#don't ask me how i managed to get a hold of a promo pack 🤫

[astrovian]

Richard Armitage's Recommended Reading List from the official Geneva paperback release promotional material sent to book retailers/libraries in 2024

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

I narrated this for Audible, and I love the fact that the format feels like a case study of a psychologically compromised patient, rather than a traditional novel. It made me question whether it was a true story or fiction. I also love Stevenson's obsession - one shared by many authors and psychologists - with the alter ego. It's been suggested that Stevenson was subversively writing about suppressed sexuality (which was at the time considered unacceptable in social circles). His Mr Hyde was perhaps something that was literally 'in hiding' and forcing its way out.

C.J. Tudor: The Drift

A departure for Tudor into Zombie territory, i suspect conceived during the pandemic, and set across three different time zones. This is a chilling, thrilling genre puzzle about a group of survivors, a bus crash buried in the snow, a stranded cable car and a group of misfits walled up in a dystopian hellish retreat that feels like the end of the world. Lurking in the shadows is something so deadly it feels like an impending apocalypse.

Robert Harris: Act of Oblivion

Harris is one of my favourite authors. He's so immersed in historical detail his stories always feel like documents from an archive rather than invention. Act of Oblivion is the ultimate destination thriller. Set in 1660, during the Interregnum, the novel reminds me of a relentless road movie. Richard Nayler, head of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is consumed by a quest to find the last remaining fugitives who signed the death warrant of Charles I. It becomes a lifelong, all-consuming obsession that takes the form of an epic journey from London to the New World and the developing colonies.

Susanna Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

It's the 20th anniversary of this seminal novel, and it's been very much on my mind as I have narrated a new audiobook edition for Bloomsbury. A spectacular Dickensian destination thriller set in London and the European continent during the Napoleonic wars, I love the array of extraordinary characters (some factual, some fictional) and the weaving of magic into the politics of the time. Dr Strange and Mr. Norrell attempt to restore practical magic to England by convincing the government and the military of its usefulness in war. The rivalry between the two men in exacerbated by the emergence of an older, darker force which, along with Clarke's historical tapestry drawn from factual events and folklore, gives the story a bedrock that is convincing and compelling.

Stephen King: The Shining

Chiller, thriller a s destination; I can't get through the winter without a Stephen King novel. I've read The Shining a few times and as frightening as it is, there is something about the remote isolated setting of the Overlook Hotel in the midst of this brutal winter that intrigues me. The descent of Jack Torrance into madness, and the terrifying consequences of this for his wife and young son, makes for a trembling page-turner. One thing the book does better than the film is balance the fear with the spiritual: the 'shining'. In the novel, Jack's son Danny has a special psychic glow and in a child it feels like an impenetrable power for good in the facenof evil. You've probably seen the film, but the book is well worth a read too.