Percival Everett James

Jenny Newman In the Blood

Orlando Whitfield All That Glitters

Why have I chosen these three books and what do they have in common? I asked myself this question and found that the answer was surprisingly revealing. At the core of all three books is a friendship. And I am very interested in writers who can teach me how to write about friendship and dramatise the dynamics of a relationship that is fundamental to so many epic tales. Most books contain a crime, even when they are not crime novels, and if family dramas and romance don’t crowd out friendship, stories of loyalty and betrayal are the strongest themes in the books I love. 

Friendship is a connection that often unites odd couples and childhood gangs. Most friendships are unequal. There is always one who longs to be special to the other and may make more demands. There is always one who is courted and one who enjoys the power to give or to withhold. Friendships, like love affairs, can explode and vanish. Or they can simply fade into distance and coolness. Many friendships prove to be entirely imaginary wish fulfilments, not so much a question of an insincere attachment as a complete delusion. Some bonds, however, are life long and last up to and beyond the death of both parties.

What links these three books is the exploration of three very different friendships: the bond between two runaways, the adult Black slave, James, and the child Huck Finn in Percival Everett’s reimagining of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The at first fraught and finally loyal friendship between Jackie, the heroine of Newman’s novel, and the legitimate son of the great house, Oliver, is a relationship that transforms the lives of both children. Whitfield charts the unravelling of the friendship between two ambitious young men in All That Glitters, the author himself, and the man who enthralled him for fifteen years, Inigo Philbrick. 

It takes two in all three books to generate the action, emotion and tension, essential to all good stories.  

Now Read On ….

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