A DARING RESCUE IN LONDON

Why Ben Macintyre’s ‘The Siege’ May Be The Year’s Best Nonfiction Thriller

The author of ‘Operation Mincemeat’ and ‘A Spy Among Friends’ returns with another winner

Janice Harayda
Lit Life
Published in
5 min readOct 4, 2024

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Ben Macintyre and the cover of U.K. edition of “The Siege’
Ben Macintyre and the U.K. Edition of “The Siege” / Penguin Random House

Why do people still use the term “Great American Novel”?

It isn’t just a cliché but obsolete: a relic of that testosterone-fueled era when Norman Mailer and others “fancied themselves in the boxing ring with Hemingway, delivering a succession of body blows to Papa and other writers of his celebrated generation,” as the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote.

Or so I argued in a recent piece that struck a chord with readers. People seemed intuitively to grasp its main point: The idea of the Great American novel has become a casualty of more than movies and the diversity of voices finding their way into print. It competes for attention with a boom in narrative nonfiction that at its best holds its own against high-quality fiction.

I was thinking of nonfiction like David Grann’s The Wager, Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. Those books dealt with different topics — a shipwreck, schizophrenia, and the opioid epidemic — but all were better than most of the recently published novels I’ve read.

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Janice Harayda
Lit Life

Critic, novelist, award-winning journalist. Former book editor of the Plain Dealer and book columnist for Glamour. Words in NYT, WSJ, and other major media.