Saturday, May 31, 2014

The Straits Times

SCIENCE FICTION

The Forever Watch

By Ong Sor Fern

By David Ramirez

Hodder & Stoughton/Trade paperback/$30.79 without GST/Major bookshops/***1/2

The idea of a spaceship, holding the last of mankind, sailing through space to a new Earth, is not a new idea. The most recent popular incarnation of the idea was Beth Revis' young adult trilogy Across The Universe.

David Ramirez's book is for adults, which means a dash more sex (discreet by contemporary standards) and a generous helping of violence (again, not as lurid as some other offerings).

Hana Dempsey is a mid-level bureaucrat in the City Planning department of the spaceship Noah, which is on a centuries-long journey to a new Eden with the last remnants of humankind. In a fairly stratified society, people are defined by their psychic abilities, enhanced by implants and the mysterious inner workings of the ship. Hana, against unspoken biases, develops a tentative relationship with street cop and "bruiser" Leon Barrens.

Newly transferred to the Long Term Investigations department, Barrens stumbles upon a mystery: multiple deaths in which the victims are left in barely recognisable pieces. Determined to investigate this "Mincemeat" phenomenon, Barrens asks Hana for help. As their unofficial investigation progresses, it turns up evidence of a dark conspiracy by the ruling class which threatens the survival of everyone on board.

Ramirez's writing is smooth and polished, his vision of the ship and its technologies nicely thought through and described in enough detail to paint a satisfying picture without getting mired in a mass of tech-talk. This is quite an accomplishment for a first-time author and molecular biologist. His background in science comes in useful later in the story as one particular plot point hinges on genetics.

While the characters are not as fully fleshed out as one might like, the main protagonists are likable enough to keep the reader sympathetic to their causes even if their motivations are sometimes a little underdeveloped. The world Ramirez creates is not particularly original - there are plenty of flashes of other classic sci-fi influences, ranging from Alfred Bester to Roger Zelazny. No shame in filching from the best as Ramirez weaves all these influences into something different enough to be pleasing despite the crazy quilt effect. Moreover, the plot twists are also sufficiently gripping that you will keep turning the pages in pursuit of the denouement.

In other words, this comes out just in time to catch the crest of summer readers. It is light enough to keep your brain from frying, possesses enough scientific and narrative ballast to keep it from feeling too insubstantial, but is pacey enough to be thoroughly entertaining.

If you like this, read: The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester (1997, Orion, $23.10, Books Kinokuniya), a modern sci-fi classic about a rich tycoon who attempts to plot murder in a society policed by telepaths, by an author who helped invent the genre.

Read, kids, read By Frank Bruni

The Straits Times

Read, kids, read

By Frank Bruni

If we spend our last hours or minutes of the night reading rather than watching television, we wake the next morning with thoughts less jumbled, moods less jangled. Reading has bequeathed what meditation promises. It has smoothed and focused us.

AS AN uncle, I'm inconsistent about too many things.

Birthdays, for example. My nephew Mark had one on Sunday, and I didn't remember - and send a text - until 10pm, by which point he was asleep.

School productions, too. I saw my niece Bella in Seussical: The Musical, but missed The Wiz. She played Toto, a feat of trans-species transmogrification that not even Meryl, with all of her accents, has pulled off.

But about books, I'm steady. Relentless. I'm incessantly asking my nephews and nieces what they're reading and why they're not reading more. I'm reliably hurling novels at them, and also at friends' kids. I may well be responsible for 10 per cent of all sales of The Fault In Our Stars, a teenage love story to be released as a movie next month. Never have I spent money with fewer regrets, because I believe in reading - not just in its power to transport but in its power to transform.

So I was crestfallen recently, when a new report by Common Sense Media came out. It showed that 30 years ago, only 8 per cent of 13-year-olds and 9 per cent of 17-year-olds said that they "hardly ever" or never read for pleasure. Today, 22 per cent of 13-year-olds and 27 per cent of 17-year-olds say that. Fewer than 20 per cent of 17-year-olds now read for pleasure "almost every day". Back in 1984, 31 per cent did. What a marked and depressing change.

I know, I know: This sounds like a fogey's crotchety lament. Or, worse, like self-interest. Professional writers arguing for vigorous reading are dinosaurs begging for a last breath. We're panhandlers with a better vocabulary.

But I'm coming at this differently, as someone convinced that reading does things - to the brain, heart and spirit - that movies, television, video games and the rest of it cannot.

There's research on this, and it's cited in a recent article in The Guardian by Dan Hurley, who wrote that after "three years interviewing psychologists and neuroscientists around the world", he'd concluded that "reading and intelligence have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic".

In terms of smarts and success, is reading causative or merely correlated? Which comes first, The Hardy Boys or the hardy mind? That's difficult to unravel, but several studies have suggested that people who read fiction, revelling in its analysis of character and motivation, are more adept at reading people, too: at sizing up the social whirl around them. They're more empathetic. God knows we need that.

Late last year, neuroscientists at Emory University reported enhanced neural activity in people who'd been given a regular course of daily reading, which seemed to jog the brain: to raise its game, if you will.

Some experts have doubts about that experiment's methodology, but I'm struck by how its findings track something my friends and I often discuss. If we spend our last hours or minutes of the night reading rather than watching television, we wake the next morning with thoughts less jumbled, moods less jangled. Reading has bequeathed what meditation promises. It has smoothed and focused us.

Maybe that's about the quiet of reading, the pace of it. At Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, whose students significantly outperform most peers statewide, the youngest kids all learn and play chess, in part because it hones "the ability to focus and concentrate", said Mr Sean O'Hanlon, who supervises the programme. Doesn't reading do the same?

Psychology professor Daniel Willingham at the University of Virginia framed it as a potentially crucial corrective to the rapid metabolism and sensory overload of digital technology. He told me that it can demonstrate to kids that there's payoff in "doing something taxing, in delayed gratification".

A new book of his, Raising Kids Who Read, will be published later this year.

Before talking with him, I arranged a conference call with authors David Levithan and Amanda Maciel. Both have written fiction in the young adult genre, whose current robustness is cause to rejoice, and they rightly noted that the intensity of the connection that a person feels to a favourite novel, with which he or she spends eight or 10 or 20 hours, is unlike any response to a movie.

That observation brought to mind a moment in The Fault In Our Stars when one of the protagonists says that sometimes, "you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book".

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I'm convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

NEW YORK TIMES

Read any good books lately? I have By David Brooks

The Straits Times

Read any good books lately? I have

Here is selection that touches on life's limitations, ambitions and inner spirit

By David Brooks

Covers of books that have had an impact on the writer's life: A Collection Of Essays by George Orwell (above), Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

PEOPLE are always asking me what my favourite books are. With summer almost here, I thought I might recommend eight that have been pivotal in my life.

A Collection Of Essays, by George Orwell - If you want to learn how to write, the best way to start is by imitating C.S. Lewis and George Orwell. These two Englishmen, born five years apart, never used a pompous word if a short and plain one would do. Orwell was a master of the welcoming first sentence. He wrote an essay called England Your England while sheltering from German bombs during World War II. Here is his opening: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

Here's how he opened an essay on his schoolboy days: "Soon after I arrived at Crossgates (not immediately, but after a week or two, just when I seemed to be settling into the routine of school life) I began wetting my bed."

There's a disarming rhythm to each of those sentences; reality is odd, and it takes a few shimmies to get it right. Orwell was famous for sticking close to reality, for facing unpleasant facts, for describing ideas not ideologically but as they actually played out in concrete circumstances. Imperialism wasn't an idea; it was a lone official haplessly shooting an elephant.

His other lesson for writers, even opinion writers, is that it's a mistake to think you are an activist, championing some movement. That's the path to mental stagnation. The job is just to try to understand what's going on.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - This is a novel about characters who are not quite in control of themselves. Kitty goes to the ball in a perfect dress. Even the strip of velvet around her neck fits just so. She is swept up in a sort of ecstasy of movement until a glance at the man she thinks is her beau crushes her in an instant.

Levin falls in love in a way he didn't plan. He experiences unexpected transcendence cutting grass, of all things. He cannot account for his own happiness, which is in excess of what he deserves, and still has to hide the noose at dark moments for fear he might use it.

Covers of books that have had an impact on the writer's life: A Collection Of Essays by George Orwell, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (above), All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Anna is a magnetic person propelled by a love that is ardent and unexpected but also headlong and unpredictable. She's ultimately unable to surmount the consequences of her actions or even live with the moral injuries she causes. Was Anna right to follow her heart? Should she have settled for a mediocre life in line with convention? This is a foxlike love story, with many angles, which does not lead to easy answers.

Rationalism In Politics by Michael Oakeshott - This essay dismantles a common form of contemporary hubris - the belief that it is possible to solve political problems as if they were engineering problems, with rational planning. Oakeshott distinguishes between technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of information that can be put in a recipe in a cookbook. Practical knowledge is the rest of what the master chef actually knows: the habits, skills, intuitions and traditions of the craft. Practical knowledge exists only in use; it can be imparted but not taught. Technocrats and ideologues possess abstract technical knowledge and think that is all there is. Their prefab plans come apart because they simplify reality, and don't understand how society works and the rest of what we know.

All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren - This is nominally a novel about Huey Long. But it is also a novel about irony, the way good can come from bad, and bad can come from good, the way people march into public life imagining they are white lambs only to be turned into guilty goats. The main characters are tainted and mottled, part admirable, part noxious. The book asks if in politics you have to sell your soul in order to have the power to serve the poor. It's written in an elegiac tone that I'm a sucker for. The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier are also written in this tone. The narrator of All the King's Men has to lose his innocence to understand the multiplicity and sadness of the truth.

Covers of books that have had an impact on the writer's life: A Collection Of Essays by George Orwell, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (above), and Middlemarch by George Eliot.

Most of today's books are about limitation - about being propelled by passions we can't control into a complex world we can't understand. Next, I'll find some books that are more self-assured. These come in two baskets, which we'll call Athens and Jerusalem. The Athens books fire external ambition; the Jerusalem books focus on the inner spirit.

We'll start the Athens basket with The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides. In Homer, we see characters who are driven by a competitive desire to be excellent at something, to display their prowess and win eternal fame. This ambition drives Homeric heroes to excellence, but it also makes them narcissistic, touchy and prone to cycles of anger and revenge.

Through the figure of Pericles, Thucydides shows us how to live a life of civilised ambition, in which individual achievement is fused with patriotic service. He also reminds us that in politics the lows are lower than the highs are high. That is, when politicians mess up, the size of the damage they cause is larger than the size of the benefit they create when they do well.

Some of my favourite biographies are about people who followed the Periclean mould and dedicated themselves to public service: Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton; Edmund Morris' series on Theodore Roosevelt; Winston Churchill's endearing My Early Life.

These books arouse energy and aspiration. They have the risk-embracing spirit found in W.H. Auden's famous poem, Leap Before You Look, which opens:

The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap."

And ends this way: "A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep

Sustains the bed on which we lie, my dear:

Although I love you, you will have to leap;

Our dream of safety has to disappear.

The books in the Jerusalem basket interrogate worldly ambition and encourage righteousness. Of all the authors I've read, the one with the most capacious mind is Augustine - for his understanding of human psychology, his sonorous emotions and his intellectual rigour. The Confessions is a religious book, but it can also be read as a memoir of an ambitious young man who came to realise how perverse life can be when it is dedicated to fulfilling the self's own desires.

"I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me," Augustine wrote. "I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love, and from the very depth of my need hated myself."

Gradually, he orders his love, putting the higher loves above lower ones, and surrendering to God's ultimate love. He also reconciles with his mother, Monica, the ultimate helicopter mum.

Towards the end of Monica's life, mother and son sit sweetly in a garden, their conversation rising to higher things. There is a long beautiful sentence, which is hard to parse, but which conveys the spirit of elevation. It repeats the word "hushed". The tumult of the flesh is hushed. The waters and the air are hushed, and "by not thinking on self surmount self". Even Augustine's voracious ambition is hushed in this surrender.

For Jewish takes on inner elevation, I'd recommend The Lonely Man Of Faith by Joseph Soloveitchik and Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl. For Christians, you can't go wrong with Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness, or Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy.

Scott Spencer's Endless Love is about youthful passion. It opens this way: "When I was 17 and in full obedience to my heart's most urgent commands, I stepped far from the pathway of normal life and in a moment's time ruined everything I loved..."

For mature love, we have to turn to George Eliot's Middlemarch. It is hard not to be awed by her characterisations. Some samples:

"She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was."

"We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves."

"His soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying."

I suppose at the end of this bookish piece, I should tell you what I think books can't do. They can't carve your convictions about the world. Only life can do that - only relationships, struggle, love, play and work. Books can give you vocabularies and frameworks to help you understand and decide, but life provides exactly the education you need.

NEW YORK TIMES

Cara Hoffman's Be Safe I Love You - Woman at war

The Straits Times

BOOK OF THE MONTH

Woman at war

Home is as bad as the frontline for a returning soldier in Cara Hoffman's Be Safe I Love You

By Akshita Nanda Arts Correspondent

BE SAFE I LOVE YOU

By Cara Hoffman

Virago/ Paperback/290 pages/$29.95/Major bookstores/****

A soldier discharged from the army finds it impossible to settle into civilian life. So far, so typical for stories about combat veterans and post-traumatic stress disorder, from Pat Barker's novel of British soldiers after World War I, Life Class (2007), to David Morrell's post- Vietnam War thriller First Blood (1972), which inspired the Rambo movies.

The first startling difference in American writer Cara Hoffman's novel is that the discharged soldier and potential powder-keg is a woman in her early 20s, whose potential for violence may be misjudged easily.

Second, protagonist Lauren Clay was already damaged by life before she fought in Iraq. When she enlisted, it was for money to pay the mortgage and feed her younger brother Danny. It was the last in a series of difficult decisions she made for almost half her life to protect him, as her mother left home and her father sank into depression.

Just as her brother's letters to her while she was in Iraq always ended with a plea to "be safe, I love you", Lauren's mission in life has been to keep him secure as well. But her small-town reunion with friends and family begins to take on a dangerous edge as her conflict-worn imagination conflates present reality with past hazards.

In Barker's Life Class, art students have to set aside their talent for the killing fields of World War I. Lauren in Be Safe I Love You is a gifted singer who had a full scholarship to a noted music school, but gave it up to go to war to provide for her family.

Seeing creative potential turn to destructive anger is part of the reason why Be Safe I Love You is not an easy read, but it is a powerful one.

Hoffman is a little too fond of her own style and over-writes unnecessarily at times. Interludes featuring an army doctor keen to put Lauren under psychiatric treatment hold the plot back, rather than create suspense. Sentences are sometimes clipped. Unnecessarily.

Still, the overall tale is haunting and full of satisfyingly grim inversions of gender stereotypes.

Lauren is dangerous, but even the reader might not understand how dangerous she truly is, even as she nearly breaks her boyfriend's nose during one early altercation.

After all, her home environment seems well-suited to her problems. Her town is next to a military outpost and houses several survivors of the Vietnam War. Counselling services are literally at her doorstep, in the persons of her father and his best friend.

Yet she ignores all helping hands, including from her former boyfriend Shane and the army psychiatrist.

She ignores any push towards the musical training and college education she deliberately set aside to shoulder her family's financial needs.

The horrible truth is that war breaks something that years of therapy and normalcy may not fix, as seen in Shane's shiftless uncles, who never recovered from the Vietnam War.

And these fictional characters with their helplessness and ability to destroy are representative of countless men and fewer women returning from battlefields every day.

Hoffman plays here a trick similar to that in her first novel, So Much Pretty (2011), in which the murder of a teenager also shone a spotlight on countless unremarked and unaddressed cases of domestic violence and abuse in a town.

Lauren's case is just one among so many others. The soldiers may be coming home, but the war goes on inside them. One can only wish for fewer battles and more peace talks in the world.

If you like this, read: The Lonely Soldier: The Private War Of Women Serving In Iraq by Helen Benedict (2010, Beacon Press, $18.40, Amazon.com). This non-fiction book collects real-life stories of female soldiers and the dangers they face in combat and among their comrades.

akshitan@sph.com.sg

The Forever Watch - SCIENCE FICTION

The Straits Times

SCIENCE FICTION

The Forever Watch

By Ong Sor Fern

By David Ramirez

Hodder & Stoughton/Trade paperback/$30.79 without GST/Major bookshops/***1/2

David Ramirez's book is for adults, which means a dash more sex (discreet by contemporary standards) and a generous helping of violence (again, not as lurid as some other offerings).

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Power to write bestsellers - David Baldacci

The Straits Times

Power to write bestsellers

David Baldacci, who is releasing three new titles this year, has churned out nearly 30 bestsellers

By Akshita Nanda Arts Correspondent

Suspense novel Absolute Power by David Baldacci (above) was made into a movie starring Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood, while King And Maxwell was turned into a television series starring Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn. -- PHOTO: ALEXANDER JAMES

Lawyer-turned-writer David Baldacci is known for his novels of suspense and is often mentioned in the same breath as John Grisham.

So when he wrote his first young adult novel, The Finisher, he submitted it last year to publishers under the pseudonym "Janus Pope", a nod to the two-faced Roman god of change and beginnings.

"It was also important to me to sell the book on its own merit," says the American writer on the telephone from London, where he is promoting his newest novels.

A statement like that would sound pompous coming from anyone else, but the fact is that Baldacci has had a home run with his thrillers.

He has written nearly 30 bestsellers since his 1996 debut novel, Absolute Power. It netted a US$2-million book deal plus the same again in film rights and was made into a movie starring Clint Eastwood.

The author has a jaw-dropping three books out this year, including The Finisher, acquired by Scholastic before it knew Janus Pope's identity (it has the author's real name on the cover).

Every one of his previous 27 novels headed bestseller lists in the United States and overseas, including Singapore, where local distributor Pansing Books sells 6,000 to 8,000 Baldacci titles a year.

There are 110 million copies of his books in print around the world and his works have been made into two movies - Absolute Power (1997) and last year's Wish You Well - plus a television series, King And Maxwell, about secret service agents turned private detectives. It premiered on American channel TNT last year and is currently airing on British channel Alibi.

Mention this and Baldacci immediately points out that any success began only after 15 years of non-stop rejections.

Suspense novel Absolute Power by David Baldacci was made into a movie starring Ed Harris and Clint Eastwood, while King And Maxwell was turned into a television series starring Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn (both above). -- PHOTO: UNIVERSAL CHANNEL

Before he sold Absolute Power, about a power-mad politician trying to cover up a murder, he failed to sell any of the short stories and screenplays he wrote while working as an attorney in Washington D.C.

"As I've told people, I was an overnight success, yeah, but it took five thousand nights," the 53-year-old says with a laugh.

Based in Virginia, he spends 10 to 15 hours a day writing and often publishes two novels a year. "If I'm not writing, I'm not happy," he says.

New titles this year include two featuring familiar characters from his previous novels, such as government assassin Will Robie (The Target, out last month) and military investigator John Puller (The Escape, due in November).

Suspense novel Absolute Power by David Baldacci was made into a movie starring Ed Harris (left) and Clint Eastwood (right), while King And Maxwell was turned into a television series starring Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn. -- PHOTO: UNIVERSAL CHANNEL -

Then there is The Finisher, the first in a new series backed by Scholastic, which also brought out the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

The Finisher features a teenage girl born in a village where nobody leaves for fear of monsters in the surrounding forest. The heroine, Vega Jane, does not back away from fights and is determined to find out the truth about her society.

There are obvious similarities to Katniss Everdeen of The Hunger Games, but when asked, the author laughs again.

"I had only two choices. If I'd made her - him - male, I'd have been compared to Harry Potter."

The Finisher took him five years to write and "was something of a challenge" but also a dream come true.

"I'm just a kid who never grew up, just remained very child-like. I wanted to create my own world. I was into fantasy as a child," the author says. He read everything from Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll to the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis and The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Baldacci was born and brought up in Richmond, Virginia. His mother and father worked for a telephone company and trucking firm respectively, and every weekend, he and his older brother and sister headed to the library.

He says: "I saw the world through books, but I had no idea I could be a writer full time."

He did his bachelor's degree in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University and got a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.

He had begun writing in secret, but for the next nine years, paid the bills while working as an attorney, often on contracts, mergers and acquisitions.

During this time, the only person who knew of his dream to be a writer was his wife Michelle, formerly a paralegal. They have two children - their daughter Spencer is 20 and their son Collin, 18.

He recalls: "For 10 years, I wrote short stories, never had any success doing that. I got an agent in Los Angeles, selling screenplays - no success. I'd gotten to the point thinking writing might just be a hobby."

Then in 1994, a book he wrote over three years, about a fictional US president getting the secret service to cover up a murder, sold to Time Warner Books for US$2 million. Within that same week, he received another US$2.5 million for film and foreign rights from film company Castle Rock Entertainment.

"It was a surreal time. I couldn't believe it was happening to me. Fifteen years without selling anything and people I've never met were just chucking cheques at me."

The money made it possible for him to give up his law career and write full-time.

He has an external office, but he also writes at home, oblivious to interruptions.

"I've written with a screaming child on one lap, typing with one hand and saying: 'Please give me one more paragraph and I'll feed you,'" he says. "I tend to write in the middle of chaos."

One family legend goes like this: When Collin was younger, he got hurt while playing and went to his father for first aid. The writer, never looking away from his work, said: "See what happens when you study hard? Way to go, son!"

In spite of that, his family do not hold his obsession with writing against him. Both his children read his books and his wife often edits his drafts.

"My kids and my wife will tell you that I often zone out but they know I'll be back."

While Baldacci made his name with suspense, among the rare departures from the genre is his 2000 family drama Wish You Well, about two children sent to live with their grandmother in rural Virginia. It is based on the stories his mother and maternal grandmother told him about life in the 1940s.

His mother died a few years ago, the day before Mother's Day, and the author chokes up while recalling this. The day after, he had to make an appearance at a book signing.

"I must have signed a thousand books and they were all: 'Happy Mother's Day'. I sat in the car for three hours after that, shaking."

In 2012, he decided to adapt Wish You Well into a movie in honour of his mother. The independent film was brought out by Life Out Loud Films, Copper Beech Productions and the author's Baldacci Entertainment.

The film was directed by Darnell Martin (Cadillac Records) and starred Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn. It was screened in March at the Sedona International Film Festival in Arizona, where it took an audience choice award.

Apart from writing and film-making, the author has thrown his weight behind his Wish You Well Foundation, in support of literacy, run by his wife. It donates funds, books or teaching to educational programmes across America.

Reading is an issue close to his heart, and not just because he is a writer, he says.

"We have a very terrible issue in the US where a lot of people can't read," he says.

"When you can't read, you can't think for yourself and if you can't think for yourself, a lot of people will step up to think for you.

"I think it's at the top of the checklist for dictators, close down all the libraries. Literacy is important to democracy."

akshitan@sph.com.sg

Books by David Baldacci are available at all major bookstores.

BEST OF BALDACCI

ABSOLUTE POWER (1996)

Pan Macmillan/ Paperback/550 pages/$17.07/ Major bookstores

The book that launched David Baldacci's career and won the heart of Clint Eastwood, who directed and starred in the 1997 film adaptation.

A burglar witnesses the US president kill his lover and then enlist secret service agents to cover up the murder. Should appeal to fans of Frederick Forsyth's thrillers.

ONE SUMMER (2011)

Pan Macmillan/ Paperback/368 pages/$13.95/ Major bookstores

A US army veteran with a terminal illness struggles to hold his family together. No shoot-outs or criminal thrills here but this tear-jerking family drama will win over fans of Nicholas Sparks.

THE INNOCENT (2012)

Grand Central Publishing/ Paperback/432 pages/$13.95/ Major bookstores

The first appearance of one of Baldacci's most popular creations: Will Robie, a government assassin with a heart of gold. He must shield a teenage girl whose life is in danger, even as a botched hit job puts him in the sights of his own side.

KING AND MAXWELL (2013)

Pan Macmillan/ Paperback/400 pages/$13.04 before GST/ Major bookstores

Sean King and Michelle Maxwell are private detectives with past careers in the US secret service. In this latest and sixth adventure, they are approached by a teenage boy who received a message from his father days after the soldier was killed in Afghanistan.

THE FINISHER (2014)

Macmillan/ Paperback/506 pages/$18.94/ Major bookstores

Baldacci's first book for young adults. No one leaves Wormwood Village for fear of the monsters in the surrounding forest. But one 14-year-old girl begins to suspect not all is what it seems and there might be greater dangers within the village instead.

For fans of Veronica Roth's best-selling young adult novel-turned-movie Divergent.