In the Bible story, Cain kills his brother Abel, but that’s not the case with Jeffrey Archer’s book.īelow, you'll find my thoughts on Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer. When I first heard the title of the book, I immediately thought of the Cain and Abel Story in the Bible. One of the five books that Andrew would like to have with him on a desert island is Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer. Whether he'll also provide a new perspective on his prison diaries wasn't mentioned.Kane and Abel Have you ever been in a situation where someone mentioned a book that you hadn’t read or known about? That happened to me in an interview with Andrew Warner, the founder of Mixergy. What's happened is that as commercial fiction has come to dominate the market, the elements that make a commercial novel are becoming stronger."Īrcher may also take a fresh look at the book's sequel, The Prodigal Daughter, which tells the story of the feud from the perspective of Kane and Abel's children. "It has certainly become more pronounced than 30 years ago, when probably the mix between commercial and literary fiction was more balanced, and therefore you had commercial novels trying to be a little bit more literary. In a way, the rewrite is a sign of the times, Trevathan said, with thrillers such as The Da Vinci Code serving to increase the public's appetite for shorter chapters and a greater pace. It doesn't feel dated, whereas the old edition feels dated." We were going to call it 'Kane and Abel for a new generation'. "I was perhaps sceptical about what he could do in that I couldn't work out how he could do this withoutĬhanging the plot, but I'm now won over … One of the things Jeffrey said to me was that it's as if he sat down and wrote it now, rather than 30 years ago. "Jeffrey reread it a couple of years ago and felt he could do it much better now," said Trevathan. The revised version – which will be published in mid-October to mark the book's 30th anniversary – doesn't change the plot, just the style. It follows the lives of Boston money man William Lowell Kane and penniless Polish immigrant Abel Rosnovski, born on the same day, through the first world war, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the bitter rivalry that develops between them. Kane and Abel, first published in 1979, is Archer's bestselling novel – Pan says it has sold around 34m copies worldwide. Now each chapter ends with a question mark, or a much more obvious cliffhanger." In the old book the cliffhangers were a little bit convoluted. "One thing he's done is that with these commercial novels, they end each chapter with a cliffhanger. "The chapters are much punchier, the plot is driven along much faster," said Archer's editor at Pan Macmillan, Jeremy Trevathan.
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