Camino Island

by John Grisham

This Side of Paradise.

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961; Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948); John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952); Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer (1961); Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (1959); William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967); Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (1929); Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965); and J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951).

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929); Steinbeck’s Cup of Gold (1929); F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920); and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929).

And with no home to long for it was impossible to feel homesick.

Writers are generally split into two camps: those who carefully outline their stories and know the ending before they begin, and those who refuse to do so upon the theory that once a character is created he or she will do something interesting.

Scott Turow

“I loved The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, and I believe it sold well.”

“A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler, one of my favorites, and LaRose by Louise Erdrich.”

I’ll give any book a hundred pages, and if by then the writer can’t hold my attention I’ll put it away. There are too many good books I want to read to waste time with a bad one.”