The Outsider
My Life in Intrigue
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
“A writer of thrillers whose life is one, too . . . The man has lived an amazing life. Call it stranger than fiction.”—The Washington Post
From the grand master of international suspense comes his most intriguing story ever—his own.
For more than forty years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue, from The Day of the Jackal to The Odessa File and The Fox. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched. But what most people don’t know is that some of his greatest stories of intrigue have been from his own life.
He was the RAF’s youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, got strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian Civil War, landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau (and has himself been accused of helping fund a 1973 coup in Equatorial Guinea). The Stasi arrested him, the Israelis feted him, the IRA threatened him, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent, well, her actions were a bit more . . . intimate. And that’s just for starters.
Nominated for the Edgar Award for best critical/biographical work of 2015.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Forsyth's real life has been almost as thrilling as the stories he's created in his 15 novels. In this collection of autobiographical vignettes, Forsyth details his many once-in-a-lifetime experiences that helped shaped his work, including the inspiration for his debut novel, 1971's spy classic The Day of the Jackal. A twist of fate allowed Forsyth to enter the Royal Air Force his boyhood dream at the unlikely age of 17. He crashed his 1949 MG sports car in 1960 and spent three days in a coma, then received his big break when the Reuters news agency sent him to Paris as a foreign correspondent to cover the uprising against French President Charles de Gaulle. And Forsyth claims to have almost started World War III. Eventually, Forsyth made the switch to broadcast journalism and joined the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1965, deflecting death in the African jungle during the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s before turning to fiction. Forsyth packs his stories with history both personal and global, and writes with the charm of a man recounting his escapades to grown grandchildren, making this a riveting and refreshing memoir.
