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The Book Review
Patrick Radden Keefe on the Mystery at the Center of ‘London Falling’
00:34:41
The author discusses his newest book, about a 19-year-old’s curious death and the investigation that followed.
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- [00:00]
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Gilbert Cruz
about this story, was there a moment that you found yourself sort of leaning in a little bit like a detail, or is that a moment that came later?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It came right away. I actually knew. I mean, it was interesting. The pitch was as simple as I know this family, they lost a child, mysterious circumstances. After he died, they found out he was posing as the son of a Russian oligarch. And he had said that much. And I knew if the family will agree to talk to me, this is the next year of my life.
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Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruz. This is the book review for the New York Times. And today we've got Patrick Raden Keefe on the show. Patrick is a writer for the New Yorker. He is also the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including say Nothing. That book was number 19 on the Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. And it was also adapted into a limited TV series. His new book, London Falling, is out now. It's about a young man named Zach Brettler, just 19 years old, who died after falling from a luxury apartment building into the River Thames in London. The book is an investigation into Zach's death as well as the shady criminal underworld that he found himself dragged into. But it's also much more complicated than that. When I talked to Patrick, he said he had first heard about the story back when he was working on the TV version of his book say Nothing. It was a pitch from someone who was very close friends with Zach's parents, Matthew and Richelle Brettler. And he said that they had made a startling discovery about their son.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
They learned that he had been, unbeknownst to them, leading this secret double life in which he had an alter ego which which they had been totally unaware of. And he'd been moving around London pretending at 18, 19 years old that he was the son of a Russian oligarch, that his father was a Russian billionaire, and so they made this discovery, and they learned about all of this, actually, from these two guys who had been friends of Zach's and who were with him on the night that he died. And one of them was a businessman named Akbar Shamji, who was kind of a very handsome, glamorous guy who lived on a really posh street in Mayfair, which is a really posh part of London. He'd gone to Cambridge University. He came from a very wealthy family, and he was in his 40s, but he had been kind of a mentor and friend to Zach. And then there was another guy who was a friend of his who he had introduced as well to Zach, named Virinder Sharma, who. It's a little unclear what he did in. He was a little older. He was in his early 50s. He lived in this luxury apartment. It was his apartment from which Zach had fallen. And as the parents learned more about this Virinder Sharma guy, they learned that, in fact, he seemed to have a past in London's underworld as a gangster, and that he was better known on the streets of London by a nickname, which is Indian Dave. And so that was kind of the beginning of this whole thing for me was the idea of this kid dying mysteriously. He'd had this alter ego, and he'd fallen in with these two older men.
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Gilbert Cruz
You are maybe approached by people frequently or not, who say, oh, there's a story here. I heard this thing. You might be interested in this. What was it about this one? And how do you know when something is right for you?
- [04:06]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's weird. I still don't have a real system for these things. And I'll tell you, anytime I go out and look for a story, I almost never find them. When I sort of decide today I'll find a new idea, usually they find me. In this case, I can sort of give you the intellectual answer, which is that I was really interested in the role of the oligarchs in kind of coming into London and changing the face of that city in recent decades. And then I hear this story about a family, and I do tend to gravitate to stories about families. I think I've gotten better about learning to sort of listen to my own impulses, where that goes. And if I'm really intrigued by this, I'll be able to kind of muster a level of excitement which hopefully I can transmit to the reader and the reader will share.
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Gilbert Cruz
Sticking with the early days of this story, you did have to eventually reach out to these parents who were grieving, and they were still early in their Grief, because they still did not understand what it was that had happened to their child. Maybe they had had suspicions. What was your first outreach to them, and how did that go, and how did your relationship with them develop?
- [05:19]
Patrick Radden Keefe
So this guy Andrew, who. The friend of theirs who I met on the set, he had told me the story, and I listen, I'd love to talk to them. I think there might be a story in this. I would love to be the person to tell it, but I understand that they might have reservations. And so why don't we just agree to have a coffee and we'll get together and we'll talk, purely off the record. So I didn't even have a notebook out in that first conversation. We sat down at a cafe in Bloomsbury on a warm summer afternoon, and they just talked for two hours with very little prodding from me. And it was fascinating because I think I've seen this happen in other cases. You know, when people are experiencing a loss or, you know, sometimes I'm asking people about the worst thing that's ever happened to them. And that can be very isolating, I think, naturally. And then on top of that, the Brettlers are quite. You know, they're. I think they're quite socially sophisticated people. They have a kind of a high degree of eq, if you like. And they. And so they both, I think, had reached a point, this is several years after Zach's death, where they felt like, you know, we don't want to subject the people in our life to, like, we could just talk about this endlessly, but we realized that that might be awkward for the people in our lives. And I come along and I just say, I'll take everything you got. You know, you want to talk about it for five hours, I'm here. And so it all just kind of came tumbling out, not even in any particular order. I have to admit that first conversation was very confusing for me, just because there was sort of so much to wrap my mind around. It was a complicated story. And then we met again maybe a week later, and there were a couple things that it felt important for me to say to them at that point, because I think they had done some diligence on me. They'd looked me up. And, you know, my book, say Nothing, is about this murder in 1972. And at the end of the book, I say, I figured out who did it. And as a book, it has a kind of unusually satisfying sort of narrative because it's kind of a whodunit. And in the end, I say, I'm gonna tell you who done it. But that was a really unusual situation of a sort that I think is unlikely to repeat in my career. And so one thing I wanted to tell them was don't get into this with me because you think in some unspoken way that this is like a quid pro quo and I'm going to solve the mystery because that feels like it would be unfair to you. And in that there's kind of a false promise and unfair to me in that it just puts way too much pressure on me to deliver something I might not be able to. And then the other thing I said to them was, I don't want to pressure you, I don't want to twist your arm. This is totally up to you. I don't need to write this story. But if you're going to get into it, if you want to do this, if we're all going to hold hands and jump, the one thing I need to insist on is that there's no take backs, that you can't say yes today and then two months from now when I've been working, get cold feet.
- [08:29]
Gilbert Cruz
Can you talk a little bit more about the sort of rare access you had to them? Hundreds of hours of talking with them, texting with them on a very regular basis, in a way maybe that you have never had access to primary sources before. What was that like? And as importantly, how did that result in the type of book that you were able to write?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It was really something. I mean, I'm often writing about people who are dead or who don't want to talk to me or in some cases who are threatening to sue me even as I'm writing about them. And in situations where I've had access to people, I haven't had quite the same degree of access as I did here just in terms of the, you know, the number of hours logged. And there was another kind of extraordinary thing, which is that the Brettlers, as soon as Zack went missing, so actually before they knew he was dead, when he was just missing, they were having conversations, trying to figure out where he was and what was going on. And they were talking to a private investigator and talking to the police and talking to Akbar Shamji and Virinder Sharma and Matthew Brettler, because he's a particular kind of person, I think, because he knew that it was a high pressure moment and he was going to want to be, he's very analytical, he was going to want to be able to sort of study all this stuff. Afterwards he started recording everything on his iPhone. So they had this archive of all these conversations they had in the days and weeks after Zach went missing and was and was ultimately declared dead. And that was extraordinary because I initially had had conversations with them in which they told me their memories of these encounters. But then subsequently they gave me the iPhone recordings. And in some cases the iPhone recordings were quite different from the way they remembered it because their memory was kind of 2020 hindsight. And that allowed me to write the book in this very, very intimate, kind of close third person fashion where you're really right there with them. You're kind of in their heads. And so there are things that they kind of in their naivete in the first third of the book believe that turn out not to be true. And I thought rather than, rather than tell you everything at the top, I actually want you to, I want to sort of simulate for you the experience of being them. And, you know, they meet somebody and they think, oh, here's a trustworthy person who's here to help me, little knowing that the person is lying to them and is going to turn out to be a snake.
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Gilbert Cruz
After the break, Patrick talks about the two things that convinced him that this story should be a book.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
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Patrick Radden Keefe
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Gilbert Cruz
This was published as a very compelling New York article. As so many of your Pieces are. And it is now a book. This is something that you've done a couple times. Talk to me about the process of taking it from one form to another. You know, how are you making sure that this feels different enough that there's sort of extra value for the reader or for yourself, even as the person who has put years into this?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
You know, I've been writing for New Yorker for 20 years, and this is the fourth time that I've done this. And there's really only ever been four times where I. Cause, I mean, as people listening will know, you know, famously, New Yorker articles are quite long. And there is, you know, the notion that you would get to the end of a New Yorker article and say, but there's so much more, should probably be a rare occurrence. Most of the time. What I love about it is I get to the end and I'm done, and I move on. And I feel as though I've really said everything I have to say about a subject. There's been four times where that was not the case. In this case, part of what was happening was that I. As I got into the story, you know, really, the whole narrative turns on this night in this apartment in London where you have these three guys in the apartment. Akbar Shamji and Varinda Sharma and Zach Brettler. And Zack goes off the balcony, and there are all these kind of layers of complication as you look at that night. So it turns out that, you know, Zack was pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch, but actually Ackbar was kind of pretending to be something he wasn't, and Verinder was sort of pretending to be something he wasn't. So there's all this kind of spiraling intrigue. The two things that inclined me to think it might be a book were the backstories of those three guys in that apartment were all really rich and fascinating. So if you look at their family histories. So I didn't mention this at all in the piece, but Zach Brettler had two grandfathers, actually, Rochelle and Matthew, both of their fathers who had survived the Holocaust, and they both fled Europe and ended up in England as teenagers, having lost virtually their whole families, been murdered in the camps. And so you have this moment with these two young guys in the 1940s when they arrive in London and they have to reinvent themselves. You know, they've lost everything, and they have to decide, who am I going to be? And I started to think about, you know, Zach's transformation into Zakus Miloff, billionaire son of A Russian oligarch, and the notion of self reinvention in general. And then I started to think about how London had reinvented itself in recent decades. And I thought that there might be an opportunity to kind of trace the family's histories back. Of these three guys in the apartment, noticing some of these weird echoes that happen across the generations in these three different families, and in the process tell a story about how London has changed. Hopefully not in a way that would feel like a big doorstep. There's a colleague of mine at the New Yorker, Nick Troutwine, who has this. He had this beautiful line that he used when I was talking about this with him that I thought about all the way through. He said, you have to be careful that you don't. That the laundry doesn't break the line. You know, that idea of you have this kind of quite slender story about this family losing a son and then trying to figure out what happened to him.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
And you can kind of ornament that with all this other stuff, but there's. There's a sort of quite precise amount of stuff you can ornament it with and too much and it'll overwhelm that central threat. So that was the thing I was thinking about a lot. But as I sort of thought about, as I kind of squinted and I could imagine the bigger version, I got really excited.
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Gilbert Cruz
Could you talk about your relationship to London? I know you've spent a lot of time there over the years. I'm not gonna say the cliche, except I am actually saying that cliche of London being a main character in the book. But your book is called London Falling. The history of London, certainly the modern history of it, is a major factor in the events that occurred. What's your relationship to it?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I should say. I mean, it's funny, the book is probably quite critical of London, but to be clear, I love London.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
My mother's from Australia. My dad's from Boston. My parents met in England. I went to grad school there right out of college. I lived in London in 2000, 2001. Made very dear friends there. And I've gone back, you know, virtually every year since. So I've sort of watched this transition happen over time. I think there are elements of this story that are very, very distinctive to London.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I don't want to over inscribe this stuff, and it's done in the book with a pretty light touch, but if you're reading carefully, there are threads having to do with the British Empire and. And Britain's role in the world. It's a story very much about social class, which is kind of a defining element of British life in a way that I don't think it quite is in the US So there are aspects of the story that are very, very specific to London. But, you know, having said that, some of what the story is about is the kind of hustle culture, the aspirational culture that we all live in, which is a very American kind of culture.
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Gilbert Cruz
As I was thinking, the same thing it is. I was thinking this last night, which is that obviously it's a very British story, it's about English people, takes place in London. But the dynamic that you describe, in which a young man is surrounded by wealth, maybe is spending a little too much time on social media, is watching too many Hollywood movies, and believes that he could enter a world and maybe even pass in that world for being someone who is richer and more important than he actually is. There have always been strivers in English society, fakes and whatever, but it does strike me as very American as, well, in some way, and very capitalist. I guess maybe that's the same thing completely.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. And it's funny because, I mean, part of the story that I tell in the book is that, so the Russians come right in the 90s and the noughties, but before the Russians, it was the Americans. The first big invasion happened in 1987, when Margaret Thatcher deregulates the banking sector. And there's this flaw of American bankers who come in, and they're the ones who, you know, are paying lots of money for apartments. They want to send their kids to good schools. They want to drive BMWs. They're into conspicuous consumption in a way that even wealthy people in the UK up to that point really weren't in quite the same fashion. And, you know, Zach Brettler grows up obsessed with American movies, American movies about hustlers. This is a story in which almost everyone is in a kind of fake it till you make it mode. And it's funny, you know, one of Zach's favorite movies was. Was the Wolf of Wall Street. And I guess there's a way in which we could think of that movie as a cautionary tale. He did not see it as a cautionary tale. I think for him, it was a sort of aspirational thing. When Zach turns 18, he incorporates his own business and he names it after the crooked brokerage firm in the Wolf of Wall Street. So the line between fantasy and reality was a little. A little fuzzy for him. And I think he got kind of drunk on that aspirational culture.
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Gilbert Cruz
I really would love to talk about parenthood a little bit. You're a parent. I'm a parent. One of the threads I was not expecting in this book was the way in which this story made me think about just the very idea of parenthood. What's our responsibility as parents? How much rope should you give your kids in order to chart their own life and make their own mistakes? As a lot of people like to say, they need to make their own mistakes. How much can you even know your kid? In the end, you know, I really was just struck by the journey that Rachelle and Matthew had to take, learning not just about the death of their child, but that so much about what they believed they knew about Zach was just completely false, and maybe they did not know their child at all. It really hit me at the end of the whole story.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, it's so hard. I mean, I don't. You know, I have two adolescent sons who are. It's a similar age gap to Zack and his brother Joe, and they're very competitive with each other. I mean, there are all kinds of ways in which I could relate to some of the dilemmas that the Brettlers were dealing with. I also find that, I mean, setting aside for a moment the weirdness of this kind of period in history that we're living through, where, you know, you had smartphones that kind of come online when Zach is. I don't know, how old would he have been? Kind of 10, 11, 12 years old. And there's a period of time where young kids have pretty unfettered access to phones. I mean, they still do, but it's just the phone and its role in sort of shaping the psyche of a young person is its own issue. But leaving that aside for a moment, I think even when you or I were growing up, the nature of adolescence, right, is that you need to kind of break away from your parents to some degree. There's some moment, as the parent of a child where you see some strange thing that didn't come from you, and it didn't come from the other parent, and it's manifesting in the child, and it's unclear. Is this some weird external stimulus that's coming from somewhere else? Is it some sort of throwback recessive gene that's manifesting? They sudden become someone you don't necessarily recognize? And I think the thing that's so hard is that's, I think you could argue, essential in a person's transition into adulthood that they break away in that manner. The challenge for the Brettlers was what do you do? You know, do you. When Zach starts to change and become something that worries them, do you lock him up? Do you try and sort of smother him with control and protect him from all the stuff that's out there? Or do you, you know, is there a danger if you do that that he'll. You'll drive him away?
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I think part of what has fueled their relentless investigation in the years since Zach died is a feeling of, oh, God, you know, what could we have done? They're sort of playing back the tape and trying to find exit ramps that they missed.
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Gilbert Cruz
I was incredibly struck. I've never read Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree. It's quite a tome.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It's worth it. It's an incredible book.
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Gilbert Cruz
It's supposed to be a great book, classic piece of nonfiction. But the quote that you take away from that or that you put in here, the truth about parenthood, is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger really struck me like a lightning bolt as I was listening to the audiobook of this on a plane last week. I was like, oh, my God, is this what is going to happen to Me and my 11 year old?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. And it's sort of figuring out what that should mean. What does that mean day to day? Right. And it's also fascinating because the Brettlers both grew up in a different era. They grew up in a time of, like, pretty laissez faire parenting, and they turned out all right. And then by the time they were parents. I have a little riff in the book about all the things that parents are expected to do now, but it's the opposite of laissez faire. Parents are unbelievably involved in the lives of their children as compared to practically any earlier generation. And yet there's that idea that it's a kind of fantasy to think that you actually have real. That you can exert real control in terms of how your kid is going to turn out.
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Gilbert Cruz
Yeah, I don't like it. It scares me.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Me, too.
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Gilbert Cruz
We are going to take a break, and when we come back, Patrick answers some very specific questions about books. And he's also going to talk about the classic novel that he is only just reading for the first time.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
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Patrick Radden Keefe
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- [26:24]
Patrick Radden Keefe
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- [26:30]
Gilbert Cruz
So, the New York Times Book Review, for more than a decade has asked authors new and old a recurring set of questions about their reading as part of a series that we call by the Book. This is something we've run in print for a very long time. We are now doing it as part of this fantastic show. I have several extremely specific questions for you about your reading life, books that you're reading and the like, and I would like you to answer them. Can you do that?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I can. Okay. I'm gonna have to give you different answers than I gave when I did this in print, but this is a good challenge. Unfortunately, I read a lot.
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Gilbert Cruz
I'm looking at the shelves behind you. I believe it. Okay, Patrick Randen Keefe, what books are currently on your nightstand?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
So I have a huge stack of books on my nightstand in part because I confess to you that I do not always finish all the books on my nightstand. I start more than I finish. I have a book, Season of Fury, by. It's not yet out. It's by Rosina Ali, a former colleague of mine and a friend of mine about Islamophobia in America, which I'm about to start and I think should be amazing. It actually grows out of work that she's done some of it in the New York Times. Rosina's Incredible. And I have a novel that I reread periodically, just as kind of comfort food. It makes me feel. I mean comfort food is probably the wrong way to put it because it's more high minded than that. But the Emperor's Children by Claire Massoud, which is a novel I read when it came out and I revisit every few years. It's wonderful.
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Gilbert Cruz
That's sort of a 911 adjacent book, right? It came out around that period?
- [28:02]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes, it's actually about. It came out afterwards. But 911 in ways that I won't divulge 911 comes up in it and extraordinary book.
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Gilbert Cruz
Why do you reread it? What does it make you feel?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
I think it's beautifully written. The characters are wonderful. It has a kind of dramatic inevitability. The gears all sort of. They sort of kick in in a way that you don't see coming. But also it's set in a world. You know, I graduated from college in 1999 in New York and was back in New York again not long after 9 11. It's just set in a world I recognize. I will say there's a kind of strange thing that started to happen to me as I near 50 which is that when I revisit certain works of culture I find that I relate to different characters than I did before. It's really unsettling.
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Gilbert Cruz
What else has this happened with?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
It happened in a big. And this is gonna sound darker than it is, so bear with me. But I think probably the greatest podcast ever made was S Town, at least to date. And that's another one that I revisit every few years. And it's hosted by a young public radio guy who was probably in his 30s when he made it. And when it came out however many years ago, he was sort of my proxy, he was my Virgil. I related to him. And it's about this guy who's this kind of very depressed 49 year old guy in Alabama who keeps reading the newspaper and despairing about what's happening in the world. And when I re listened to it about six months ago, it was really kind of unsettling. But I found my whole. My point of view character had changed.
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Gilbert Cruz
That's fantastic.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Which is weird. You know, I mean, I think of myself as essentially still in my 30s. What's going on here? But it was also just the idea that he's. This guy is kind of constantly going on about environmental devastation. And it's this idea of kind of, you know, frankly, how do you wake up in the morning and read the first 10 stories in the New York Times and then proceed into your day with any spirit of optimism. That's the thing he's wrestling with. And I related to that in a scarily profound way.
- [30:26]
Gilbert Cruz
No, that's not. I agree. That's not dark at all. Okay, Patrick, what is your favorite book that you think no one else has heard of?
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Okay, so this is not necessarily a book that anyone. Well, it's an out of print book, but it's one that I really love. I've always been very into film, and I love the work of Steven Soderbergh. He's somebody I've tried to profile for years for the New Yorker, but he never wants to. Never wants to play ball. And his first movie was Sex, Lies and Videotape and Faber in the uk Published not long after that came out. So we're in the 90s now. Published the screenplay for Sex, Lies and Videotape, but also included a diary that Soderbergh kept from the moment he started writing the script until the moment that the movie was. I think it goes either to Sundance or it may go all the way to Cannes, where he wins the big prize. And famously, his speech. He was all of 24 years old or something, and he gets up to the podium and says, well, it's all downhill from here. But it's his diary, and it's an incredible record of just a really, really brilliant creative mind. In the matter of about a week over the winter holidays, staying with his parents in Louisiana, cranking out this script and then setting up the financing and the cast and all the rest of it, and then making the movie and describing directing his first feature. It's wonderful. I have a feeling it's actually so personal that that may be part of the reason that it went out of print. And he. I don't know whether he was involved in the kind of discontinuing, but it's. You know, I'm going to choose.
- [32:13]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm going to have to do some insider trading here and go on ebay right after this conversation.
- [32:18]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Before we publish it, before they all get a copy.
- [32:23]
Gilbert Cruz
You know, he's like a crazy reader, right? He just.
- [32:26]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I do.
- [32:27]
Gilbert Cruz
He reads so many novels and books.
- [32:30]
Patrick Radden Keefe
You've seen the list that he puts out every year.
- [32:32]
Gilbert Cruz
I wait for it every January.
- [32:33]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's insane. Yeah, yeah. And he's got this book, you know, about this book. He's writing a book right now. I cannot wait to get my hands on this. He's writing a book which is all about directing, but it's about the movie Jaws. He's obsessed with Jaws. Yes.
- [32:48]
Gilbert Cruz
What?
- [32:48]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes. Yes. I'm so excited for this book. I may eventually.
- [32:53]
Gilbert Cruz
Patrick, I just came back from la, where I flew in part to go to the Jaws exhibition at the Oscars Museum.
- [32:59]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Did you? How was it?
- [33:00]
Gilbert Cruz
It was awesome.
- [33:01]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Oh, man, it's so cool.
- [33:03]
Gilbert Cruz
Okay, we have a couple more questions here. What is the best book you have ever received as a gift?
- [33:10]
Patrick Radden Keefe
My first book was a book called Chatter that I wrote when I was in my 20s. I was really young. I don't think it's a very good book, but I was kind of figuring out. I was still sort of learning what I was doing. And it's about the national security agency, the NSA. It's kind of a very post 911 book. And it turns out the NSA is a really difficult subject to write about, especially if you don't really know what you're doing as an investigative journalist, which was me. And my wonderful editor for that book is a woman named Eileen Smith. And when I was halfway through, Eileen Gave Me out of Sheer Rage by Jeff Dyer, which is a great book that I'd recommend to anybody, but it's a very, very, very funny book. But it's D.H. lawrence. Yeah, it's about D.H. lawrence, but really what it's about is how impossible it is for Jeff Dyer to write a book about D.H. lawrence. And it was just the most inspired. You know, it was just like, what a moment of inspiration on Eileen's part to, here's this guy writing a book about a spy agency, and she gives me this book by Jeff Dyer. And it was probably the most thoughtful gift of a book I can remember.
- [34:26]
Gilbert Cruz
That's a great gift. Patrick, are there any classic novels that you have only recently read for the first time?
- [34:35]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yes. So I'm embarrassed to say. And this is still in progress. I. There's this thing that they do. Listeners may not know this, but there's this thing they do now where when you get a signed copy of a book that's, you know, you buy it at the bookstore, but it's already. It's got the sticker on it says it's signed. Sometimes it's because the author has gone and signed the books. But what they do now in advance of publication is they will, before they bind the book, send what they call tippins, which are just these pages, these blank pages that are going to be bound into the book. And on this new book, I was sent thousands and thousands of. I don't Know how many. I mean, our whole dining room table was covered in these tip ins. And I had to spend months just signing my name on all of these thousands of pages that would eventually get bound into these books. This is both in the US and also for the UK edition. And I decided, all right, I'm gonna listen to an audiobook while I do this. And I need to get something really substantial. And I actually thought that I would. It was kind of an interesting question. Would I finish the book first or the signing? And I ended up signing, finishing the signing first. It was Middlemarch, which I'd never read.
- [35:43]
Gilbert Cruz
Oh, wow.
- [35:44]
Patrick Radden Keefe
The version, hold on. I wrote down her name because she's so good. There are different versions. The version I got is Juliet Stevenson as the woman reading. She's phenomenal. It is such a funny book in a way that I don't think I had fully appreciated. And she has this kind of perfect dry delivery. It's fantastic. But weirdly, because it was like a thing I did was I signed and I listened and then I finished the signing. So now I need to come up with some excuses used to go back to it.
- [36:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Patrick, are there books that you find yourself returning to time and again?
- [36:17]
Patrick Radden Keefe
There are a bunch, yeah. I mean, In Cold Blood is a book I go back to quite a bit. I would tell you, I go back to Robert Caro as if I've read everything cover to cover. But the truth is that's a kind of buffet table at which I graze periodically. It's very inspiring. And I did read the Power Broker cover to cover when I was young, when I actually was in college. And I have more stamina for that kind of thing. But mostly I go back and kind of dip into those. There are novels. I mean, they're very sort of specific novels. I really love Presumed Innocent, Scott Durow's first novel. Incredible book. I read it in law school. It's just amazing. I love the Secret History by Donna Tartt. And funnily, my.
- [37:04]
Gilbert Cruz
It's one of the best.
- [37:05]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It's so great. And it holds up again and again and again. And funnily enough, my older boy who has had periods where he's a great reader and periods where he's not as engaged. What's funny is he's read it about three times and in his case, I keep saying it's too soon for you to reread, you know, you need to read other books. But he loves that book as well.
- [37:28]
Gilbert Cruz
That's so great.
- [37:29]
Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah. I mean, there's any number of them that I go back to The Last samurai by Helen DeWitt.
- [37:34]
Gilbert Cruz
Really good reader.
- [37:35]
Patrick Radden Keefe
I could go on.
- [37:36]
Gilbert Cruz
You could, but you shouldn't. Because we have to end this conversation. Patrick, thank you so much for joining the Book Review to talk about your new book, London Falling.
- [37:45]
Patrick Radden Keefe
It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.
- [37:50]
Gilbert Cruz
The Book Review is produced by Sarah diamond and Amy Pearl. It's edited by Larissa Anderson and mixed by Pedro Rosado. Original music by Dan Powell and Elisheba Itu. Special thanks to Dahlia Haddad. We want to hear what you think about the show, so send us an email @thebookreviewytimes.com I'm Gilbert Cruz. Thanks for listening.
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Patrick Radden Keefe
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Patrick Radden Keefe
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
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