With Child

Over the course of a year, Andy Martin followed thriller writer Lee Child, creator of the tough-guy hero Jack Reacher, and recorded the experience in a diary. The book includes a foreword by Child. Martin's entries cover the release of Make Me, the drafting of Night School in a Manhattan flat, the filming of Never Go Back in New Orleans, and the frustrations and pleasures of writing, along with the grind of promoting a bestseller.

The two travel together through a busy schedule of TV studios, bookshops, Harvard, Stockholm, literary conferences and gun shows, where they face rivalries and reviews that range from enthusiastic to savage. Other writers appear along the way, including Stephen King, David Lagercrantz and Karin Slaughter, and Martin also takes apart Jonathan Franzen's latest novel.

Martin also looks beyond the author to Child's readers. He finds a woman in Texas whose name appears in a home invasion scene in Make Me, climbs a Montana mountain to meet the one reader who calls Reacher a "lightweight", and speaks with devoted fans from Europe to South Africa who turn to the character for comfort. The book argues that readers are as central as writers to the making of contemporary fiction.