Thursday, January 05, 2012

Top 10 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:
George Edalji in Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

A lawyer accused, this time, and championed by a writer: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no less. George is a Birmingham solicitor, content in hardworking obscurity until he is swept to national prominence – and infamy – by The Great Wyrley Outrages. His story reads like a thriller, all the more gripping because it is based on real events.
Read about another lawyer 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