The next book to be featured on the Zoe Ball Radio 2 Book Club will be The Year of the Locust, the highly anticipated new novel by Terry Hayes, author of I Am Pilgrim. The book was released on 9 November and Terry will be on the show with Zoe on 28 November.
We have an exclusive extract available for you to read. You can also win a reading group set of 10 copies on our Noticeboard.
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The Year of the Locust
The world stands at a crossroads.
One way lies a future. The other, annihilation.
It will take the journey of a lifetime to save it.
There are no second chances…
If, like Kane, you’re a Denied Access Area spy for the CIA, then boundaries have no meaning. Your function is to go in, do whatever is required, and get out again – by whatever means necessary. You know when to run, when to hide – and when to shoot.
But some places don’t play by the rules. Some places are too dangerous, even for a man of Kane’s experience. The badlands where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet are such a place – a place where violence is the only way to survive.
Kane travels there to exfiltrate a man with vital information for the safety of the West – but instead he meets an adversary who will take the world to the brink of extinction. A frightening, clever, vicious man with blood on his hands and vengeance in his heart…
About the author
Terry Hayes is a former journalist and multi award-winning screen-writer. He wrote screenplays for, amongst others, Mad Max 2 – Road Warrior, Dead Calm, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Payback, From Hell and Vertical Limit, along with much uncredited writing on a host of other movies including Reign of Fire, Cliffhanger and Flightplan.
The Year of the Locust is Terry Hayes’ second novel. His first, I Am Pilgrim, was published in many languages and was an international bestseller. He lives with his wife and family in Lisbon.
A word from Terry
“I was a migrant child, arriving in Australia at the age of five and feeling immediately adrift in such a vast and strange country. The four of us arrived at the start of summer and within a few weeks the Blue Mountains – about forty miles west of Sydney – were ablaze with a huge bushfire. As luck would have it, the flat we were living in was on a high ridge and provided a grandstand view of what looked to me like the apocalypse. There was nothing like that in Sussex.
I had just learned to read and in those strange and troubled months leading up to Christmas, I slipped deeper and deeper into books. About a five minute walk along the highway from the flat was the local library. It was a small and – unusual for Australia at the time – contemporary building that was set back in lawns and a garden. I can picture it perfectly all these years later; it became like a second home to me.
Five years after stepping ashore in Australia, my dad and I walked to the library and he signed a release form that allowed his underage son – who had exhausted most of the possibilities in the kids’ area by then – to borrow books from the adult section.
It was during that time that I decided I wanted to be a writer. Of course it was a childhood dream but, somehow, I managed to live it. It would never have happened without that library and the wonderful women who worked there and encouraged and helped the young kid with the unusual accent.
Of course it is a great pleasure – and an honour – to have had my new novel The Year of the Locust chosen for the Radio 2 Book Club. It is a long book, epic in some ways perhaps, and I certainly hope it brings enjoyment and pleasure to those who read it. Who would have thought, looking out at those bushfires, I would have arrived at this situation? What an incredible journey life is.
I thought for many years that reading had provided some sort of tether to reality; I was wrong – I finally realized it was a tether to my imagination.”
Get involved
Tune in to the Zoe Ball Breakfast Show to hear the live feature on 21 November. You can also listen to the full-length interview on BBC Sounds.
Have you read The Year of the Locust? You can share your thoughts with us on Twitter using #R2BookClub.
Planning to buy The Year of the Locust for your group? Buy books from Hive or from Bookshop.org and support The Reading Agency and local bookshops at no extra cost to you.
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