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A Superspy Races to Halt Armaggedon

By Janet Maslin

• June 16, 2014
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Neither its plot nor its provenance do much to recommend Terry Hayes’s “I Am Pilgrim.” So it’s all the more surprising that this first novel by a screenwriter of films not renowned for their dialogue turns out to be the most exciting desert island read of the season.

Yes, the 600 or so action-packed pages are headed toward a showdown between a brave and ultra-brilliant American secret agent and an equally fearless jihadi terrorist. But neither is written as a stereotype; the two don’t meet until the end of the story; and this book has the whole globe to trot around before that. There are more than enough subplots and flashbacks to keep readers riveted. The American agent’s wild array of past exploits could fill a book of their own.

Despite Mr. Hayes’s long history as a movie guy (his credits include “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior” and “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” ), “I Am Pilgrim” is not a film treatment bloated into book form. It’s a big, breathless tale of nonstop suspense, and it has something rarely found in big-budget movies of the same genre: the voice of a single writer instead of the patchwork nonsense created by endless collaborators and fixers. Mr. Hayes delivers his share of far-fetched moments, and no doubt he’d like to see “I Am Pilgrim” filmed some day. But he’s his own worst enemy in that regard. His novel will be hard for any movie version to beat.

The screenwriter in Mr. Hayes mandates that “I Am Pilgrim” begin with a big, lurid crime scene. So our narrator, who goes by many fake names, is summoned to a hotel room in Lower Manhattan in the aftermath of Sept. 11. There, in the midst of the chaos, is a once-hot-looking woman who has been killed in a way that erases all signs of her identity. It’s almost as if the killer had followed guidelines described in the secret but worshipfully regarded forensics manual our guy wrote, under the fake name Jude Garrett, for a secret subsidiary of the C.I.A.

With lightning speed, and with logic best not examined too closely, Mr. Hayes greatly widens his book’s canvas after this New York scene. We find out about how, our main man, now 32, spent his early years on an estate in Greenwich, Conn.; was faking his identity, even as a boy; and has earned his reputation as a lethal spy but fears that he must give up a “a thing most people call love, I suppose.” As he puts it, “I wanted to walk along a beach with someone and not think about how far a sniper can fire.” Maybe that’s possible in a sequel, but he won’t be taking any slow, romantic strolls this time.

Cut to Saudi Arabia, where the mind of a teenage terrorist is being formed. Allowing for the fact that few mainstream Western writers have much insight into such characters, Mr. Hayes does what he can to breathe life into the ideas of hatred and vengeance as life-altering motivations. (He has also written screenplays for Mel Gibson.) So this boy, who will come to be known as the Saracen, has his fate determined by his father’s. “Only in a police state does a child pray for nothing more serious than a crippling accident to have befallen their parent,” Mr. Hayes writes. Grammarians who howl at popular fiction like Dan Brown’s books can find a lot to work with here, too.

After Mr. Hayes writes, more movingly than gruesomely, of how the boy is affected by his father’s public beheading (his crime: disparaging the royal family), he raises the rage level: The family’s widowed mother must now get a job, which somehow entails exposing her face and wearing Gucci sunglasses. That’s it: The son goes into exile, determined to learn how to wage war against America. A couple of decades later, having roamed from Bahrain to Afghanistan to Germany, he is ready and able.

The Saracen becomes a doctor and, after experimenting shockingly on human guinea pigs, perfects a new, improved strain of plague that is vaccine-proof. On a parallel track, our guy — who will ultimately be known as Pilgrim (no clue as to whether this is meant to evoke John Wayne ) — is recruited at the highest level (enter the president of the United States) to ward off a terrible but mysterious threat to the nation, a threat that turns the last part of the book into a race against the clock.

Mr. Hayes aligns his characters very ingeniously for this final part of the story, to the point where even that initial New York murder has something to do with it, and all the loose ends begin to come together. By this point, the Saracen and Pilgrim are a couple so clearly made for each other that the reader can hardly wait for them to meet. The setting, like all this book’s settings, is too picturesque for words. Mr. Hayes seems to have done backbreaking travel to some of the world’s most beautiful places in the name of research for his peripatetic story.

This author excels at a foreshadowing that is nothing if not galvanizing: “I headed back down the crumbling passage, deeper into the gloom. There was one thing, however, that I had overlooked, and for the rest of my life I would wonder about the mistake I made.” But at its all-important finale, “I Am Pilgrim” suffers a fit of Hollywooditis, and abandons some of the toughness it has worked so hard to develop. This book doesn’t exactly end; it just stops, and Mr. Hayes does whatever he must to make that happen. At the price of credibility, he paves the way for a sequel. It’s not a fair trade.

I AM PILGRIM

By Terry Hayes

612 pages. Emily Bestler Books/Atria. $26.99.

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Finally Out and Worth the Wait, The Year of the Locust by Terry Hayes

The author of the 2014 blockbuster I Am Pilgrim explains why it took a full decade to finish his second spy thriller.

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At nearly 900 pages, this literary doorstop follows Pilgrim, a misanthropic American intelligence agent who tries to stop a Saudi terrorist from releasing a deadly virus. Even after a decade, the memory of a scene in which Pilgrim dislodges a corpse’s eyes in order to use them to pass a biometric security checkpoint remains vividly terrifying.

Almost immediately after Pilgrim came out, a follow-up, to be called The Year of the Locust , was announced. A Pilgrim

film was in the works. Hayes wrote a screenplay. Directors were attached. New writers were brought in. Would Pilgrim become the next Jason Bourne, Ethan Hunt, James Bond—or all three? And then: silence. It took Donna Tartt a decade to follow up The Secret History and Harper Lee 55 years to release Go Set a Watchman . Emily Brontë wrote only Wuthering Heights .

.css-4rnr1w:before{margin:0 auto 1.875rem;width:60%;height:0.125rem;content:'';display:block;background-color:#9a0500;color:#fff;} .css-gcw71x{color:#030929;font-family:NewParis,NewParis-fallback,NewParis-roboto,NewParis-local,Georgia,Times,serif;font-size:1.625rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.625rem;line-height:1.1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-gcw71x{font-size:2.8125rem;line-height:1.1;}}.css-gcw71x b,.css-gcw71x strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-gcw71x em,.css-gcw71x i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} "It wasn't like I was sitting around drinking beer and playing skittles. I was working," says Hayes.

After a stint as an investigative reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald , Hayes, 72, a ­British-born Australian, worked in Hollywood on such films as Dead Calm and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior . He palled around with Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Robert Evans. He met Heidi Fleiss and wishes he’d taken notes. He gave up screenwriting when an executive asked him to add a chimps-­versus-­humans baseball game to a draft of a Planet of the Apes remake.

“I said to my wife, ‘I’m going to write a novel,’ ” Hayes says. With his Hollywood savings, “I could agonize over it all and redo it and think more about it.”

I Am Pilgrim was a smash, and for the follow-up Hayes felt he could take his time. But there’s a difference between a few years and a decade. His readers waited with charged Kindles, filling the void with Jack Reacher installments by Lee Child and the senior citizens of the Thursday Murder Club. But nothing seemed to come.

“It wasn’t like I was sitting around drinking beer and playing skittles,” says Hayes. “I was working.”

American readers can finally get their hands on The Year of the Locust this month (Simon & Schuster, $32). It follows the global adventures of a misanthropic shadow operative spy named Kane and clocks in at 250,000 words. “I don’t think it’s a book until it’s 600 pages,” Hayes insists. “That’s what a psychopath I am.”

The Year of the Locust: A Thriller

What took so long? Hayes spent time raising his four children. “I saw more productions of Aladdin than any person deserves to,” he says. “I don’t regret that.” And over the last 10 years he deleted a full 750,000 words, or as he describes it, “a lot of work to chuck away.” He adds, “The sensible business decision would be to bring out a book, then another. Clearly I’m not that sensible. But if I don’t do it the way I want to do it, why am I doing it at all?”

Hayes remains in talks with Hollywood about a Pilgrim adaptation. Recently Austin Butler has been circling the role. And the author insists he’s working on a sequel to Locust . “I’ve got a good idea on the plot, and I know those characters,” he promises. “The next book won’t take nearly as long.”

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I AM PILGRIM

by Terry Hayes ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 27, 2014

Two psychos enter, and one psycho leaves. Good entertainment for readers with a penchant for mayhem, piles of bodies and a...

Tom Clancy meets Robin Cook in a thriller that should find a place in many beach bags this summer.

Debut novelist Hayes brings well-refined storytelling chops to the enterprise: He’s written numerous screenplays, including  Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome . Indeed, while reading this novel, one gets the sense it was written to turn into a screenplay or perhaps began life that way, what with its shifting points of view and a narrator who may or may not be reliable. Whatever the case, Hayes gets us into the thick of things right away: Pilgrim, a federal agent, is a brilliant student of the human psyche who just happens to have awesome killing skills that he’s practiced on several continents; in Moscow, for instance, he recounts, “even though I was young and inexperienced I killed my boss like a professional.” Don’t give him a bad performance review, then. He finds plenty of scope for his talents when put up against a former mujahedeen ominously code-named The Saracen, who’s resolved to wreak all kinds of havoc on the West for its offenses against Islam. He’s a bad, bad man—the fact that he wasn’t killed in the war along with a million other Afghans, Hayes writes, “would make most people question if not God’s existence at least His common sense.” Hayes is a master of the extremely gruesome scene—the opening involves an acid bath, and later we get popped eyeballs, beheadings and all kinds of grisliness. The story does go on a hundred pages too long and gets sidelined here and there, but it has considerable strengths, and the author gets points for avoiding at least some clichés and putting a few Arabs into key good-guy (or good-girl) positions.

Pub Date: May 27, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-4391-7772-3

Page Count: 624

Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria

Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014

THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

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BOOK TO SCREEN

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice ( The Bone Collection , 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

GENERAL MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | DETECTIVES & PRIVATE INVESTIGATORS | SUSPENSE | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER

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by Kathy Reichs

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An Electrifying Novel That Will Keep You Up Reading All Night

I read I AM PILGRIM in 2014, and again in 2019. I missed the escapism, and the sigh of relief the book had me feeling—jet-setting from exotic locales while devouring the legends of two amazing protagonists.

In Terry Hayes’s bestselling novel, a murder takes place in a grungy Lower East Side hotel, post-9/11. It’s a pretty gruesome murder that makes identifying a young, mutilated woman on a mattress impossible. The NYPD is called to the scene, where the lead officer, Ben Bradley (the heart of the story, in my opinion), notices the killer’s technique is taken from a forensic pathology book he had previously been obsessed with, written by a CIA ghost named “Jude Garrett.”

From here, we meet our narrator, “Pilgrim,” who grew up in Greenwich, CT, with adoptive parents. All throughout his life he used different aliases. We find out his lonely, but privileged childhood helped shape him into the best agent the CIA had ever seen, beginning his “Rider of the Blue” legacy with killing an agency mole in Russia. But the aftermath of September 11th is too much for him to handle. So he goes off the grid in Paris and writes his book under Jude Garrett only for it to backfire, when Ben and his wife, the lovely Marcie, tracked him down.

In the second narrative, a young boy, “the Saracen,” morphs into a jihadist bioterrorist. After seeing his father get beheaded in the public square for making lewd comments about the Saudi monarch, the boy’s ideology on life changes. The family moves to Bahrain, where he sees his once ultraconservative mother wearing chic sunglasses and exposing skin in public with men who aren’t relatives. The boy, disgusted, eventually leaves for Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban.

Still angry, but perhaps more calculated, the Saracen eventually becomes a doctor. He builds a genetically modified version of the smallpox vaccine and tests it on three kidnapped subjects. Bad news for the rest of the world: it works.

Pilgrim comes out of retirement to help with a lead from a former colleague, causing him to go to Turkey. It’s there he investigates a separate murder of a Greek billionaire, which is actually a cover, to the closely guarded Saracen threat. Needing his help, Pilgrim calls Ben Bradley, and a cat-and-mouse game ensues with bullets, boats, and kidnapped children.

It could have been easy for Hayes to drown the plot with suicide bombings and tradecraft jargon. But he doesn’t. On the one hand, the dual-narrative helps drive the classic spy-thriller model, but on the other, Hayes makes you feel like you’re listening to him tell a fireside story. You’re reeled in by little intricate parts of the story—whether that be the rolling hills of the Turquoise Coast, or how an ancient instrument sounded. By the time you reach the misty-eyed ending, you won’t even be upset that Hayes ruined your sleep cycle.

Read David Brown’s review here.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, i am pilgrim.

The problem that I have with reviewing I AM PILGRIM isn’t my usual one --- how to begin --- but rather how to finish. Before I even had the book in hand, I had a couple of folks recommend it to me in the strongest possible terms, which is what I will do for you as well before we’re done here. They also understated their cases, but can be forgiven. This is a mammoth book, one that criss-crosses the world and goes back and forth over a couple of decades within the course of several hundred pages, with side journeys off the wild night’s ride of the two main plots.

Let me begin with a warning: once you start reading this book, you won’t want to stop. There’s no good place to do so, either. I tried to go to sleep a couple of times one night but found myself wondering, as the limerick goes, who was going to do what to whom, and succumbed to reading a few more pages. Until I was through. I doubt that your results will differ.

"This is a mammoth book, one that criss-crosses the world and goes back and forth over a couple of decades within the course of several hundred pages... I AM PILGRIM is the must-read book of this summer."

The Pilgrim of the title uses a bunch of different names during the course of I AM PILGRIM, such as Scott Murdoch, Jude Garrett, Richard Gibson and Peter Campbell (yes!), among others, for a very good reason. Pilgrim is summoned in a consulting capacity to a rundown hotel room in New York where a woman’s body has been discovered. All distinguishing and identifiable features of the victim have been burned off with acid; the room has been washed down with an industrial-strength antiseptic; and all of her teeth have been pulled and disposed of. We gradually learn who Pilgrim is, and why he has been brought in as a consultant. The story is told in anything but a linear fashion; Pilgrim is an expert criminologist who does not exist, and also has been the titular head of an off-the-books government agency, a sort of Internal Affairs Bureau that oversees the NSA and CIA, administering a swift and certain unapologetic rough justice for betrayal.

When events overtake the agency and is shut down, Pilgrim moves restlessly from place to place, concealing his identity and maintaining himself as a moving target against the enemies he has made throughout the world. He is pressed back into service, however, when an Islamic fanatic known as the Saracen devises a plot to bring the United States --- and, by extension, Israel --- to the ground. It is made clear that this event took place several years in the past, and is something that only a handful of people knew of. Clearly, Pilgrim stopped the Saracen; otherwise, he would not be around to tell the tale that he narrates so well here. What is not immediately obvious, though, is how Pilgrim does so, which is not revealed until toward the end of the book.

And the murder that opens I AM PILGRIM? Oh, we learn a thing or two about that as well, and a whole lot about Pilgrim, as relayed with side-trips short and long into his past, stories of spy tradecraft and rough men who stand ready in the night while we sleep peacefully. Even when author Terry Hayes brings the narrative to a screeching halt while Pilgrim goes off on the equivalent of a “hey, that reminds me…” tangent, the book remains fascinating and riveting from first sentence to last paragraph. Oh, and that last paragraph. It’s a beautiful one, so much so that it almost eclipses all that has gone before.

Before I go, let’s talk about Hayes for a moment. If you don’t necessarily recognize his name, you know his work in film, which includes such classics as Payback and the iconic The Road Warrior. But I AM PILGRIM is in a class all its own. I am not entirely sure that it’s fiction, to be honest; it reads more like a memoir, and there is an important element in it --- one that kind of kickstarts the book --- that seems to hint that perhaps Hayes is standing in place of one of those rough men I mentioned earlier. It’s either a testimony to his imagination and talent as a writer or my own imagination. Or insight. We’ll probably never know. But what I do know is that I AM PILGRIM is the must-read book of this summer.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on May 30, 2014

I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

• Publication Date: July 21, 2015
• Genres: Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Mass Market Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Pocket Books
• ISBN-10: 1501119451
• ISBN-13: 9781501119453

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I Am Pilgrim

by Terry Hayes

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Terry Hayes' debut novel I Am Pilgrim is a fast-paced thriller set in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In many ways I Am Pilgrim is a standard race-against-time story: The protagonist (code-named "Pilgrim") – a remarkably skillful former head of a super-secret U.S. agency few know exists – is brought out of retirement to find a terrorist ("The Saracen") before he's able to release a particularly virulent strain of the smallpox virus on an unsuspecting American public. Along the way he tracks his prey using his finely honed skills (coupled with the occasional bit of good luck), has setbacks and successes, and plays cat and mouse with international bad guys that want him out of the way - permanently. In other words, pretty formulaic stuff that could be the synopsis of any one of a number of novels.There are aspects to this particular book, though, that set it above most of the others in this genre. First and foremost, Hayes creates richly detailed characters whom one really comes to understand. It would have been easy enough, for example, for the author to simply use a stereotypical Taliban extremist as his villain, but he goes the extra mile in showing readers this individual's childhood and how, exactly, his loathing of Western culture evolved over time. The end result is an exceptionally cold-blooded and remorseless killer readers will have no trouble seeing as a mass-murderer; the effect is absolutely chilling. The hero, too, is multi-faceted; we learn how Pilgrim's character was formed and come to admire his cleverness and daring. I particularly enjoyed the fact that he was drawn somewhat ambiguously; he's not necessarily a 100% "good guy," and from time to time his actions are morally questionable. He remains likeable throughout, however, exhibiting a combination of light-hearted bravado and steely-eyed resolve reminiscent of James Bond – a difficult balance for any author to achieve and done extraordinarily well here. The quality of the author's writing also stands out. He goes beyond simply conveying action, taking great pains to paint detailed scenes that come to life for the reader:

For mile after mile we crisscrossed the sprawling city – four and a half million souls marooned in the middle of the desert – seemingly half of them employed by Aramco, the world's largest oil company – and interviewed people about a family which had long since vanished. We sat in the majlis – the formal sitting rooms – of poor houses way out in the suburbs and questioned men whose hands were trembling, we saw dark-eyed kids watching from shadowy doorways and glimpsed veiled women in floor-length burkas hurrying away at our approach.

Hayes' background as a screenwriter is evident; at over 600 pages I Am Pilgrim could appear intimidating, and yet the plot is so well paced that it never drags; at times the action sequences had me almost reading faster than I could turn the pages. There are a few problems with the novel that could keep some from finding it an enjoyable romp, the most prominent of which is the plausibility of many of the book's action scenes. There were several times when I had to suspend disbelief; if you want a book in which every piece fits neatly together and makes logical sense, this isn't the one for you. Also problematic may be the long set-up as readers are introduced to the main characters; the beginning is definitely more character than action-driven. Personally, I found these sections interesting and was completely drawn in by Hayes' prose. And finally, included are some pretty brutal scenes (including passages depicting torture) that could be off-putting for some readers. Those quibbles aside, I Am Pilgrim makes for a great (if somewhat weighty) beach read; it's fast, suspenseful and involving, while at the same time not requiring a great deal of thought or analysis to enjoy. I highly recommend the novel to those looking for a well-written and entertaining thriller with which to while away the summer hours.

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Review: ‘I Am Pilgrim’ has intriguing protagonist

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“I Am Pilgrim” (Atria/Emily Bestler Books), by Terry Hayes

A man with ties to a top-secret unit of the federal government has to fight his instincts to stop a madman in Terry Hayes’ compelling thriller “I Am Pilgrim.”

The man goes by the name of Pilgrim. He’s had so many aliases over the years that he has no memory of his real name or identity. When he retired from the agency, he wrote a book on forensics that became the standard by which law enforcement teaches their investigators. Pilgrim lives under the radar, but New York police Detective Ben Bradley knows how to find someone when he’s desperate.

Bradley takes Pilgrim to the scene of a murder in a rundown hotel room. With no way to identify the victim — and the room cleaned of any trace material — it is difficult to get a lead. Pilgrim quickly realizes that everything in the room indicates the killer used techniques described in his book to obliterate any possibility of a clue.

This crime is only the beginning as Pilgrim is thrust into a conspiracy that forces the president of the United States to rely on him to save the world.

As a man who constantly lived other lives, Pilgrim is a fascinating character. Being forced back into the game and fighting a man who seems to know everything about him has Pilgrim on his heels, looking for ways outside the box to stop the plot.

The storytelling and a truly intriguing protagonist make “I Am Pilgrim” a contender for best-of-the-year lists.

Terry Hayes - I Am Pilgrim

“the narrative is thrilling: the tension tightens with action…it’s a murder mystery, an illuminating account of contemporary international politics and a study of an unusual man.”, no major spoilers.

I AM PILGRIM – TERRY HAYES

“Writing a movie is like swimming in a bath and writing a novel is like swimming in the ocean”

Renowned hollywood script writer Terry Hayes(of Mad Max, Vertical limit fame amongst others; not to forget the incredible Australian TV series Bodyline) mentions this in the acknowledgements and saying he did justice to it would be an understatement. I AM PILGRIM is a winner all the way – a flawless page turning blockbuster which I would rate amongst one of the best novels I’ve ever read.

The ideas or the events aren’t exactly something new; in fact I’ve come across all the major themes in countless other novels – ingenious murders, an Islamic fanatic, a secret agent, a threat to America, and a thread to bind them all. However, it’s the way they are narrated – the very essence of writing, that is , story telling that makes this novel stand out amongst its competition. It delivers what it promises – non stop thrills and action without coming across as over the top.

Just one thing which I found he could have done better is keep it about 20 pages shorter. No, he hasn’t padded his story anywhere but I felt the ending had to be as heart stopping and deadly as the rest of the novel. He does provide a perfect climax but then doesn’t leave it there. Instead, he decides to tell some things after the curtain has come down which I feel would have been more apt as part of an epilogue. But that doesn’t take away the fun which lasts for almost 900 pages.

A blockbuster 5/5.

DO NOT MISS THIS!

Reviewed by:

Aditya singh.

Added 15th January 2018

More Reviews By Aditya Singh

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• I am Pilgrim – Review

The Guardian review of the book proclaims it as “The only thriller you need to read this year”. Perhaps rightfully so. The book is well researched with a highly intense tempo maintained throughout the long- ish storyline (900 + pages … whoa ! )

So while the length might put off many of the nuclear-reading segment of the ebook age (those who like their books short and sharp), the multiple subplots and parallel story-lines inherent in the book make it more like a collection of stories. Among the major tales, there is one on international terrorism, another on a murder mystery, an underlying plot of the memoirs of an ex-spy , among others. Not bad at all, pretty engrossing once we start getting engrossed.

There has been a lot of ground work apparently done by the author on various aspects from the executions in KSA to the life of a spy to the way espionage politics occur between international intelligence groups to the mercilessly consequential yet high frequency of cognitive dissonance in the secret world . Not to mention the very striking operating procedures of an international undercover job, especially when its one to save the free world.

A good book. Though initially a reader might be overwhelmed by its length, there is a terrible feeling of bereavement when the book is finished. Especially after the chest-thumping, action-oriented climax.

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The Backlist: Alex Finlay and Polly Stewart Revisit 'I Am Pilgrim,' by Terry Hayes

Authors read a globe-trotting master class in thriller pacing..

Everyone who has ever tried to write crime fiction understands the importance of pacing. It’s not enough to have a plot that sounds exciting on the jacket copy—getting the plot to move in a way that keeps the reader breathlessly turning pages is another matter altogether.

When I first read Alex Finlay’s work, I understood what people meant when they said they couldn’t put a book down. Every chapter tipped me over into the next; every scene made me want to go on to the next one. When I contacted Alex to see if he’d be up for an interview for this series, I was hoping we could talk about how he structures a story to maintain that sense of fervent anticipation, but I had no idea that he’d introduce me to another master of pacing: Terry Hayes, author of I Am Pilgrim and the forthcoming The Year of the Locust . Hayes knows how to keep the reader on the edge of their seat, and more impressively still, he manages to keep it up for over six hundred pages.

Why did you choose I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes?

I read it for the first time about a decade ago, and it was one those rare books that you just can’t wait to get back to. There are a lot of great books out there, but those ones that make you just want to rush back home or finish dinner quickly so you can get back to them—those are few and far between. It was so compelling to me as a reader, and as a writer, I marveled at how Terry Hayes broke convention. I can’t imagine going to my editor and pitching a six hundred plus page thriller, for one thing, and he kept me going through the whole thing. 

I also admired the way he switches things up on the reader. The first scene is what seems like a fairly normal crime—a body found dissolved in acid in a bathtub—but then it blows up into this epic journey with the fate of the world at stake. For me, that was just great.

Do you know Terry Hayes, or have you heard anything about the editing process for this novel?

I don’t know him, but around the time the book came out, I was writing this column for Suspense Magazine that was called something like “America’s Favorite Suspense Authors on the Rules of Fiction.” Over a two-year period or so, I interviewed something like seventy of the leading crime, thriller, and mystery writers, and it was a great education for me, but I also used it as an opportunity to meet some people whose work I admired. Terry Hayes isn’t an American, but I threw him in the mix, and I remember talking to him a little bit about the length. He said it was actually fifty thousand words longer when he signed the contract, so that was interesting. He had to cut it down from that first draft.  

I’ve been reading a lot of spy novels for this series. Terry Hayes seems so confident in the way he portrays the world of espionage, which it sometimes seems that nobody really understands. How do you think he makes it so plausible and so convincing?

I’m not a spy novel reader myself, so maybe it seems authentic to me because I’m not tapped into that world. I felt like he captured a vibe, and it’s kind of intangible. That’s a long-winded way of saying that I don’t really know how he did it, but it’s definitely convincing to me too. 

I’d love to talk about the structure of this novel. There are all these quick cuts between chapters, and nearly every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, which is part of what makes it such a propulsive read. Do you know anything about how he planned it out? 

I don’t, but I think tapped he into something about how our attention spans have changed for the worse in the last couple of decades. I think he realized that one way to combat that for readers is to give them a lot of stimuli. With him, it’s constant changes of pace, changes of character, changes of time. Who doesn’t like to mix it up a little bit? Each chapter, each vignette, is so interesting in itself, and they function almost like short stories, but they also connect up to the main storyline in this really brilliant way.

This book has been optioned, and it’s easy to imagine it as a movie. Because Terry Hayes has done so much screenwriting, I assume that he was thinking in those terms when he was writing too. Do you have any thoughts on the way he employs the techniques of film in this novel?

I’ve seen some of his movies, but I don’t see any of that necessarily in the book other than with the pacing maybe. I haven’t written any screenplays myself, though I’ve read a lot of books on the format for a novel I was writing that included snippets of a screenplay. The form definitely suits my writerly tastes. You know, some writers love to describe everything in detail, the emotions and the trees and the house, but that’s not my style. I can write dialogue all day, and then I’ll often just put a note to myself to fill in the details of what the place looks like. 

Even though this book is very fast-paced, there are about a million different settings and Hayes makes you feel like you’re there with every one. How does he do that, and without much description?

I think it’s the little details. There’s a scene near the beginning where the main character drives over the hill into Paris and sees the Eiffel Tower on the horizon. Hayes doesn’t have to throw the travel guide at you, because little details like that help me to visualize it in my head. For me, that’s the gold standard for thriller writing—when you can use very few words, but create a whole picture in someone’s head.

Do you think Hayes did a lot of research for this book? How do you approach research in your work?

Well, either he did a lot of research or he’s like that guy in the commercial, the most interesting man in the world. I mean, we go from forensics to Swiss banking to torture methods, and there are about a thousand other subjects that he seems to know inside and out. My approach is basically backwards: I write the whole book, guess about anything I don’t know, and then, about three weeks before my deadline, I frantically start calling experts. I don’t want to get a lot of angry emails, basically, but it’s totally the most inefficient and backwards way to do it. On the other hand, I feel like if I started with the research, I’d probably procrastinate and just get lost in the sauce and never get words on the page

Do you know anything about Hayes’s forthcoming novel, The Year of the Locust? I looked it up, and it looks like it’s been delayed since 2015. Do you think it’s ever coming out?

I’ve been tracking it, since Pilgrim is such a favorite of mine. The publisher and Hayes put out a press release, and it’s coming out in February 2024. When I spoke to him, he said he envisioned Pilgrim as the first book in a trilogy, but I don’t think this book is part of that series. He obviously writes at his own pace and does what he wants to do, which is pretty admirable. 

Is there anything else that you learned from this novel that you think you might use in your own work? 

This book is a great example of a really elaborate structure with multiple perspectives and multiple timelines. And I think it’s a masterclass in writing a great hook, in the sense that the first chapter really reels you in. But I also think this book is kind of proof of the old saying that there are no rules in writing as long as you can pull it off. I’m not generally a no-rules person–

I do think there are elements of craft that are probably necessary for aspiring writers who want to get in the door. On the other hand, this was a debut novel and Hayes certainly broke every rule. It’s inspiring, if not practical, and I was saying to my wife this morning, “I want to write a book like Pilgrim someday.” I’d love to do something epic like that. It’s just great.

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The best recent thrillers – review roundup

Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me (Mulholland, £14.99) is enormous fun, a psychological thriller worthy of Ruth Rendell or  Patricia Highsmith . We know that Paul – a once-successful novelist, now a professional freeloader – is awful, but he is roguishly charming company and has a gift for noticing telling details, even if the pattern he makes with them is fatally askew. His whole identity is based on lies which, so far, have never caught up with him. But when by chance he meets an old university friend and gets in with his circle, including a widow called Alice, Paul is invited to spend the summer with their families at her Greek villa. Is he the lucky recipient of their generosity or an object of contempt, lured to Greece for some other nefarious purpose? The way the narration keeps us guessing is masterly. But Durrant is an astute satirist, too. She captures this monied but dysfunctional world with hilarious precision, down to little details such as the way upper-middle-class people say “oh, well done” to those beneath them for middling achievements such as completing a journey.

To complain about thrillers being “implausible” always feels slightly dumb. But the truth is their universe must have integrity and coherence – especially if an author’s goal is the undermining of those qualities for effect. The heroine of Helen Callaghan’s warm, engaging but ultimately puzzling debut Dear Amy (Michael Joseph, £12.99) is Margot Lewis, a secondary school teacher who moonlights as an agony aunt for her local newspaper in Cambridge. This is a world in which people write physical letters to “Dear Amy” which, even more surprisingly, Margot goes into the paper’s office to collect. One day, shortly after a girl from her school is abducted, she receives the first of several letters purporting to be from Bethan Avery, another local girl who vanished 20 years before. She takes the second of these to the police, but they are not interested. At one point she visits her local library because she hasn’t been able to find the information she needs on the internet. After you have clocked up several of these “What, really?” moments, the big twist arrives and sheds light on some of them ... But it’s tricky because you can only pull a rug away if it exists in the first place.

On the face of it, Fargo creator Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall (Hodder, £14.99) is equally far-fetched. But somehow you don’t notice, even when plane crash survivor Scott Burroughs is swimming through the night with a dislocated shoulder, tugging a child behind him. Among the passengers who did not miraculously survive the private jet’s destruction were David Bateman, head of a Fox News-type network, and Ben Kipling, a banker about to be indicted for money laundering. Burroughs is a painter who was befriended by Bateman’s wife; the child he is towing is Bateman’s son. The engine of the mystery is the accident investigation itself, but Hawley is just as interested in the brutal, dehumanising effects of the way the story plays out across the media landscape Bateman helped to shape. Arguably, the novel is over-designed – the device of looping back to focus in detail on the build-up to the flight for each of the passengers works better in theory than in practice – but it’s beautifully written and consistently thought-provoking.

Benjamin Warner’s debut, Thirst (Bloomsbury, £12.99), tracks the breakdown of society in slow motion from the point of Eddie Chapman’s discovery that the water supply has dried up. That there is no explanation for this doesn’t matter; the rural setting, too, doesn’t feel especially American – Warner seems to be aiming for the universalising opacity of Saramago’s Blindness . The characters are essentially incurious about their fate and oddly trusting in the ability of the authorities to save them. A lethargy is present from the outset – the effects of dehydration just exacerbate it. Warner’s main focus is Eddie and his girlfriend and their struggle to find water – hell, liquid of any sort, even pickling vinegar. Bottled water is the new gold. The problem with Thirst is that it wants us to treat it as a moral fable, yet its insights are banal – we know how scarcity and desperation make people behave.

James Swallow has been the unseen hand behind a mass of SF tie-in novels (for franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who ) as well as audio dramas and video games. His latest, Nomad (Zaffre, £12.99), is a globe-trotting espionage thriller, its hero Marc Dane a betrayed MI6 operative branded a traitor when he is the only survivor of a botched operation. Dane is a lowly “forward mission specialist” and his rapid ascension to Bond-like superspy will cause your eyebrows to do the full Roger Moore . The cover declares that it’s “for fans of I Am Pilgrim ”. In truth it isn’t half as good as that bestseller, and feels as if it has been written in a hurry. It is superior hackwork, though, and very enjoyable.

When the sitter cancels at the last moment, Anne and Marco Conti leave their six-month-old baby Cora home alone while they pop next door for a boozy dinner with their neighbours. But when they return home, the front door is ajar and Cora is gone, even though they only checked on her half an hour before.... So begins The Couple Next Door (Bantam, £12.99), the twisty, frenetic debut of former lawyer Shari Lapena. We share local detective Rasbach’s suspicions that all is not what it seems. And boy, is all not what it seems … There’s tight, effective storytelling here, but the subject matter can’t disguise the thinness of the characters or the way baby Cora is abstracted into a McGuffin.

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Review: I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

It has a brilliant plot, occasionally the grammar will stop you and make you need to reread the sentence but in a book this good, I’d forgive a lot. Telling the story of a man who is intent on destroying America and another man’s struggle to prevent him, it’s a complex and tightly woven novel. The Saracen’s father was beheaded when he was 14, tortured and beheaded for speaking out against the Saudi royal family. Highly intelligent and realising that revenge wouldn’t happen overnight, he set out on a long journey to destroy the ‘far enemy’ (America) so that it would destroy the ‘near enemy’. ?The revenge was going to be in the form of tampered vaccines whereby the highly infectious smallpox would kill thousands and millions of Americans. Given what is happening with Ebola at the moment and the attempts to quarantine huge areas, it perhaps isn’t as farfetched as it might seem. His cruelty and determinations is revealed in his extreme planning deliberate infectation of three victims who all die tortured deaths. ?The author also seemed to suspect that he would be accused of it being farfetched and provided ‘evidence’ of similar events in history e.g. one example of torture towards the end of the book was cited as being used in Japanese war camps in WW2.

The only person who can stop him is Scott, adopted child of extremely wealthy parents but who has dissociated himself from all past friends and family. Having proved himself already to be a brilliant agent, he was attempting to leave that life when he was invited along to a bizarre murder scene. A woman has been murdered in an apartment and there are no clues as to her identity ?- her body has been burnt by acid, her teeth have been removed, and other steps have been taken to ensure her identity will never be discovered. All of these ‘methods’ were copied from Scott’s book (written under a pseudonym) which provides the reason for his future investigation.

What ties this murder with a man’s eyes being removed from his live body, with the attempt to stop the Saracen sending 10,000 vials of biological warfare to America? ?It’s complex and it will suck you in. Written in the first person narrative, the character of Scott keeps you on side, it feels as though he is confiding in you, telling you a story, revealing mistakes he made, and making us turn the pages to see how each mistake affects the progress of the investigation.

The books seems to be well researched, there may be glaring errors that someone more knowledgeable about Islam, Saudi Arabia and Turkey will spot but it seems to be expertly researched, it felt as though Terry Hayes had visited all of those locations as they are described with such depth. The extent of torture used is something that I don’t like to think about, I cringe if I even hear of an animal being mistreated but to hear of people being tortured so they beg for death is something else. ?Scott is a likeable person and what makes him even more likeable is the fact that he can’t stomach watching people being tortured, even though he is responsible for killing traitors to the US. His colleague The Whisperer knows he will break under torture and advises him to leave this world before it gets to that stage – this really adds to the tension towards the end of the book.

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Home / Find a book / I Am Pilgrim

I Am Pilgrim

By Terry Hayes, and and, Christopher Ragland

St Just Monday Morning Reading Group 22nd August 2022.

I am Pilgrim. Terry Hayes.

The group’s discussion of this book was long, highly interesting, and ranged over a number of issues. In general readers thought the narrative was cleverly plotted, convincing, realistic, and very absorbing. A majority said they liked the book; one or two readers said they didn’t, but just the same they were drawn into it whilst reading. It was also agreed that the story looked as if it were intended as a film-script, and we suspected that a film of it is in fact in production. The plot, we thought, must have entailed a lot of research into the various complexities, not least the smallpox element, and the ingenuity of involving the reader in finding out what is happening, or ‘making the reader into a spy’, was pointed out and admired. We did notice some minor holes in the plot, but decided that in a film, when viewed at speed, these would be unnoticeable.

We talked about the violence in this book, some of which is highly gruesome, and whether this was acceptable or not – the consensus was that the violence was a necessary, though challenging, aspect of the book: it raised the stakes of the events described, and explained to the reader why the characters are invested in them so much; it added depth to the story; and it was connected with real events of war and terrorism from which we can hardly escape. We compared the violence in this book to that in Sebastian Barry’s On this day, which we read a while ago.

We considered the idea of the distribution of the smallpox variant via a supposed vaccine for the disease. The novel was written prior to the present pandemic, and so a number of questions were raised about the workability of this scheme, principally, whether or not it would be containable with the US. Current events of course suggest that it would not. We talked about how smallpox spreads, whether the older generation in the UK have immunity to it or not, and what might have happened if the virus had been released in multiple locations. We also touched upon the immorality of medical practitioners, or supposed ones, spreading disease instead of curing it, and asked ourselves whether such a thing is worse than, for instance, the attack on the World Trade Center. We also compared the smallpox release scenario with the matter of anthrax release during World War Two.

Another moral issue that arose was the question of whether suicide (as depicted in the book) is sanctioned by Islam, or not, and under what circumstances.

Following this was a discussion about radicalisation of young people to extreme forms of religion (Islam and others), how this comes about, and how this may lead to the committing of atrocities. In this particular book, we thought, religion has been twisted by human beings to serve evil purposes – the protagonists do in fact make conscious and deliberate choices about their actions, and are not merely victims of their upbringing or of indoctrination. Their choices might be flavoured, or influenced, by their backgrounds, but they are still choices just the same. In a similar vein: was the book Islamophobic, or not? In the end we decided that though anti-Muslim vocabulary is certainly used, in essence the author is only criticising extreme Islam, and not the religion itself or the majority of its genuine followers.

The discussion could have continued longer, but was ended by our time limit, and closed with a (paraphrased) quotation from Marx: ‘History is made by men under circumstances not of their own choosing’.

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• Published: 1 April 2014
• ISBN: 9780552160964
• Imprint: Corgi
• Format: Paperback
• RRP: $26.00
• Crime & mystery
• Thriller & suspense

I Am Pilgrim

Terry Hayes

The Day of the Jackal meets Homeland with a dash of Bourne - the ground-breaking, internationally bestselling thriller that captivated millions of readers worldwide.

'A big, breathless tale of nonstop suspense' The New York Times 'Simply one of the best suspense novels I've read in a long time' David Baldacci 'An all too plausible disaster for the world we live in. Great nail-biting stuff' Robert Goddard 'The plot twists and turns like a python in a sack... Visceral, gritty and cinematic' The Times _______________

The astonishing story of one man's breakneck race against time to save America from oblivion.

A YOUNG WOMAN MURDERED. All of her identifying characteristics dissolved by acid.

A FATHER PUBLICLY BEHEADED. Killed in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square.

A SYRIAN BIOTECH EXPERT FOUND EYELESS. Dumped in a Damascus junkyard.

SMOULDERING HUMAN REMAINS. Abandoned on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan.

PILGRIM. The codename for a man who doesn't exist. A man who must return from obscurity. The only man who can uncover a flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.

The much-anticipated, heart-racing new thriller from Terry Hayes, THE YEAR OF THE LOCUST, is available now. _______________

Praise for Terry Hayes

'Clever and compulsive' Sunday Mirror 'Huge ambition and even huger talent' Stav Sherez 'Compelling and wildly inventive storytelling' Chris Ewan 'Hayes brings well-refined storytelling chops to the enterprise' Kirkus

About the author

Terry Hayes is a former journalist and screen-writer. Born in Sussex, England, he migrated to Australia as a child and trained as a journalist at the country’s leading broadsheet. At twenty-one he was appointed North American correspondent, based in New York, and after two years returned to Sydney to become an investigative reporter, political correspondent and columnist.

He resigned to produce a prominent current affairs radio program and a short time later, with George Miller, wrote the screenplay for Road Warrior/Mad Max 2. He also co-produced and wrote Dead Calm, the film which launched Nicole Kidman’s international movie career, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and a large number of TV movies and mini-series – including Bodyline and Bangkok Hilton – two of which received international Emmy nominations. In all, he has won over twenty film or television awards.

After moving to Los Angeles he worked as a screen-writer on major studio productions. His credits include Payback with Mel Gibson, From Hell , starring Johnny Depp, and Vertical Limit with Chris O’Donnell. He has also done un-credited writing on a host of other movies including Reign of Fire, Cliffhanger and Flightplan, starring Jodie Foster.

The Year of the Locust is Terry Hayes' second novel. His first, I Am Pilgrim was an international bestseller. He and his American wife – Kristen – have four children and live in Switzerland.

Also by Terry Hayes

Praise for I Am Pilgrim

Massive in many senses, but none more so than its ability to exert a vice-like grip on the reader....Destined to be spy thriller of the year Irish Independent

Rendition yourself into a pulsating thriller that never lets up as it carries the hero and the reader on an ever more desperate race between time and an all too plausible disaster for the world we live in. Great nail-biting stuff! Robert Goddard

The narrative is thrilling: the tension tightens with action...It's a murder mystery, an illuminating account of contemporary international politics and a study of an unusual man......An excellent thriller which as a first novel is really remarkable Literary Review

THRILLER OF THE WEEK. Delivers thrills and spills...A full tilt mix of Homeland , The Wire and The Bourne Ultimatum Mail on Sunday

I Am Pilgrim is a 21st century thriller: a high concept plot, but with finely drawn protagonists. The plot twists and turns like a python in a sack. The style is visceral, gritty and cinematic...A satisfying and ambitious book, written with skill and verve Adam LeBor, The Times

Clever and compulsive - the best thriller in years Deidre O'Brien, Sunday Mirror

THRILLER OF THE MONTH - If the gizmos and bad guys of James Bond and Jason Bourne are a guilty pleasure, you'll love I Am Pilgrim Good Housekeeping

Fast-paced, slick and full of suspense...It will be the only thriller you need to read this year Yorkshire Post

I Am Pilgrim takes the modern spy novel and pushes it screaming and kicking into the twentieth-first century. With a stunning sense of plot, beautifully detailed writing, huge ambition and even huger talent, Hayes has produced one of the most memorable novels of recent times. This is a frightening, pulse-pounding journey into the future of terrorism and the brave new world we’ve been ushered into. Amazingly assured and complex, this is one of the best debut novels I’ve ever read Stav Sherez

Terry Hayes' I AM PILGRIM delivers smart, compelling and wildly inventive storytelling, told on an ambitious scale with total command. A masterful novel and a terrific read Chris Ewan

As relevant as today's headlines. A scary trip through the shadowy world of international espionage. Just hope that Pilgrim is on our side. Terrific. No, on second thoughts, better than terrific Mark Timlin

A rollicking, yet thoughtful spy thriller which looks set to become a summer blockbuster... [ I Am Pilgrim ] has plenty of action, but at its heart the drama is cerebral and rich in character, a battle of wills and intellect which is more George Smiley than Jason Bourne Tom Tivnan, The Bookseller

[Terry Hayes’] debut novel has been hyped as "the only thriller you need to read this year", and for once that isn't nonsense. I Am Pilgrim makes moussaka of its rivals John O’Connell, Guardian

I Am Pilgrim is going to be big Simon Mayo

I Am Pilgrim is a satisfying and ambitious book, written with skill and verve The Times

Worthy of the hype **** Sunday Mirror

I Am Pilgrim is a fresh new take on the genre...and it’s one you won’t regret picking up David Baldacci

[ I Am Pilgrim ] has been a fantastic read: a big, solid, chunky, fast-paced, rip-roaring thriller, the love child of a manic union between Jack Reacher and James Bond. Heat

Mr. Hayes’s globe-trotting book has more kicks, twists and winks than anything of its dusty genre has provided in a long time. You will be happily surprised to find a new thriller franchise with brains to match its brawn Janet Maslin, New York Times

Written in a heart-stopping pace, this literary thriller lands somewhere between Homeland and Breaking Bad and then transports you to a different level. It is part spy novel, part psychological thriller. Twists and turns. Emotionally complex characters. Relevant geopolitical issues. Monica Lewinsky, Wall Street Journal

The best thriller I've read in ten years... An astonishing piece of work Linwood Barclay

Discover more

The author of I Am Pilgrim shares his thoughts on finding inspiration, the books that shaped his youth, and what to expect from The Year of the Locust, his long-awaited second novel.

Reading group discussion points for I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

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• 19 January 2019

I am Pilgrim

I am Pilgrim Review: a compelling plot, rich characters, horrifying jeopardy and seat-edge cliff-hangers make this a must-read.  Here are 8 reasons I recommend it. 

I am Pilgrim  by Terry Hayes is an epic, breathtaking chase from New York to Afghanistan to Bahrain to Gaza to Bodrum to Bulgaria and back.

Hold onto your hats – I am Pilgrim  is quite a ride

I am Pilgrim Review

Here (no spoilers) are 8 reasons I am Pilgrim  will thrill you :

Characterisation

This is outstanding feature of the novel.  Both the bad guy (“The Saracen”) and the protagonist, the US-trained superspy codenamed “Pilgrim” (both Saracen and Pilgrim can also mean “Nomad”), are richly drawn, with enough back story to fill several novels.  This can be irritating: the book is so long that some threads of detail disappear (Pilgrim’s drug habit) or reappear without having appeared in the first place (the Saracen’s dead wife).   But on the whole the characters, including a host of minor players, gleam like diamonds.  This makes you care about them.

The action scenes in I am Pilgrim are thrilling.  I loved the firefight in an Afghan village, the ghastly deaths of three hostages and the theft of some medical supplies from a heavily-guarded facility.  All will have you on the edge of your seat.

Consequences

The consequences with which the world – specifically the US – will threatened if Pilgrim does not succeed in his mission are credible and horrific.  The book illustrates the potential horror early on in microcosm.  You pray it will not come about on a bigger scale.

Pilgrim himself has an unerring moral compass which draws sympathy – a bit like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher  (links in bold italics are to other posts on this blog).  Other characters also have clear moral values.  Even “The Saracen” plans his act of evil for reasons which he believes are pure and noble.

Rich insights

Hayes reaches deep into characters to create insights which enrich and illuminate the book.  He creates a Jewish character who has survived the Holocaust and hangs around the Bebelplatz – a memorial to the 1933 book-burning by Nazis in Berlin – to highlight one point.  This is that  when millions of people, a whole political system, countless numbers of citizens who believed in God, said they were going to kill you – just listen to them.   Later, Pilgrim inspires a cynical musician who has lost his mojo to resume his musical career – just in passing.  The book is full of fascinating detail.

I am Pilgrim  contains some fine epigrams .  I liked  Evidence is the name we give to what we have, but what about the things we haven’t found?  and  If you want to be free, all you have to do is let go.

The structure  of the book is outstanding.  Hints from opening chapters flower into relevance hundreds of pages later.  For example Pilgrim’s early hatred of the practice of torture by “waterboarding” sets the scene for it to be used later.  The early love of an anonymous Geneva banker for his family becomes a key to the resolution.

Cliff-hangers

The book is rich in  cliff-hangers , especially from the mid-way on.  You really, really want to know what will happen next.  For tips on how to do this, see my post scenes and sequels: how to build tension in your writing .

A few minor flaws

I am Pilgrim  is not perfect.  The narrative is politically incorrect to a degree verging on parody.  Pilgrim and other supposedly sympathetic characters casually dismiss the qualities of one set of people after another – Serbs, Albanians, Russians, Japanese, and Arabs just to start with.  The assumption that a female Turkish police officer would be incapable of firing a pistol betrays either startling sexism or ignorance of the trigger-happy nature of the Turkish police.  The Afghan sequences of the book have weak patches, occasionally sinking almost to Shantaram -esque levels of boilerplate.

On the whole, though, these are minor quibbles set against the powerful narrative.  One may debate to what extent thrillers should attempt political correctness.  If you like a good blockbuster thriller, try  I am Pilgrim.  

If you like fast-paced thrillers, you should try my own  Blood Summit , which thriller author John Connolly described as “hugely entertaining”.  Click on the pic for a link.

P.S. If you enjoy fresh, original writing, please  subscribe to my newsletter (you can unsubscribe anytime you wish).  I’ll send you a free “Hotel Story” to say thanks! Or I would be delighted if you would like to follow me on Facebook .

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2 Responses

Hallo Leigh, gratuliere zu dieser ausführlichen Rezension. Ich werde trotzdem das Buch nicht lesen wollen – allein schon das “waterboardimg ” würde mich davon abhalten, das mir jegliche Art von Folter zutiefst verstört. wahrscheinlich weil ich doch noch am Rande mitbegkommen habe, was die Nazis angerichtet haben. Aber Deine Rezension ist wirklich sehr sehr gut! Danke für Deinen Besuch Eva aus dem 9.

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