Behind the stories

Two of the happiest thrills in the life of a reader are discovering a new author and hearing that your favourite author has released a new book. The year 2014 had plenty of happy surprises then for readers.

An Afghan-American woman named Nadia Hashimi is one of the stars of Books-2014. Her parents grew up in the Afghanistan of the 50s when poetry and music were everywhere and women were educated. She herself grew up looking at pictures of women in her family dressed in latest western fashions.

However, the struggle that Afghani women face today inspired her to write her debut novel, The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, which deals with the lives of two women who are disguised as men, a generation apart.

In the popular fiction category, one of the most-awaited books to come out was Rick Riordan’s The Blood of Olympus. The story of how Percy Jackson, the hero of Riordan’s Olympian tales, was born, is almost as interesting as the books itself. Riordan was already an award-winning author of mysteries for adults, when his eldest son Haley asked him to tell him bedtime stories from Greek mythology.

Haley had just been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. Riordan, who had taught Greek mythology to middle school classes for many years, came up with the character of Percy Jackson. The story took three nights to tell, at the end of which Haley suggested that Riordan write it out as a book. That is how this extremely popular Young Adult book series came to being!

This year has also seen novelist Eimear McBride winning the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize for fiction for her debut novel A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. She actually wrote it nine years ago, but it was rejected by mainstream publishers. In the end, it was published this year by Galley Beggar Press, a small independent imprint set up for writers who struggle to find publishers.

Stephen King, the unmatched king of chills and thrills, has a book out this year too, Mr Mercedes. King might have made a fortune with his books, but he started off small — as a first-grader, he wrote four stories about magic animals for which his mother paid him 25 cents each. He had made his first dollar from writing.

However, success as a novelist was hard to come by, even for King. The first few pages of his first novel, Carrie, were a disappointment to him; he trashed them. His wife Tabitha took them out and read them.

She wanted him to finish the story, and he did. He got a $2,500 advance for it, a large sum for him. But the big break came later, when the paperback rights for Carrie sold for $4,00,000!

Finally, there is winner of the Man Booker prize for Literature in 2014, Richard Flanagan. He won it for his most recent novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, the story of a flawed war hero and a survivor of the Death Railway in Burma.

Flanagan has great history — his father was a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, himself. He is also the great great grandchild of Thomas Flanagan who was transported to Tasmania in Australia as a convict. His crime? He stole eight pounds of cornmeal!

Flanagan’s writing career is studded with highly-acclaimed successes such as Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping. However, The Narrow Road to the Deep North took so long to write that Flanagan began thinking he should get what work he could in the mines in far Northern Australia.

Asked what he would do with his 50,000 pound winnings, he said he would use it for life. “I’m not a wealthy man,” he said. “This means I can continue to write.” And we can continue to read. How lucky for us!