My name is Cara Hunter and I'm here to talk about from my third book which is
called No Way Out. It's the third in the series featuring DI Adam Foley who's
based in Oxford but he doesn't drive a Jag and he doesn't like crosswords, so
he's very different to Morse. But some of the things in the book are a little bit
of a homage to those wonderful Morse novels. This particular one as I say
is the third and it starts with a terrible house fire in a big house in
North Oxford and it appears at least that two small children have been left
in the house alone. So that's the start of the story and I'm very excited about
this one. I'm even more excited in some ways about the first one, Close To Home
which has just been nominated for a British Book Award in the crime and
thrillers category. And being up against people like Jo Nesbo and Ian Rankin is
a writer's dream come true so that's pretty exciting.
So here I am in Waterstones Piccadilly, one of London's most beautiful bookshops
and a bit like a sweet shop actually if you're a reader like I am.
And I'm going to talk to you about three books I really love. I'm going to talk
about a classic book, a crime book and a comfort book, which is one of the books I
go back to again and again and again. So the first one is what I at least would
call a classic book and that is A. S. Byatt's Still Life. Now this is the second
in the Frederica Quartet, as it became, they were all published over a very long
period of time. This one as I say, number two, came out in 1985 and I read it as
soon as it came out because I loved the first one so much. And it's all about a
family in Yorkshire and particularly the two sisters of that family,
Frederica and her older sister Stephanie. And in this particular book we follow
Frederica, the clever and spiky Frederica to Cambridge where she's
exploring her own intellect and her sexuality and other things. And we also
follow Stephanie, the older and rather milder sister, who's remained at home in
Yorkshire, has married a vicar and is pregnant with her first child. And
there's some absolutely wonderful scenes, particularly for Stephanie actually,
where she describes the process of giving birth which I've never done but I
certainly have a much clearer idea about what it might involve now!
An absolutely lovely passage where she describes how the baby sees, the
newborn baby, how he sees his mother's face and all the colors that blend
together. I always send that to my friends when they have their first child,
it's an absolutely wonderful piece of writing. And this book is a wonderful
piece of writing, it scintillates with ideas, it's beautifully written and I
absolutely loved it. She taught me how you could do things with words. Okay so
number two is my crime read and I have chosen a very recent book, The Suspect by
Fiona Barton. Now this is the third of her series of books; The Widow and
The Child were the ones before. I also recommend those. But this is the latest
one and it sets up with a premise that will terrify the parent of
any teenage child; the idea that two young girls could have gone off having
fun backpacking in Thailand and then disappear. So this story starts with that
disappearance and it focuses particularly on the journalist Kate
Waters who also happens to have a son in Thailand at the time and she hopes that
by going out to cover the story she might also be able to connect with her
son. All I would say about that is be careful what you wish for. So this is a
great crime read, everything I love about a good crime read; it's got great pace,
it's got great characters, it shifts perspectives between the press and the
police and parents and a great satisfying ending. So definitely a
recommended one. Number three is my comfort read; in other words a book I
go back to again and again and again. And I was just thinking just now I think my
own copy of this, it's now fallen apart I've read it so many times. I think it's
also gone in the bath once or twice. It shows you it's much-loved and it is
The Magus by John Fowles, which is another absolutely wonderfully written book
rather like the A.S. Byatt. It came out in the mid 60's and it has something of that
aura to it as well. It certainly has that sense of the time full of energy
where anything might happen. It follows a young Englishman called Nicholas Urfe
who goes to teach at a school in Greece on a Greek island. He's restless, he's got
a string of failed relationships behind him. And then one day when he's
wandering around the island he comes across an old railway sign hung in a
tree that says 'waiting room'. And it's outside the domain of a mysterious
landowner called Maurice Conchis and he is the magus of
the title. And what follows is an enchantment both for Nicholas and for
the reader. It's a wonderful book, it's incredibly ambitious. You can lose
yourself in it very, very easily and I do regularly, that's why I keep going back
to it. And I love it so much there's actually a tiny, tiny reference to it in
my fourth book which is coming out later this year called All The Rage. So there's a
prize if you spot that.