Thursday, January 5, 2012

Top ten lawyers in fiction

Simon Lelic is a novelist. His books are Rupture [US title, A Thousand Cuts], The Facility and, out now in the U.K. and coming soon to the U.S., The Child Who. He lives in Brighton with his wife and two young boys.

Megan Abbott, author of The End of Everything, on The Child Who:
By page three, Simon Lelic’s harrowing and haunting novel The Child Who has you utterly in its snares. A daring writer but also a deeply open-hearted one, he renders his flawed but sympathetic characters with the most tender of hands, heightening the tale’s suspense and drawing us even closer."
One of Lelic's top ten fictional lawyers, as told to the Guardian:
Sandy Stern in Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

Rusty Sabich is the main protagonist – in Presumed Innocent as well as the sequel, Innocent – but Sandy Stern is the star of the show. If you'd done wrong, and Atticus had refused your case, you'd call Sandy. His cigar habit means he doesn't come cheap, but he'd be worth every cent. Just ask Rusty.
Read about the other entries on the list.

Also see John Mullan's lists of ten of the best bad lawyers in literature and ten of the best lawyers in literature, John Quinn's five best list of books about trial lawyers at work, and Scott Turow's five favorite legal novels.

Learn more about the book and author at Simon Lelic's website.

The Page 69 Test: Simon Lelic’s A Thousand Cuts.

--Marshal Zeringue