Nicholas Blincoe

The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the birth of the breakfast cereal in The Road to Wellville to Alfred Kinsey and the creation of sexology in The Inner Circle. This might draw comparisons with James Ellroy, Boyle’s exact contemporary, except that where Ellroy aims at the very darkest version of a tabloid reality, Boyle takes a New Age perspective conveyed though whimsy and surrealism. Ellroy, of course, was born in California while Boyle chose to live there. He is a native of the culture rather than the territory. This is a problem in The Terranauts, where the assumptions and aspirations of a group of scientists inside a giant geo-desic dome are left unexplained.

Jack Shenker is a throwback to an older, more romantic age when foreign correspondents were angry, partisan and half-crazed with frustration at the stupidity of the powerful. He made his name in Egypt, arriving with nothing more than a desire to be a reporter. As the revolution began, he moved to Tahrir Square and started to publish stories in the Guardian. He soon began to win awards, notably for a piece on the deaths of African migrants in the Mediterranean. He has continued to report around the world, but his first love remains Cairo. The Egyptians, his first book, is fuelled by anger and frustration.