Desert Island Books

BIG thank you to Ian Rankin who was on the "desert island books" segment of Simon Mayo's BBC radio 5 show. The premise is that you're stranded on a desert island only with 6 books and Mr Rankin chose The Cold Cold Ground as one of his books. Ian obviously has a lot of clout, on Wednesday night The Cold Cold climbed 33,000 places on Amazon.co.uk to be the 200th best selling book in the entire country. This is a super nice pat on the back from a guy I really look up to. Nice bit of timing too...

You can listen to the segment here 

My Favourite Books of 2015

I've been keeping a reading journal since 1997 rating and sometimes commenting on the books that I read over the previous year. This year I read 40 books; my average is about 50 - 60 per year so this was a substantially below average season. The reason for that might be because A) I'm getting older and losing focus or B) the books are getting shittier. Anyway these are the favourite books that I read this year, not all of them, of course, were published in 2015. There's a surprisingly high proportion of science fiction here and not a single history book which is odd because I read a lot more histories than I do sci-fi. My favourite history book this year was Max Hastings' book The Secret War, which was ok, but not quite good enough to break my top 20. My favourite novel of the year was The Cartel, my favourite travel book was Paul Theroux's Deep South, my favourite audiobook (if you don't count Patrick Tull's reading of Patrick O'Brian's Wine Dark Sea) was The Fold by Peter Clines. The most lyrically beautiful book I read this year was The Peregrine by JA Baker (talking about the call of the nightjar he says "if a song could smell this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood.") I read this year's Booker Prize winner and thought it was ok but not quite good enough to make my list. I read this year's Nobel Lit Prize winner and didn't think she was very good at all. The Prix Goncourt winner was good. The National Book Award winner was ok. I've written about the Edgar winner before. One book on this list you might not have heard of is The Rider by Tim Krabbé which is a novel that entirely takes place during the two hours of a bicycle race, that the surprisingly multi-talented Mr K rode in the early seventies. 





1. The Cartel - Don Winslow
2. Even Dogs In The Wild - Ian Rankin
3. The Peregrine - JA Baker
4. The Girl With All The Gifts - M R Carey
5. Deep South - Paul Theroux
6. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August - Claire North (Catherine Webb)
7. A Little More Free - John McFetridge
8. The Rider - Tim Krabbé
9. The Devil's Making - Sean Haldane
10. And Yet - Christopher Hitchens
11. The Star Side of Bird Hill - Naomi Jackson
12. Never Mind - Edward St Aubyn
13. Songs That Saved Your Life - Simon Goddard
14. Moon In A Dead Eye - Pascal Garnier
15. Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel
16. Voltaire - Ian Davidson
17. A Guide For The Perplexed - Werner Herzog
18. The Fold - Peter Clines
19. M Train - Patti Smith
20. Latest Readings - Clive James (even though he gets the Aubrey-Maturin books wrong, but wrong, I think, for comic effect.)

Books Of The Year - November Update

Occasionally in emails or tweets or blog comments I get asked what I'm reading at the moment or have enjoyed recently. It's an easy question for me to answer as I've been keeping a meticulous, nerdy, indexed (!) reading log that dates back to 1993. 
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I have no reading plan or set books; I don't read for self improvement (I'm with Dr Johnson on this one); I read exactly what I want to read when I want to (except occasionally when I have to read stuff for the newspaper). This then (below) is what my 2013 log looks like so far without the cross referencing, notes and index. The list is in chronological order. The grades are highly subjective, provisional and change frequently as time passes (and as you can see I'm a pretty easy grader).

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1. Plainwater - Anne Carson B

2. The Professor - Terry Castle A 

3. Just My Type - Simon Garfield B

4. The Generals - (audiobook) Thomas E Ricks A+

5. The Antidote - Oliver Burkeman B+

6. Why Does The World Exist - Jim Holt (began in 2012) B+

7. The Yellow Birds - Kevin Powers (began in 2012) C+

8. Thinking The Twentieth Century - Tony Judt A

9. Our Times - AN Wilson B

10. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara A

11. The Swerve - Stephen Greenblatt D

12. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace A

13. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton A

14. Desolation Island - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ * 

15. The Fortune of War - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+ *

16. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot B+

17. A Town Like Alice - Nevile Shute D

18. TransAtlantic - Colum McCann A

19. The Old Ways: a Journey On Foot - Robert Macfarlane (audiobook) A
20. Hope: A Tragedy - Sholem Auslander B-
21. The Crimson Petal And The White - Michel Faber A
22. The Far Side Of The World - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
23. Socrates and a Platypus Go Into A Bar - Daniel Klein E
23. The Reverse of The Medal - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
24. Inferno - Dan Brown (audiobook) C

25. The Thirteen Gun Salute - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) B+*
26. How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne In 21 Questions And An Answer - Sarah Bakewell B
27. Miami Blues - Charles Willeford A
28. Into The Silence - Wade Davis A
29. The Truelove - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) C*
30. The Finish - Mark Bowden B
31. The Wild Places - Robert Macfarlane C
32. Armchair Nation - Joe Moran A
33. The Wine Dark Sea - Patrick O'Brian (audiobook) A*
34. Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets - JK Rowling E
35. Wool 1-5 - Hugh Howey B
36. Sinead Morrissey - Parallax A
37. The Luminaries - Elanor Catton A
38. Red or Dead - David Peace A+
39. Edgelands - Michael Symmons Roberts and Paul Farley A+
40. Longbourn - Jo Baker A
41. The Broken Road - Patrick Leigh Fermor A
42. Autobiography - Morrissey A-

The books that have really stuck out for me in 2013 so far have been The Generals, Red or Dead, Edgelands and Morrissey's Autobiography, and the Luminaries was pretty good too. As you can see I've had a pretty amazing run of books in the last 2 months beginning with Sinead Morrissey's Parallax and ending (so far) with the Moz himself. In case this gets taken as a kind of my-books-of-the-year blog (which I'll probably be too lazy to actually write) I should also mention the new crime novels by Declan Burke (Slaughter's Hound) and John McFetridge (Black Rock) both of which I read last year in galley and both of which I rank A+. Additionally, I just got the new Ian Rankin yesterday and although I've only looked at the cover, that smells like an A too. 
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* I'm working my way through the Patrick O'Brian audiobooks for the 4th time.

Publication Day!

My new novel I Hear The Sirens In The Street is published in the UK and Ireland today. It's the continuation of the story of Detective Inspector Sean Duffy which began last year with the novel The Cold Cold Ground and will conclude next year with In The Morning I'll Be Gone. This time Duffy gets himself mixed up with the DeLorean car plant, the FBI, British Intelligence, lonely widows, Morrissey* and other savory and unsavory types. You can read the first 8 chapters of Sirens if you click on the link to the right of this page. We were lucky enough to get two blurbs for Sirens which appear on the jacket. Ian Rankin said "It blew my doors off" which when you read the book you'll hopefully find as funny as I did. We also got a really nice quote from Daniel Woodrell, who - as regular blog readers will know - is one of my writing role models. This is what Mr Woodrell had to say:

Adrian McKinty has the chops to do all manner of things with words, and in I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET he unleashes a strain of rough and visual, sly and lyric narrative prose in service of one hell of a story. Sean Duffy is a great creation, a figure of many parts, and the place comes alive---a uniquely beautiful and nasty part of the world I'd be scared to visit if everybody didn't sound like they might be cousins of my dad on my mom's side. 
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You can get Sirens at the usual places: bookshops, dodgy market stalls, ebay, from my next door neighbour who has gone through my bins, maybe the occasional supermarket. If you want to purchase the book online, yes it's available on Amazon.co.uk as a paperback version and when the US version is released in May it will be available on Amazon.com. The audiobook won't be out for a few weeks as my esteemed colleague the great narrator Gerard Doyle is directing a play until the end of March and has more than enough on his plate.
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If you do get the book I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time (I've been subject to an unfortunate bit of sock puppeting and trolling in the last few months so it would be nice to redress the balance).
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Anyway here's the amazon.co.uk link and if you're really desperate to get the book early in Australia or America of course Amazon.co.uk will ship it to you wherever you are in the world. Ciao and happy reading...
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*Perhaps I should point that I'm only kidding about Morrissey (as he's a pretty litigious fellow) but there is one very oblique Morrissey reference/shout out where one of the characters in Sirens is reading Legion of the Cramps, the Cramps fanzine which, at that stage was edited by his Manky Miserableness himself.