Douglas Kennedy – författare

Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer living a very private life in Maine. Until, one wintry morning, his solitude is disrupted by the arrival of a package postmarked Berlin.But what is more unsettling is the name accompanying the return address on the package: Petra Dussmann. For she is the woman with whom Thomas had an intense love affair twenty-five years before in a divided Berlin, where people lived fearfully under the shadows of the Cold War.And so Thomas is forced to grapple with a past he has always kept hidden. For Petra Dussman was a refugee from the police state of East Germany. And her tragic secrets were to re-write both their destinies.

The critically acclaimed bestseller from the number one bestselling author of The Moment and A Special Relationship. A powerful romantic novel set in the tumultuous world of post-war America.New York, 1945 - Sara Smythe, a young, beautiful and intelligent woman, ready to make her own way in the big city, attends her brother's Thanksgiving Eve party. As the party gets into full swing, in walks Jack Malone, a US Army journalist back from a defeated Germany and a man unlike any Sara has ever met before - one who is destined to change Sara's future forever.But finding love isn't the same as finding happiness - as Sara and Jack soon find out. In post-war America chance meetings aren't always as they seem, and people's choices can often have profound repercussions. Sara and Jack find they are subject to forces beyond their control and that their destinies are formed by more than just circumstance. In this world of intrigue and emotional conflict, Sara must fight to survive - against Jack, as much as for him.In this mesmerising tale of longing and betrayal, The Pursuit of Happiness is a great tragic love story; a tale of divided loyalties, decisive moral choices, and the random workings of destiny.

On the night of her thirteenth birthday, Jane Howard made a vow to her warring parents - she would never get married and she would never have children. But life, as Jane discovers, is a profoundly random business. Many years and many lives later, she is a professor in Boston, in love with a brilliant, erratic man named Theo. And then she falls pregnant. Motherhood turns out to be a great welcome surprise - but when a devastating turn of events tears her existence apart she has no choice but to flee all she knows and leave the world.Just when Jane has renounced life itself, the disappearance of a young girl pulls her back from the edge and into an obsessive search for personal redemption. Convinced that she knows more about the case than the police do, she is forced to make a decision - stay hidden or bring to light a shattering truth.Like Kennedy's previous highly acclaimed novels, Leaving the World, speaks volumes about the dilemmas we face in trying to navigate our way through all that fate throws in our path.

‘Accomplished…a strangely mesmerising effect…absolutely excellent’New StatesmanNew York, 1980sAlice Burns – a young book editor – is deep into a manuscript about the morass of family life. The observations within resonate, perhaps, because she has just watched her own family implode.As she reads she wonders: When did the sadness start? And could it be that unhappiness is a choice?Thus begins a great American epic which follows Alice as she navigates high school, first love and sexism at an elite college, a spell in 1970s Ireland, and a tragedy that sends her stateside as the US embraces a cowboy actor named Reagan.But it is also the tale of her endlessly complex parents and brothers – how their destinies are written by the lies they tell themselves and others.The Great Wide Open is an immensely ambitious and compulsive saga; a novel which will speak volumes to anyone who has marvelled at that pain that can only be caused by family itself.

'A touching exploration of passion untested by domesticity' Mail on SundayBefore Isabelle I knew nothing of sex.Before Isabelle I knew nothing of freedom.Before Isabelle I knew nothing of life.Paris in the early Seventies. Sam, an American student, meets a woman in a bookshop. Isabelle is enigmatic, beautiful, older and, unlike Sam, experienced in love's many contradictions. Sam is instantly smitten - but wary of the wedding ring on her finger. What begins as a regular arrangement in Isabelle’s tiny Parisian apartment transforms into a true affair of the heart, and one which lasts for decades to come.Isabelle in the Afternoon is a novel that questions what we seek, what we find, what we settle for - and shows how love, when not lived day in, day out, can become the passion of a lifetime.Praise for Douglas Kennedy‘The absolute master of love stories with heart-stopping twists’ THE TIMES‘Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by globalaffairs’ OBSERVER

'A touching exploration of passion untested by domesticity' Mail on SundayBefore Isabelle I knew nothing of sex.Before Isabelle I knew nothing of freedom.Before Isabelle I knew nothing of life.Paris in the early Seventies. Sam, an American student, meets a woman in a bookshop. Isabelle is enigmatic, beautiful, older and, unlike Sam, experienced in love's many contradictions. Sam is instantly smitten - but wary of the wedding ring on her finger. What begins as a regular arrangement in Isabelle’s tiny Parisian apartment transforms into a true affair of the heart, and one which lasts for decades to come.Isabelle in the Afternoon is a novel that questions what we seek, what we find, what we settle for - and shows how love, when not lived day in, day out, can become the passion of a lifetime.Praise for Douglas Kennedy‘The absolute master of love stories with heart-stopping twists’ THE TIMES‘Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by globalaffairs’ OBSERVER

That dumbshit map. I'd been seduced by it. Seduced by its possibilities. That map had brought me here ... That map had been a serious mistake'The map in question is of Australia, stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop by American journalist Nick Hawthorne, en route to another dead-end hack job in Akron, Ohio. Seduced by all that wilderness, all that NOTHING, Nick decides to put his midlife crisis on hold and light out to the ultimate nowheresville - where a chance encounter throws him into a sun-baked orgy of surf, sex and swill, and a nightmare from which there is no escape.'Douglas Kennedy might never be allowed into Australia again. This is a crazy, compulsive ultimately serious thriller and a bravura fictional debut from one of our best travel writers' Philip Kerr

Though much has been written about the political implications of the religious revival which has engulfed America in recent years, a question remains unanswered: what pushes its people into 'declaring for Jesus'?Douglas Kennedy spent a long hot summer cruising through that expanse of the American South known as 'The Bible Belt' exploring that question. In a remarkable journey into one of the strangest corners of the United States, Kennedy finds himself spending time in Miami with a one-time member of the Mafia turned charismatic preacher, discovering Christian heavy metal music in Nashville, and visiting Death Row in South Carolina with an evangelist who ministers to the condemned.Repeatedly discovering the extraordinary within the ordinary, IN GOD'S COUNTRY is a profound, yet brilliantly entertaining exploration of life in late twentieth century America.

'Palm-tingling sensation ... captivating ... a completely convincing imaginative performance ... enthralling' The TimesOn the face of it, Ben Bradford is your standard Wall Street hot shot - Junior partner in a legal firm, 6 figure income, wife and two young kids straight out of a Gap catalogue. But along with the WASP lifestyle comes the sting - Ben hates it. He wants - has always wanted - to be a photographer. When he discovers his wife has fallen in love with another man, the consequences of a moment of madness force him to question not just the design of his life but the price of fulfilment. Because finding yourself means nothing when you're pretending to be someone else. From the picket fences of yuppie New England to Montana's untouchable splendour, The Big Picture spans states and states of mind in a thrilling novel of genuine originality.Reviews for The Big Picture'The Horse Whisperer recast by Patricia Highsmith ... a compulsive page-turner and a dark moral fable' Mail on Sunday'Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story' Esquire

Readers say:'Classic Kennedy. Brilliant plot, wonderful dialogue and characters. You are bowled over by the pace.''Excellent five star read from the first to the last page''If you haven't read any of Douglas Kennedy books please do'Ned Allen is young, smart, and upwardly mobile. Several years into his career as an ad salesman for a successful computer magazine, Ned's finally left his small-town roots behind, and is certain that the sophisticated Manhattan world he covets is his forever. His wife Lizzie is also a rising star of a prestigious PR firm. It seems that Ned's made it. But then what appeared to be a career break shows its true colours. Ned's forced to make some tough calls, among them a question of ethics and the small matter of whether to lie to his wife - and when the tough calls just keep getting tougher he finds himself on the brink of losing everything ...

Money as a weapon. Money as revenge. Money as a substitute for sex and love. Money as status ... This intriguing and extraordinarily well-written book is cheering for those of us who aren't rich, and will go happily to our graves without ever pulling down £300,000 per annum' Simon Hoggart, LITERARY REVIEW'How we chase Mammon defines us. Because, like it or not, we are what we earn,' CHASING MAMMON is the first travel book ever written about the uses of money and the attitudes of the wheelers and dealers in the international marketplace. Douglas Kennedy spent a year loitering with intent in six very disparate financial realms, including the Casablanca bourse (where stocks and bonds are listed on a blackboard), the squeaky-clean Singapore money markets, the Sydney futures market and the first Hungarian stock exchange to open since 1948. From the 'New Age' City folk in London, unsure whether greed really is good for you, to the tireless toilers of Wall Street, Knnedy's encounters with money-makers around the globe make for an exhilarating and quirkily original journey through the modern cash nexus.

Filling the void between surveys of the field with relatively light mathematical content and books with a rigorous, formal approach to stochastic integration and probabilistic ideas, Stochastic Financial Models provides a sound introduction to mathematical finance. The author takes a classical applied mathematical approach, focusing on calculations rather than seeking the greatest generality.Developed from the esteemed author’s advanced undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Cambridge, the text begins with the classical topics of utility and the mean-variance approach to portfolio choice. The remainder of the book deals with derivative pricing. The author fully explains the binomial model since it is central to understanding the pricing of derivatives by self-financing hedging portfolios. He then discusses the general discrete-time model, Brownian motion and the Black–Scholes model. The book concludes with a look at various interest-rate models. Concepts from measure-theoretic probability and solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises are provided in the appendices.By exploring the important and exciting application area of mathematical finance, this text encourages students to learn more about probability, martingales and stochastic integration. It shows how mathematical concepts, such as the Black–Scholes and Gaussian random-field models, are used in financial situations.

Filling the void between surveys of the field with relatively light mathematical content and books with a rigorous, formal approach to stochastic integration and probabilistic ideas, Stochastic Financial Models provides a sound introduction to mathematical finance. The author takes a classical applied mathematical approach, focusing on calculations rather than seeking the greatest generality.Developed from the esteemed author’s advanced undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Cambridge, the text begins with the classical topics of utility and the mean-variance approach to portfolio choice. The remainder of the book deals with derivative pricing. The author fully explains the binomial model since it is central to understanding the pricing of derivatives by self-financing hedging portfolios. He then discusses the general discrete-time model, Brownian motion and the Black–Scholes model. The book concludes with a look at various interest-rate models. Concepts from measure-theoretic probability and solutions to the end-of-chapter exercises are provided in the appendices.By exploring the important and exciting application area of mathematical finance, this text encourages students to learn more about probability, martingales and stochastic integration. It shows how mathematical concepts, such as the Black–Scholes and Gaussian random-field models, are used in financial situations.

THE EXPLOSIVE NEW THRILLER FROM INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER, DOUGLAS KENNEDY__________________________'A pulse-racing thriller centred on hot-button debates' Daily MailBrendan has always lived a careful, constrained life. A salesman who never liked the work, he's a man who has stayed in his marriage and his faith because it was what was expected of him. But now, having lost his job after corporate downsizing and on the cusp of sixty, he finds himself scrambling to somehow stay afloat in the only Los Angeles work on offer to a man his age - driving for Uber.When one of his rides, a retired professor named Elise, asks to be dropped off outside an abortion clinic where she now volunteers, Brendan finds himself driving right into the virulent epicentre of one of the major issues of our time, engulfing his life in the process.A novel of high suspense and considerable moral complexity, Afraid of the Light is a tough, affecting social thriller that speaks volumes about the corrosive divisions of our troubled times.__________________________'Kennedy is skilled at zigzag plotting, blending domestic twists with turns created by global affairs' OBSERVER

Robin knew Paul wasn’t perfect. But he said they were so lucky to have found each other, and she believed it was true.In the heady strangeness of Morocco, he is everything she wants him to be – passionate, talented, knowledgeable. She is convinced that it is here she will finally become pregnant. But when Paul suddenly disappears, and Robin finds herself the prime suspect in the police inquiry, everything changes. As her understanding of the truth starts to unravel, Robin lurches from the crumbling art deco of Casablanca to the daunting Sahara, caught in an increasingly terrifying spiral from which there is no easy escape. With his acclaimed ability to write page-turners that also make you think, Douglas Kennedy takes the reader on a roller-coaster journey into a heart of darkness that asks the question: what would you do if your life depended on it? ‘Kennedy is a complete genius when it comes to understanding the minds of stylish but troubled women’ Daily Mirror‘Kennedy is an absolute master at love stories with heart-stopping twists’ The Times‘Kennedy's skill is to send you racing down the slope of sheer story.’ Esquire