Hello, my name is Andrew Hunter Murray, I am the author of The Last Day which is
out now. The Last Day is a thriller set in a
world whose rotation has ground to a halt 30 years ago due to a catastrophe
in the heavens. Today half the world faces inwards towards the Sun constantly,
half faces outwards towards the cold dead universe. Life in the warm side has
changed dramatically. Britain has cut itself off from its nearest neighbors in
an attempt to survive. The story begins in the frosty Atlantic with our hero the
scientist Dr. Ellen Hopper, she's an oceanographer who thought she had left
Britain behind. She is summoned back to a decaying London to see a man she thought
she would never see again and he has something to tell her as the story
begins. Something that could have a bearing on the future of the entire
human race and we go from there. So I'm here to talk about a few of the books
that inspired me while writing The Last Day. The first of those is this one, it is
The Children of Men by P.D. James. This is an absolutely fabulous novel. It's set in
the year 2021 or thereabouts and it is set in a world where no children have
been born for 25 years, the youngest person on earth is 25 years old. The
planet has started falling apart, there is no solution to this fertility crisis.
The novel deals with Theodore Faron, he's the central character, he's a history Don
at Oxford and as the story begins he's basically given up hope. He starts
writing a diary charting his feelings in what he thinks are the final few decades
for mankind. Then we discover later on it may not be there is this tiny, tiny
glimmer of hope on the horizon. And that injects the pace into the story and sets
off this extraordinary journey for him. It is a wonderful book. It's depictions
of a world winding down are incredibly evocative. I highly recommend it. And the
film is also tip-top! My next choice - it's very hard by the way picking only three
and I'd just like that to go on the record -my next choice though is John Wyndham's
The Kraken Wakes. So Wyndham was an absolute master at
changing one thing in the world and then following on and seeing what happened
next. So in this it's a very cold war style story in a way, an allegory anyway.
In this book we see mysterious lights flashing across the sky and plunging into
the ocean. They stop after a few years everyone thinks that was a strange
phenomenon and they forget about it. Then a few years after that shipping starts
disappearing, being pulled down from the ocean. We discover there is something
down there. Wyndham is an absolute master at dealing with the suspense of this but
also he's a master at telling a story that runs over a decade. This
story stretches out and it's interlaced between the lives of the main
characters. He's a very underrated character writer as well but the plot is
also absolutely superb, highly recommended, especially if you've heard
of The Day of the Triffids and you want to go one level deeper into Wyndham world.
My final choice is nonfiction and this is Tim Marshall's Prisoners of
Geography. This is a book which in ten chapters explains why global politics
work as they do through the medium of each country's particular geography.
So you find out why the North European plain is so important to Russia.
You find out why China's energy policy works the way it does because of the
shape of the Straits of Malacca through which a huge amount of their oil passes.
So it's a very eye-opening book in terms of the way things are and when I was
writing The Last Day it's a book that is largely about geopolitics, it's about how
suddenly the world changes due to a quirk of geography that means human
nature must follow in its footsteps. This is a fabulous book, it's incredibly
concise, clear, entertaining. I recommend it again very highly.