I spent a lot of time with these smoke jumpers: hung around with them. Did you do any parachuting in preparation for writing The Smoke Jumpers? Linda Richards: I know you're a serious research guy. It's a book about three good people who have to make choices that affect the rest of their lives.' Smoke jumping, says Evans, is as much a metaphor in this book as it is a part of the action, 'the last thing on earth I want people to think of it as is a firefighting book, because it's not. The Smoke Jumper is centered around a tragic triangle involving two firefighters who parachute out of planes to put out forest fires - smoke jumpers - and the woman they both come to love. The Horse Whisperer performed, if anything, better than expected, jumping out of the starting gate straight onto the bestseller lists and selling over 15 million copies since its publication in 1995.Įvans followed with The Loop, again set in Montana, this time around a father/son relationship with wolves providing the eco-balance to the human tale.Įvans' most recent book, The Smoke Jumper, is also set in Big Sky Country. When the combined book advance and film rights brought Evans over six million dollars, a record at the time, the publishing press promptly dubbed the soft-spoken Brit The Six Million Dollar Man. The publication of his first book, The Horse Whisperer, recreated Evans as an overnight publishing darling.

Evans, who has homes in London and Devon, England, studied law at Oxford then worked as a journalist before working in television and film production.Īll of these biographical facts and physical clues would, however, give no hint about the work Evans is best known for: Though his own personal history is as British as the BBC, Evans writes American novels set under the big Montana sky. It's the sort of hair you can imagine him running his hands through distractedly when working out a particularly tricky passage or a challenging bit of dialogue. Tall and lean, he wears his hair long and somewhat professor-ish. If there was an archetype, Evans would fill it. Nicholas Evans looks every inch the British novelist. It doesn't seem to matter if readers get it, it's just important that the people who review the books and the awards get it.' These great gods of British contemporary fiction. So, it doesn't matter if people in the street don't understand - Salman Rushdie or Martin Amis or whoever it might be.

And it's only that little rarefied group of cognoscenti who are able to get it. And if something is good it can't possibly sell. In other words, if something sells, it can't be good. 'One of the things that fills me with despair about the so-called literary world is this distinction between commercial fiction and 'literary' fiction.

The smoke jumper by nicholas evans