Former President Barack Obama might be getting all the attention for that reported $65 million book deal, but former President Bill Clinton is soon coming out with an unusual book: He’s writing a novel with prolific thriller writer James Patterson.
Clinton and Patterson are co-penning “The President is Missing,” which will debut in June 2018, the Associated Press reports.
“Working on a book about a sitting president – drawing on what I know about the job, life in the White House and the way Washington works – has been a lot of fun,” Clinton said in a statement, calling himself a longtime fan of Patterson.
Patterson, in a statement to the AP, said the pair’s combined powers will make for a thriller like no other. “I’m a storyteller, and President Clinton’s insight has allowed us to tell a really interesting one,” he said. “It’s a rare combination – readers will be drawn to the suspense, of course, but they’ll also be given an inside look into what it’s like to be president.”
Ex-presidents writing memoirs is nothing new – and Clinton’s been there, done that with 2004’s “My Life” and “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.” But fiction from a member of the exclusive club is rare (former President Jimmy Carter wrote a novel set in the Revolutionary war era, “The Hornet’s Nest,” in 2003).
The prospect of a beach read from a best-selling former president and a giant of the genre was apparently a big enough draw to merit an unusual arrangement: The Patterson-Clinton book is to be jointly published by the two men’s longtime publishers, Alfred A. Knopf and Little, Brown and Co., respectively.
(c) 2017, The Washington Post · Emily Heil
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