The Outsider
My Life in Intrigue
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4.4 • 32 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From Frederick Forsyth, 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 groundbreaking The Day of the Jackal to the prescient The Kill List. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers, the shadowy Nazi underground movement, 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 in 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 was 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.
It is a memoir like no other—and a book of pure delight.
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.
Customer Reviews
How!
Thanks for writing this book. I have read all your books and as a journalist, believe your books are better read because you "have been there and done that"! Keep writing!