Joan Mackenzie reviews A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne

Hello I'm Joan and this book is called A Ladder to the Sky by John Boyne. Now John Boyne is one of my all time favourite writers and this book delivers yet again. He's amazing. It's the story of Eric Ackerman who is himself a writer getting on in years who's had a pretty insipid career. But finally, to his great surprise, wins a major literary prize which sends him on a book tour around Europe and America. And while he is on tour he is in a Berlin cafe one day and meets a young waiter called Maurice Swift who is himself, an aspiring writer. So Eric invites young Maurice to join him on the tour as a kind of amanuensis. And off they go except that Maurice steals details from Eric's earlier life and writes about it thereby exploiting the relationship and making himself into the hot celebrity of the day. The trouble is he doesn't have any good ideas of his own so in order to continue feeding his very naked ambition, he has to keep stealing the ideas of other people and so it goes. It's really well constructed. It's a lovely insight into the world of writing and publishing. For someone like me, it just resonated and I can't recommend it highly enough.