James Miller

Guest: Author, James Miller- Lost Boys. James has published a number of academic articles about
African-America Literature, Civil Rights and the 1960s counter-culture. James is currently teaching
20th Century Amerian Literature at King's.

For more info visit www.jamesmillerauthor.com

Lost Boys by James Miller

After the oil company that employs Arthur Dashwood fails to protect him from a kidnap attempt in
Baghdad, he returns to his traumatised family in London. But everything is not as it should be.
Having quit the blistering heat and swimming-pool luxury of Saudi Arabia for fear of terrorist
attack, Arthur finds that the danger is closer to home.

Arthur's young son Timothy is struggling in the hostile terrain of his new public school. Bullied by
other pupils and neglected by his preoccupied parents, he withdraws into a fantasy world, a hybrid
of computer-generated guerrilla warzone and exotic dreams of his time in Saudi Arabia, a place where
boys can fight and escape their teachers and families. As one middle-class boy from Timothy's school
and then another disappears, so evidence emerges of an extreme and disturbing rejection of the adult
world. And then it is Timothy's turn to disappear.

Haunted by memories of post-Saddam Baghdad, Arthur embarks on a terrifying search for his son, one
that will reveal his own complicity in the brutal consequences of Western power.

An apocalyptic fable and gripping geopolitical thriller, Lost Boys evokes a society on the brink of
disintegration, dangerously paranoid and utterly recognisable. It is a novel of exceptional
intelligence and imagination and an extraordinary debut.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk alone through burned America, heading through the ravaged landscape to the
coast. This is the profoundly moving story of their journey. "The Road" boldly imagines a future in
which no hope remains, but in which two people, 'each the other's world entire', are sustained by
love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the
best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that
keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

Ragtime by E.L.Doctorow

A dazzling reimagining of the United States at the dawn of the twentieth century by means of a plot
that ingeniously brings together real-life figures—such as Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan, Harry Houdini,
and Emma Goldman—with an array of invented characters.Ragtime was named one of the 100 best English-language novels of the twentieth century by the editorial board of the Modern Library and was
adapted into a successful Broadway musical in 1998. (courtesy of readinggroupguides.com)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming.Life on the river is brutal
and unknown threats lurk in the darkness. Marlow's mission to captain a steamer upriver into the
dense interior leads him into conflict with the others who haunt the forest. But his decision to
hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads
him into more than just physical peril.

The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner

The story of the dissolution of the once aristocratic Compson family told through the eyes of three
of its members. In different ways they prove to be inadequate to their own family history, unable to
deal with either the responsibility of the past or the imperatives of the present.

Go Tell it on Mountains by James Baldwin

"Nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire -
a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" First published in 1953,
Baldwin's first novel is a short but intense, semi-autobiographical exploration of the troubled
life of the Grimes family in Harlem during the Depression.

Next Week, Author Kate Williams.