Rob Rinder had fantasies about the kind of novel he would like to write. Something the literary giants, whose books lined his study, might create; something inspired by his life as a barrister, that said something big and important about justice, and who gets it. He is, he says with a laugh, someone who “disappears into their own imagination while they’re on a treadmill and has a deluded sense of their own cultural grandeur. Then I tried to sit down and write that earnest book, and it wasn’t emerging.”
For years, he says: “I’d overprojected value, even humanity, on the great writers, forgetting the greatness of the books that I’ve read and loved. It takes such talent for you to disappear into a joyous afternoon. Jilly Cooper!” He almost shouts her name in evangelical praise, when we meet at his publicist’s office. “I mean, tell me Riders isn’t a work of art.”
