(Little, Brown, $39.99)
Nicholas Evan’s wonderful book The Horse Whisperer sold 15 million copies worldwide – helped in part by Robert Redford making it into a movie, in which he also starred. (It also catapulted a teenage Scarlett Johansson into the Hollywood limelight.)
He’s written a few more bestsellers since then but I guess somewhere along the line he got permanently hitched to horses, which explains the cover of his new novel, The Brave.
If you’re not that way inclined, don’t let the horses put you off! It’s hardly horsey at all.
Tommy Bedford is a lonely English boy having a horrid time at boarding school in the 1950s; his only escape is the imaginary conversations he has with cowboy heroes of TV westerns.
So he’s understandably thrilled when he finds himself in Hollywood rubbing shoulders with the real-life people beneath those Stetson hats. The trouble is, they’re not all real – as he finds out.
Alongside this storyline is modern-day Tommy, all grown up and struggling to come to terms with the person he’s turned into, and the effect this may have had on his son, now in big trouble for some less than heroic deeds of his own.
The story is gripping, if a little uneven at times, and there’s a very good reason for this. Halfway through writing The Brave, Nicholas fed himself, his wife and his in-laws some deadly mushrooms he had picked in the woods.
They all ended up perilously ill in hospital and he now relies on five hours of kidney dialysis every second day to stay alive until he can get a kidney transplant.
This substantial brush with death changed him forever and he rewrote a lot of the book as a result. So, if The Brave’s not quite up there with The Horse Whisperer, he can be forgiven, and his next book, I’ll bet, will be worth the wait.
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