![]() But it's a non-fiction collection about people spending decades in prison for someone else's crimes. ![]() He is working on another book now, unsurprisingly. He's on the boards The Innocence Project and Centurion Ministries, which helps get wrongfully convicted people out of prison. Since then, he's taken up the cause of wrongful convictions. In 2006, Grisham wrote his first non-fiction book called The Innocent Man, about a wrongfully convicted man on death row. We never really come back to this storyline in the book but it serves multiple functions: It lets the reader revisit some of the story beats of the first book, but it also touches on the core of what drives so much of Grisham's work - injustice. Before he can even get started on the case, the man dies - supposedly by suicide. Muammar Gaddafi wants built.īut before the main thrust of the narrative, there's a prelude of sorts that involves Mitch going back to Memphis to do some pro bono work involving a man on death row. It's a bigger globe trotting book - the main legal concern is over a fictional bridge in Libya that Col. Mitch and his wife Abby live in New York City with their two children. The Exchange takes place 15 years after The Firm. ![]() And so one of these days, this incredible journey is going to be over."Įven as the machinations of Hollywood taste changed, and options for his books kept going nowhere, Grisham kept hurrying up and writing. "We always said to each other, look, everything goes in cycles and nobody stays on top forever," he said. But they also had their eyes towards the future - and on the cyclical nature of fame. We were having a ball," he said of himself and his wife, Renee Grisham. "In the early 90s, things were really chaotic, but also a whole lot of fun. Suddenly, Grisham's work was a hot commodity in Hollywood: The Pelican Brief got turned into a movie. The movie was a hit, too, becoming the highest grossing R rated film that year. The immediate bestseller was pulpy and breezy enough that it was prime material for a 1993 movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise. "We kept our feet on the ground and we didn't change," said Grisham of finding fame. Getty Images John Grisham and his wife Renee in 2004. And he gets recruited into a secret law firm in Memphis that, surprise, surprise, is doing shady business with shady people, and Mitch finds himself caught between the mob and the FBI. He isn't a criminal defense attorney, or a white collar prosecutor, or anything exciting like that. The book is about a young hotshot lawyer named Mitch McDeere. Not until after he wrote his follow up, The Firm, which was an immediate success. His first book, A Time To Kill, didn't do so well - at first, at least. He'd start his days early and write in the mornings. The Firm was first published when Grisham was juggling working as a lawyer and being a member of the state legislature in Mississippi. When I asked him why, after all this time, is he revisiting The Firm, he simply said: "Well, we're always trying to angle a way to sell more books." It's a sequel to 1991's The Firm, which was the book that turned Grisham into a writing star. He's now out with his latest, The Exchange. People often ask him about his stance on books being pulled from schools and library shelves (he said it is "ridiculous" but doesn't keep a close eye on the news). He's part of a big lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company OpenAI for copyright infringement (he said he's not allowed to comment on it). And in this tenured position in the world of books, he's adjacent to the existential crises facing books today.
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