You are reluctant to say you had to escape but really, you did have to escape.’Īt Sheffield University in the early Seventies Jim met and married a girl from New York, though it would be another twenty-three years before he got his first home in America, a sprawling wooden house in Westchester, and another six till he finally moved into a high-rise on East 22nd Street with a view of the Empire State Building across Madison Square Park. You had a love-hate relationship with where you came from, family, city, country. Writing for Scotland’s Sunday Post about Shuggie Bain, the novel that had won the Booker Prize when Lee was a judge, he said of its author Douglas Stuart: ‘He’s a guy who, just like me, had worked hard and escaped and was now living in America as a way of transcending upbringing. ‘That was me,’ Lee told everyone who ever interviewed him who ever wanted to know who he was. It was like Jim was seeing himself for the first time, more clearly than in a mirror. One page was captioned ‘New York skyscraper’ and featured a fair-haired blue-eyed boy of around five years old, sitting on the window ledge gazing out at the Empire State Building, with the city lit up like Christmas around it. On each page was an image of a different type of American home: a California bungalow, a New England salt box, a Pennsylvania log cabin, a prairie farmhouse with windmill and water pumps. The first book he fell in love with was My Home in America, a twelve-page picture book he discovered at the library aged four. For as long as he could remember he had sought out books about feuding brothers, orphans and changelings, daring escapades and survival against the odds: reading, for the boy who would one day become Lee Child, was all about escape. The young Jim Grant was never very happy at home. Most children enjoy stories about kids getting away from their parents, even the ones who are perfectly happy at home.
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