lot of history and a frightening plan.

What was the most enjoyable part of writing The Year of the Locust ?

Writing ‘The End’! I never thought I would see the day so it was a very special moment. I think anyone who writes a novel ends up going on a journey and they often don’t know quite how long it will take or where it will lead them. Everyone who finishes it has that same feeling of relief and achievement. Of course it is quickly swamped by anxiety and fear that people will dislike or disparage it but for a few wonderful days you can enjoy the fact that it is finished and you created something unique.

Fans of your first novel are still calling for it to be made into a film or TV series. Is that something that is still in the works? Any thoughts on actors to assume your characters?

Yes, I get asked that by people a lot. I am certain Pilgrim will be made. It has taken a long time but that is often the way in Hollywood- all the stars have to align. Just two weeks ago I spent several hours on a Zoom call with a very well-known movie star and he is extraordinarily keen to play the lead role. I think he would be great! I am sworn to secrecy so all I can say is – watch this space!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

He resigned to produce a prominent current affairs radio program and a short time later, with George Miller, wrote the screenplay for Road Warrior/Mad Max 2. He also co-produced and wrote Dead Calm , Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and TV movies and mini-series – including Bodyline and Bangkok Hilton .

After moving to Los Angeles he worked as a screen-writer on major studio productions. His credits include Payback with Mel Gibson, From Hell , starring Johnny Depp, and Vertical Limit with Chris O’Donnell. He has also done un-credited writing on a host of other movies including Reign of Fire, Cliffhanger and Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster.

The Year of the Locust is Terry Hayes’ second novel. His first, I Am Pilgrim was an international bestseller. He and his American wife – Kristen – have four children and live in Switzerland.

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Author: Terry Hayes

Category: Thriller / suspense

Book Format: Paperback / softback

Publisher: Bantam

ISBN: 9780593064979

RRP: $32.99

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Review: ‘Year of the Locust’ is a bonkers gem from the writer of blockbuster ‘I Am Pilgrim’

The title “The Year of the Locust” suggests a novel of biblical proportions. And it is.

Terry Hayes’ novel is an epic espionage thriller filled with wrath and retribution, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice, love and loss, all in the name of an almighty being. It’s a mind-bending story of one man’s evolution from spy to savior when the world descends into “utter darkness.”

We’re living “among the ruins of the Twin Towers” in an “Age of Panic,” says main character Ridley Kane (an ironic allusion to the Bible’s first killer). Kane is a “Denied Access Area” spy, one who is tasked with missions where angels fear to tread. As a young man, Kane was forced into a career with the CIA when he washed out of the Navy. He’s a “solo voyager,” who says his covert life is like “traveling through a sea of candles,” always trying to focus on the light. Kane may be the greatest spymaster of his generation because he trusts his prophetic visions and intuition as much as his training.

Hayes has constructed the plot as a quest narrative, taking Kane to the ends of the earth and back to save humanity from a person who has earned his place in the “pantheon of terrorism.” The story is told from Kane’s point of view after his quest has ended, presenting his journey to readers from assembled narratives because “paper can’t be hacked.”

In the novel, Hayes takes us on a deep dive into the workings of the CIA and the National Security Agency when Kane prepares for each stage of his journey. The settings are immersive and the historical details remarkable. From Afghanistan to Pakistan, from D.C. to Russia’s deep state and so many places in between, each landscape where Kane journeys is described in rich geographic detail with compelling backstories that contextualize each region’s cultures and values.

Understanding the nuance of places and their cultural contexts makes Kane’s quest more complicated, his choices more fraught. These elements, along with a huge cast of minor characters, including Kane’s wife, Rebecca (also a biblical name), give the novel a stunning, muscular style.

At close to 800 pages, this is a really big book with really big themes and chapter after chapter of blockbuster action (and graphic violence), often ending in foreshadowing that cranks up the suspense. The first three-fourths of “Year” definitely is the book many readers of Hayes’ first novel, “I Am Pilgrim” (another allusion to sacred texts), have waited 10 years to read. When the final part of the novel shifts into sci-fi territory, the sudden syncopation in the plot lines may throw some readers off. It’s bonkers and breathtaking.

I loved it.

It’s “not where you start that counts … or even where you finish,” notes Kane, contemplating his past and the world’s future. “It’s the length of the journey that matters.” And the future we get is “decided by what we do now – moment by moment, step by step, life by life.” Amen to that.

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A Superspy Races to Halt Armaggedon

By Janet Maslin

• June 16, 2014
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Neither its plot nor its provenance do much to recommend Terry Hayes’s “I Am Pilgrim.” So it’s all the more surprising that this first novel by a screenwriter of films not renowned for their dialogue turns out to be the most exciting desert island read of the season.

Yes, the 600 or so action-packed pages are headed toward a showdown between a brave and ultra-brilliant American secret agent and an equally fearless jihadi terrorist. But neither is written as a stereotype; the two don’t meet until the end of the story; and this book has the whole globe to trot around before that. There are more than enough subplots and flashbacks to keep readers riveted. The American agent’s wild array of past exploits could fill a book of their own.

Despite Mr. Hayes’s long history as a movie guy (his credits include “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” ), “I Am Pilgrim” is not a film treatment bloated into book form. It’s a big, breathless tale of nonstop suspense, and it has something rarely found in big-budget movies of the same genre: the voice of a single writer instead of the patchwork nonsense created by endless collaborators and fixers. Mr. Hayes delivers his share of far-fetched moments, and no doubt he’d like to see “I Am Pilgrim” filmed some day. But he’s his own worst enemy in that regard. His novel will be hard for any movie version to beat.

The screenwriter in Mr. Hayes mandates that “I Am Pilgrim” begin with a big, lurid crime scene. So our narrator, who goes by many fake names, is summoned to a hotel room in Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Sept. 11. There, in the midst of the chaos, is a once-hot-looking woman who has been killed in a way that erases all signs of her identity. It’s almost as if the killer had followed guidelines described in the secret but worshipfully regarded forensics manual our guy wrote, under the fake name Jude Garrett, for a secret subsidiary of the C.I.A.

With lightning speed, and with logic best not examined too closely, Mr. Hayes greatly widens his book’s canvas after this New York scene. We find out about how, our main man, now 32, spent his early years on an estate in Greenwich, Conn.; was faking his identity, even as a boy; and has earned his reputation as a lethal spy but fears that he must give up a “a thing most people call love, I suppose.” As he puts it, “I wanted to walk along a beach with someone and not think about how far a sniper can fire.” Maybe that’s possible in a sequel, but he won’t be taking any slow, romantic strolls this time.

Cut to Saudi Arabia, where the mind of a teenage terrorist is being formed. Allowing for the fact that few mainstream Western writers have much insight into such characters, Mr. Hayes does what he can to breathe life into the ideas of hatred and vengeance as life-altering motivations. (He has also written screenplays for Mel Gibson.) So this boy, who will come to be known as the Saracen, has his fate determined by his father’s. “Only in a police state does a child pray for nothing more serious than a crippling accident to have befallen their parent,” Mr. Hayes writes. Grammarians who howl at popular fiction like Dan Brown’s books can find a lot to work with here, too.

After Mr. Hayes writes, more movingly than gruesomely, of how the boy is affected by his father’s public beheading (his crime: disparaging the royal family), he raises the rage level: The family’s widowed mother must now get a job, which somehow entails exposing her face and wearing Gucci sunglasses. That’s it: The son goes into exile, determined to learn how to wage war against America. A couple of decades later, having roamed from Bahrain to Afghanistan to Germany, he is ready and able.

The Saracen becomes a doctor and, after experimenting shockingly on human guinea pigs, perfects a new, improved strain of plague that is vaccine-proof. On a parallel track, our guy — who will ultimately be known as Pilgrim (no clue as to whether this is meant to evoke John Wayne ) — is recruited at the highest level (enter the president of the United States) to ward off a terrible but mysterious threat to the nation, a threat that turns the last part of the book into a race against the clock.

Mr. Hayes aligns his characters very ingeniously for this final part of the story, to the point where even that initial New York murder has something to do with it, and all the loose ends begin to come together. By this point, the Saracen and Pilgrim are a couple so clearly made for each other that the reader can hardly wait for them to meet. The setting, like all this book’s settings, is too picturesque for words. Mr. Hayes seems to have done backbreaking travel to some of the world’s most beautiful places in the name of research for his peripatetic story.

This author excels at a foreshadowing that is nothing if not galvanizing: “I headed back down the crumbling passage, deeper into the gloom. There was one thing, however, that I had overlooked, and for the rest of my life I would wonder about the mistake I made.” But at its all-important finale, “I Am Pilgrim” suffers a fit of Hollywooditis, and abandons some of the toughness it has worked so hard to develop. This book doesn’t exactly end; it just stops, and Mr. Hayes does whatever he must to make that happen. At the price of credibility, he paves the way for a sequel. It’s not a fair trade.

I AM PILGRIM

By Terry Hayes

612 pages. Emily Bestler Books/Atria. $26.99.

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‘I always wanted to be J.R.R. Tolkien of the spy genre’: 21 Questions with Terry Hayes

The author of I Am Pilgrim shares his thoughts on finding inspiration, the books that shaped his youth, and what to expect from The Year of the Locust , his long-awaited second novel.

Terry Hayes took the world by storm in 2013 when he released I Am Pilgrim . The journalist and screenwriter’s spy thriller won widespread acclaim thanks to its compelling, twisty plot that follows a former US intelligence agent – the eponymous “Pilgrim” – in a globe-spanning race against time to uncover a deadly terrorist plot.

Now, he’s back with his long-awaited second book. The Year of the Locust is not a sequel to I Am Pilgrim (he has, however, hinted at a future “ Pilgrim 2” ), but it has many of the elements that made his first novel an international bestselling sensation.

“It’s big, it’s epic, it challenges you, it’s cinematic in its descriptions,” says Hayes from across the table during a flying visit to the Penguin office. But he was also keen to push the bounds of what you would expect from a typical spy novel, creating a new kind of main character and incorporating genre-bending aspects like time distortion and cutting-edge military science.

“It’s a bit of a cross between John le Carré and H.G. Wells – not that I have the talent of either of them,” he says. Self-deprecating caveat aside, it’s safe to say that there are plenty of readers who have waited years to get their hands on The Year of the Locust, which was initially slated to come out in 2017. It begs the question (posed tactfully as possible): what took him so long?

“I thought I had the story when I started. I wasn't even close,” says Hayes, adding that he wrote a million words for what ended up being a 250,000-word novel. “I thought, ‘This is a good start, and now I know where it's going to roll.' I was wrong. I really was... But it is a magical moment when you throw everything out.”

He could have just published the novel's first iteration and moved onto the next, but Hayes would rather be painstaking than prolific. “I always wanted to be J.R.R. Tolkien of the spy genre. I'm not that much interested in how long it takes or how anguishing it all is; I just want it to be good.”

Tolkien is one of many literary influences to crop up repeatedly in our conversation, which was inflected with humour, a warmth and ease of self-awareness, and anecdotes about everything from being a golf caddy to his most embarrassing celebrity encounter.  

Which writer do you most admire and why?

It'd have to be J.R.R. Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings is an incredible epic story, fabulously well told, with depth of imagination, and hit the cultural sweet spot. Probably not highly regarded amongst the literati, but for absolute entertainment, and engagement and grabbing you and carrying you through, The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit ? Fantastic.

What was the first book you remember loving as a child?

That's a very, very difficult question. I really can't remember. I suspect that it was by Hammond Dennis. Hammond Dennis is not read much anymore, but he wrote great adventure thriller stories for this young boy.

I read a lot, an enormous amount, as a child. When I was about 10 or 11, my father had to go up to our local library and sign some sort of release form where I was allowed to borrow books from the adult section. I'd always tended more towards older-skewing books – I guess I was very keen to grow up – so it's very hard to answer, but that is an author I remember. And then, of course, C.S. Forester , the Hornblower series , was something that captured any young boy's imagination.

What was your favourite book when you were a teenager?

I guess it was The Catcher in the Rye . Any teenager would relate to that sense of alienation and confusion. It’s a brilliantly written book, with mastery of prose and character.

And The Great Gatsby . I just love the end – "So we beat on, boats against the current" – it's just fantastic. They were really my favourite teenage books. And then, of course, I started to read Hermann Hesse and become very, very serious and anguished. [Those books] were nowhere near as much fun.

Tell us about a book that changed your life’s path

Anna Karenina , Tolstoy . We have very long Christmas holidays in Australia because it's summer, so you get like seven weeks off school. I would always set myself a task: I'd read every book written by a certain author. I'd done Hemingway, I'd done D.H. Lawrence, I'd done Hermann Hesse as I got older and into even more and more serious literature.

Then I read Anna Karenina , and I realised something very important to me: that you could write really great literature and give it all of the pace and the engagement of thrillers. Here was a book that is a giant of literature and has all of those other (what we might think of as) "commercial" elements. He managed to find a place where commerce meets art, where popularity meets profundity.

That was when I thought there really is a way to pursue a career as a writer and try to bridge a number of worlds. Now, I'm not saying for a minute that I've done that, but that occurred to me as a good idea.

What’s the strangest job you’ve had outside being an author?

Golf caddy, without a doubt. I come from not poverty-stricken, but certainly not affluent circumstances. When we went to Australia, my brother and I became totally obsessed about surfing. I wanted my own surfboard, but my parents couldn't afford it. You could go and earn 10 shillings by walking four or five miles around a golf course with somebody's golf bags. I used to do two rounds every Saturday to earn £1, which went towards the surfboard fund.

A lot of these were really pretty affluent people, but there were three guys who all of us young caddies called the Three Stooges. They didn't have trolleys; you actually had to carry their clubs. And when you're, say, 10, walking that distance, those clubs are really heavy. That's the worst job I have ever had, ever . Whenever the Three Stooges turned up looking for a caddy, we would run. Writing books has become a very easy enterprise, compared to caddying.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given?

That's a difficult question. There was a book published quite a number of years ago called One [Wild] Bird at a Time . The story is that this kid, who went on to become a writer, had an assignment for school that he had to identify and write about the 200 most common birds in America. So, being a sensible child, he didn't do anything about it until the night before it was due in. Panic hit, so he finally went to his father, who said, "Well, we've got a problem, now we're going to have to solve it. We're going to do one bird at a time."

The author of the book said that was a very important thing about writing. You've got to sit down and do one bird at a time, put one sentence down after the next. It always looks – especially if you write long books, like I do – totally overwhelming and intimidating, and you think, "I can never climb this wall." But one bird at a time? Maybe you can.

The worst piece of advice I've ever received is “write what you know.” What an absolute piece of nonsense! If I wrote what I knew, it would be a million words of unmitigated boredom. No, write what you can fully imagine.

Tell us about a book you’ve reread many times (and why)

When I start to write, I start to pick up two sorts of books: one is great books, books I really love. Lonesome Dove , I could reread that because I think Larry McMurtry really captured the changes in the Old West. He was from Texas and he really knew that stuff, and he brought to it a great depth of knowledge, wonderful characters. It was epic, it was long. James Clavell’s Shogun is a really great book. He was a screenwriter and producer – he’s probably far more talented than I am, but there is a similarity there.

I’ve read those books many times, and Lord of the Rings, of course. And then I read what I think of as really bad books – really terrible – to give myself confidence, to say, “Look, I might be terrible, but I’m not the worst, there are people who are worse than me, so keep going. Don’t give up.”

What’s the one book you feel guiltiest for not reading?

50 Shades of Grey . Commercially, it did fantastic business, and I should have read it. But I knew what it would be like. I knew it would be like sex in the movies. It doesn't matter how erotic they make it in the movie, you know they're going to cut away. You know they're not going to really get down to business because they're not going to get an X-rating. No studio in the world is going to spend that sort of money to have it shown in grindhouses.

So, 50 Shades of Grey , to me – though I haven't read it – was a book of middle-class fantasies. A lot of middle-class fantasies, mine included, are pretty mundane and not that interesting. But I should have read it because commercially, it was huge.

If I didn’t become an author, I would be ______

An Architect. It's very similar: you're pulling out of your imagination with grand design, you [just] happen to write it down in words.

There are movies that you watch, and there are movies that you're in; you're inside of them. And old drama doesn't happen on the screen, or on the page. It happens in the reader's – or the viewer's – head. That's where it's really taking place: in their head. Architecture is not that dissimilar. Good architecture, where you're firing off all of these thoughts and emotions, is stimulating people without them necessarily being completely aware of it.

When I walk into a really cool building, I take my hat off. I think, “Oh yeah, you know what you're doing. You could have been a writer, you could have been a painter, you could have been many things because you understand how it comes together.” But I couldn't draw, and I didn't have any computer programs when I was a kid. So that was that.

What makes you happiest?

Nothing. When I first met my wife and went out on a date, she was saying something about being happy. I said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy.” She looked at me askance, like, “Well, some lunatic's just arrived.”

Anyway, she ended up marrying me, so I guess it wasn't a dealbreaker, but I don't look at the world like that. Are there things that I feel great satisfaction in? Yeah, the kids, of course. We have four children and I think we've done a really, really good job with them. Of course, they don't think so. We're the worst parents in the world, but then I thought that about my parents; everybody does. I get a great deal of joy out of that. It makes me happy to do things with them.

What’s your most surprising passion or hobby?

There isn’t one, quite genuinely – apart from watching cricket or doing stuff with the family, which is very normal. I’m not a gardener, I don’t raise budgerigars or go fishing. I sit in front of the computer and I either put words down or I read – not fiction, but newspapers, magazines, the media.

If I wrote what I knew, it would be a million words of unmitigated boredom. Write what you can fully imagine.

What is your ideal writing scenario?

Oh, I've written everywhere. [Australian filmmaker] George Miller and I were once flying out to Broken Hill to start working on Mad Max 2 - Road Warrior and we were sitting in the departure lounge at Sydney Airport trying to think up scenes.

Of course, having been a journalist, I've written in hotel rooms, I've written on the side of roads, I've written in cafés, done all of that. You just need a quiet space without many distractions. No window with a view, just a desk and some decent computers. That's it.

What was your strangest or most embarrassing author encounter?

I was living in Los Angeles with an Australian woman called Marion. Her sister Jocelyn came to visit us, and of course coming to Los Angeles [she wanted] to see celebrities and all those things that people typically do.

I know a lot of people in the business, but I don't go around putting them on a show or anything like that. Anyway, it just so happened we were on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. I see this guy and a woman who's probably five to eight years younger than him – very, very attractive. And I thought, God, I know him, I know this person and they're coming straight towards me.

So I, being polite, nod to him and he nods. We stop, and we start having a conversation. We're making small talk, we chitchat. Then finally we say, “Catch you later” and walk on. I said to Jocelyn, “I'm so sorry, I would have introduced you, but I could not place who it was.”

Jocelyn just looks at me and says, “Terry, it was Ringo Starr. Have you ever met Ringo Starr?” I said, “No, never in my life. But I knew I recognised him. I knew that he was somebody famous.” And of course, the woman with him was Barbara Bach, who had been in a number of movies, so I got that bit right. 

That was the most embarrassing encounter, but also the most famous person I've ever met. I'm sure to this day he's walking around saying to Barbara Bach, “I wonder who that guy was?” 

If you could have any writer, living or dead, over for dinner, who would it be, and what would you serve them?

Harper Lee . I’d have one question for her: Were you scared? Did the success just ruin it for you? I'd like to know the answer to that, I've often thought about it.

What would I cook for her? Nothing; I’m the world's worst cook, but we'd order out. We're there for the company, and pizza's fine.

What’s your biggest fear?

Going blind. I lost a lot of the vision in my left eye when I woke up one morning and a blood clot had hit the optic nerve, which was pretty shocking. If I lose the sight in the other, I'm going to have to start dictating, and I don't know how I'd go about that.

What can I do about it? Nothing, so best not to be too frightened. It could have been worse, I mean, I could be dead, or it could have hit my brain. Some people would say that it did!

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Have my kids listen to me. Every parent in the world wants that superpower. My eldest son when he was 10, 12, always said, “Don't ever ask Dad what the weather is like because he'll start with the Big Bang Theory and then we move forward from there.” I say I’m just trying to explain things, I think it’s interesting! So, that would be the superpower to end all superpowers.

What’s the best book you’ve read in the past 12 months?

I can't say that I read anything in the last 12 months where I think, “Oh wow, I wish I'd written that.” But I have to say I haven't had much time to read anything at all, because I've been finishing Locust . I’ve been sent books to comment on, to give endorsements to, but mostly they’re not my type of book. I have specific tastes, which happens as you get older.

Reading in the bath: yes or no?

Well, I can’t believe that people have baths. Who’d want to lie around in tepid dirty water? In Australia, I don’t know anyone who has baths. We have showers, so that to me is totally alien.

If I were to do it, no I would not read in the bath. I’d be trying to keep the bath water temperature correct.

Which do you prefer: coffee or tea?

Neither. Well, I like coffee, but I’m pretty wired as it is. And I like tea – my parents are English and every morning there’d be a discussion about the correct temperature of the water, and whether you put the spoon in and whether to take the kettle off the boil, all of this stuff... Psychologically, it damaged me, I’m sure of it.

What is the best book you’ve ever read?

Anna Karenina .

What inspired you to write your new book?

I was walking down the road, stopped at the traffic light, waiting for the ‘walk’ signal, and I just thought, “Wouldn’t it be a neat idea if you’re a 35-year-old, and you ended up in a trench fighting beside your son or your daughter, who are in their late 20s?”

I thought, “Wow, that’s potentially extremely traumatic, because he’s starting to realise that it’s his son and daughter, but at some point they’re going to be overwhelmed or killed. He’s got to try to save them, but they don't know that it's their father because that's a physical impossibility” – unless, of course, it's in a novel or a movie.

So I started to think about that because I like thinking about narrative problems. How would you solve this? How would you do that? How did such-and-such an author? What corner were they in and tried to get out of?

There is a distortion of time [in the novel] which goes back to the original seed [of this idea]. It's very hard to say what engages you – it can be the most minor thing. The trick is to take the reader on that journey with you, to be very bold, to be adventurous, to try to do things narratively which are not common to the genre, and carry them along with you.

The Year of the Locust is out 9th November.

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An Electrifying Novel That Will Keep You Up Reading All Night

I read I AM PILGRIM in 2014, and again in 2019. I missed the escapism, and the sigh of relief the book had me feeling—jet-setting from exotic locales while devouring the legends of two amazing protagonists.

In Terry Hayes’s bestselling novel, a murder takes place in a grungy Lower East Side hotel, post-9/11. It’s a pretty gruesome murder that makes identifying a young, mutilated woman on a mattress impossible. The NYPD is called to the scene, where the lead officer, Ben Bradley (the heart of the story, in my opinion), notices the killer’s technique is taken from a forensic pathology book he had previously been obsessed with, written by a CIA ghost named “Jude Garrett.”

From here, we meet our narrator, “Pilgrim,” who grew up in Greenwich, CT, with adoptive parents. All throughout his life he used different aliases. We find out his lonely, but privileged childhood helped shape him into the best agent the CIA had ever seen, beginning his “Rider of the Blue” legacy with killing an agency mole in Russia. But the aftermath of September 11th is too much for him to handle. So he goes off the grid in Paris and writes his book under Jude Garrett only for it to backfire, when Ben and his wife, the lovely Marcie, tracked him down.

In the second narrative, a young boy, “the Saracen,” morphs into a jihadist bioterrorist. After seeing his father get beheaded in the public square for making lewd comments about the Saudi monarch, the boy’s ideology on life changes. The family moves to Bahrain, where he sees his once ultraconservative mother wearing chic sunglasses and exposing skin in public with men who aren’t relatives. The boy, disgusted, eventually leaves for Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban.

Still angry, but perhaps more calculated, the Saracen eventually becomes a doctor. He builds a genetically modified version of the smallpox vaccine and tests it on three kidnapped subjects. Bad news for the rest of the world: it works.

Pilgrim comes out of retirement to help with a lead from a former colleague, causing him to go to Turkey. It’s there he investigates a separate murder of a Greek billionaire, which is actually a cover, to the closely guarded Saracen threat. Needing his help, Pilgrim calls Ben Bradley, and a cat-and-mouse game ensues with bullets, boats, and kidnapped children.

It could have been easy for Hayes to drown the plot with suicide bombings and tradecraft jargon. But he doesn’t. On the one hand, the dual-narrative helps drive the classic spy-thriller model, but on the other, Hayes makes you feel like you’re listening to him tell a fireside story. You’re reeled in by little intricate parts of the story—whether that be the rolling hills of the Turquoise Coast, or how an ancient instrument sounded. By the time you reach the misty-eyed ending, you won’t even be upset that Hayes ruined your sleep cycle.

Read David Brown’s review here.

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