There are several ways a reader comes to Kate Atkinson: as the award-winning author of historical novels including Life After Life and A God in Ruins as author of the Jackson Brodie detective novels, which were made into a celebrated television series or as the quirky literary superstar who won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1995 for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, an event celebrated with news headlines referring to Atkinson as “an unknown hotel chambermaid.” “‘Life’s random,’ he said, The best you can do is pick up the pieces.'” - When Will There Be Good News? Next time - if there is one - I'll hold on tighter.Rereading Jackson Brodie in the Spring of 2020

Wildly and justifiably popular and engaging ones. Her satirist's eye, the minute observations that reveal everything about a person through the most innocuous gesture or phrase, the mischievous and audacious use of coincidence, the telescoping of time and experience can obviously work even in the literal, linear 2D world of television.īut let's not fool ourselves: she's a writer. It seems from the responses to the series that, at the very least, we've driven even more people to discover her effortless (sorry Kate - seemingly effortless) prose. Maybe great stories are great stories in any medium, if you just get out of the way. I decided to have faith in the invisible tendrils of intrigue, horror and hope that Kate's writing wraps around the hearts and minds of her fans. In the end it was that: the prospect of someone else, some other lucky bastard, trudging the streets in Jackson's battered shoes that did it. Add to all that literary, emotional and anthropological excellence the fact that, in Jackson, she had created a Mr Rochester for the modern age, a post-modern, romantic fantasy figure of a man that countless hordes of women all over the world quasi-worship, and it's easy to imagine why I flirted with dodging the bullet and watching someone else be the focus of the inevitable disappointment. 'Having narrated the audio-books of all the Jackson Brodie novels and being, as a consequence, dazzled not only by Kate's sensational abilities to weave a story but, wittily and economically, to convey character flaws, strengths, sub and un-conscious desires and drives and more, to create a hypnotic world full of damaged, struggling and beautifully etched characters, it was with utter terror that I faced the prospect of putting one of them on the screen.

Jackson brodie books