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    The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue
    Unavailable
    The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue
    Unavailable
    The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

    Written by Frederick Forsyth

    Narrated by Robert Powell

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From Frederick Forsyth, the grand master of international suspense, comes his most intriguing story ever-his own.

    For more than forty years, Frederick Forsyth has been writing extraordinary real-world novels of intrigue, from the groundbreaking The Day of the Jackal to the prescient The Kill List. Whether writing about the murky world of arms dealers, the shadowy Nazi underground movement, or the intricacies of worldwide drug cartels, every plot has been chillingly plausible because every detail has been minutely researched.

    But what most people don't know is that some of his greatest stories of intrigue have been in his own life.

    He was the RAF's youngest pilot at the age of nineteen, barely escaped the wrath of an arms dealer in Hamburg, got strafed by a MiG during the Nigerian civil war, landed during a bloody coup in Guinea-Bissau (and was accused of helping fund a 1973 coup in Equatorial Guinea). The Stasi arrested him, the Israelis feted him, the IRA threatened him, and a certain attractive Czech secret police agent-well, her actions were a bit more intimate. And that's just for starters.

    It is a memoir like no other-and a book of pure delight.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateOct 6, 2015
    ISBN9780147520661
    Unavailable
    The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue
    Author

    Frederick Forsyth

    Frederick Forsyth (b. 1938) is an English author of thrillers. Born in Kent, he joined the Royal Air Force in 1956, becoming one of the youngest pilots to ever fly in Her Majesty’s service. After two years in the RAF, he began working as a journalist. He later turned his journalism skills to writing fiction, and his first novel, The Day of the Jackal (1970), was a great success. Forsyth continued to use real figures and criminal organizations as inspiration, writing popular books like The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974). His most recent novel is The Cobra (2010).  

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    Reviews for The Outsider

    4/5

    39 ratings13 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Excellent book. Always loved his novels so it was interesting to read about his life.
    • 5/5
      Forsyth had a lot of lucky breaks in his life, but he also prepared well in order to reach his goals, so those breaks were earned and deserved. As a child he decided he wanted to be a pilot, flying a Spitfire for the RAF. He earned his wings, and finished a two-year stint with the RAF at barely twenty, going on to be a foreign correspondent with Reuters. A job as correspondent with the BBC didn't work out as expected and finding himself broke and unemployed, he wrote a book. Using the real story of an assassination attempt on De Gaulle from his days as a journalist he wrote The Day of the Jackal. He had no idea of how the publishing business worked but one of those lucky breaks (and persistence) got the book published and his new career had begun. The details of the agreement for book and film are especially interesting in hindsight.This is a fascinating story, told in short chapters, that will entertain, especially if the reader is familiar with The Day of the Jackal or any of Forsyth's other books. The downside is that this James Bond-type life story never gets to the heart of the man. There is so much left unsaid. And some accounts have an almost adolescent expression. Still, I can recommend it strongly.On a personal note: Forsyth earned his pilot's licence at Rochester at the same time that my father worked there. I can't help wondering if they ever met.
    • 4/5
      A very interesting narration, great expression of real time events. A good read.
    • 5/5
      I’ve been reading Forsyth books since I was old enough to read it seems. They always seem to have a sense of reality to me. This telling of his story gives the reader/listener an understanding of where that all comes from and the underlying strength needed to make or rather create something like these works of fiction. I really enjoyed listening to this book and would highly recommend anyone to give it a go.
    • 5/5
      What a life! Forsyth's autobiography is more interesting then his novels. Really enjoyed it. Wealth of information.
    • 4/5
      When one of the big authors of thrillers writes his autobiography, there are two ways for it to go - either he has real stories that are at least as interesting as his novels or his life is so normal that he needs to talk about his work in order to have something to say. Forsyth had lived an interesting life - as a journalist he had been in Africa when the colonial system was dissolving; as a writer he ended up in tight spaces while doing research (part of them because of his connections from the earlier years); as a spy he saw parts of the world that people did not use to back in the days. He grew up privileged, he got more than people usually do without being so rich that it did not matter. And he had the most unusual luck. How much he overplayed his luck in the book will always remain a mystery - even at the worst times, he seemed to always end up the winner. He will leave a job for a dream and somehow get the dream happening; he will go to Africa and make connections and then remain the only journalist on the ground. He will decide to write a novel and despite not knowing how to sell it or anything about the business, it gets published (but then if it was nor Forsyth, that would not have happened). His whole life is another proof of the good old maxim that you can win only when you risk. Had he overplayed some of the danger, some of his importance? Probably. Everyone writing their autobiography does. But he makes it sounds believable. And some of those are historical records - the fine details may not be that clear. He infuses his story with humor - enough to show that he is so self-important not to see how some of those stories sound, with names and places that get one's imagination flying. In a way, after he becomes an author, his story becomes less interesting and he knows it - so he does talk about the first novels but he still keeps his focus on the non-literary - he is writing about his life, not about his craft.Forsyth choose to structure his story in small chapters - telling small stories - mostly consecutive but without the need to make it a full story. And it works for the life he describes.
    • 4/5
      No one will ever accuse Frederick Forsyth of not having lived life to its fullest. Forsyth, now in his eighth decade, seems to have been predisposed to live an extraordinarily adventurous life almost from the beginning and he, in fact, managed to become one of the youngest young men ever to earn his wings from the RAF. But that was just the beginning for the man who would ultimately gain great fame as author of international bestsellers such as The Day of the Jackal, The Dogs of War, and The Odessa File.Surprisingly, Forsyth only turned to writing fiction in desperation when he could think of no other way to earn enough money to tide him over between jobs. He was then thirty-one years old, and although he had no idea how the publishing world worked, he hoped to earn enough money to pay off his debts before getting on with the rest of his life. Forsyth, though, was no ordinary thirty-one-year-old. Fresh off a journalism job that saw him posted to Paris and Berlin, and which included assignments to the troubled heart of deepest Africa, the author already had the makings in his head of the early books that would make his fame. Thus were born the well-researched and realistic novels previously mentioned. Forsyth would, of course, probably have been long remembered if he had quit right there, but he has an additional ten novels to his credit.What makes Forsyth different is how closely he personally experienced so much of what he writes and used those experiences in fictionalized form to allow the rest of us understand and experience the world he knows so intimately. A recounting of those experiences comprises about the first third of The Outsider, and it is not until approximately page 250 of this 352-page memoir that Frederick Forsyth, novelist, makes his first appearance. But readers who are most interested in this phase of Forsyth's life will find it to have been well worth the wait because his stories about how the books were constructed and sold are at times almost as adventurous as some of Forsyth's earlier tales.The Outsider, because it conforms to neither the common pattern for memoir nor for biography, can be a little jarring at times. It's sixty segments more like the kind of after dinner talk that a fellow diner might expect from someone with Forsyth's experiences. The segments are relatively short and are laid out in just that kind of straightforward way, with supporting characters seldom fleshed out in a manner that would make them especially real or memorable. The chapters do seem to follow each other in more or less chronological order, but the book does not refer to dates often enough to make the time-gaps between stories entirely clear to the reader. That, however, is a small criticism and a small price to pay for getting to know a man like Frederick Forsyth better. The timing of The Outsider is perfect, and Forsyth's fans are sure to appreciate it.
    • 5/5
      Wonderful book....One of my favorite books of all time is The Day of the Jackal. This explains its origins as well as the others in his initial trilogy of books of intrigue (The Odessa File and the Dogs of War). Forsythe had an amazing childhood and early adult years being very aggressive in his approach to life. I like that!
    • 5/5
      Frederick Forsyth has long been my favorite author. I even wrote a paper about him for a high school research paper decades ago. I was thrilled to see his autobiography in the library the other day because I knew it would be fascinating. Even having an above-average knowledge of his story, I was still blown away by the life he has led. I am amazed at some of the places and scrapes he has gotten himself into and out of in his action-packed life.

      In many ways, he is a modern-day Jack London, who has used a series of jobs to get himself into the most unlikely places and to meet some of the most important people of the 20th century. His eye for detail and story narrative has led to excellent writing that has allowed us to share in his adventure almost like we were there with him.

      Forsyth has never been one to write for the sake of creating beautiful prose, but rather--like the journalist he is at heart--to write detail that makes a scene come alive. His autobiography is written the same way, with effortless make-you-feel-like-you're-there descriptions of a variety of exotic locations and the most unlikely situations.

      If you've ever read Fortyth, you'll love his autobiography. If you enjoy the modern thriller genre--which he helped to create--you'll love his autobiography. If you enjoy adventure and unlikely twists--you'll love his autobiography.

      Highly recommended.
    • 2/5
      This book demonstrates that Frederick Forsyth is, undoubtedly a very clever man who has had an interesting and exciting life, though there was something oddly stilted and almost antiseptic about it. Although he describes some intriguing events, the whole delivery is entirely lacking in any emotional engagement.I have never quite known what to make of Forsyth's novels. I enjoyed his early work, though I found that the further he moved from stories with a strong basis in fact, the weaker his novels became. His first book, which made his name and sealed his fortune, was 'The Day of the Jackal', a barely fictionalised account of an attempt to assassinate President De Gaulle in the early 1960s. That book was immensely successful, and held the reader's attention in a vice-like grasp as it detailed, step by step, how the assassin secured a false passport, smuggled rifles across closely guarded borders and changed his appearance. 'The Dogs of War', his third novel, was essentially a manual on how to conduct a coup in a central African state during the 1970s. In both books, Forsyth relied upon information he had gained during his extensive career as a journalist to generate a taut plot which he followed without any diversion to develop his characters' personality. The focus was on action and planning, and in both cases the approach worked well.He did, however, move away from fictionalising real events, and that was when his inability to create compelling and empathetic characters (or even entirely plausible ones) began to emerge. One might have thought, therefore, that when he moved to describing the real events of his own life, he would be back in mid-season form, securing the breathless engagement of 'The Day of The Jackal.' With so much exciting material at his disposal one might reasonably have expected to be rapt, reluctant to put the book down. Sadly, it never came close.As I have said, Forsyth was clearly very clever, excelling at school and especially gifted at learning languages. From the age of five he had a clear idea that he wanted to become a fighter pilot, and to pursue this dream he even turned his back on the offer of a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge. Following his departure from the RAF he became a journalist, working firstly in East Anglia and then securing a posting with Reuters that was to enable him to travel widely throughout the world, and offer him the inspiration for some of his earlier work. The places that he visited, the conflicts that he witnessed and the people whom he met should have made this account engrossing but, owing to the peculiarities of his prose style it came across as if he was listing some mundane activities that had been recounted to him by someone he met on a bus.
    • 4/5
      This memoir is a very entertaining read. We travel with Forsyth from his boyhood obsession with flying to his employment assignments with Reuters and the BBC. Returning from Africa and losing his job, he reinvents himself as a novelist, turning his life experiences into financial success. He suffers financial ruin at the hands of a crook investor and returns to writing to restore his coffers. At 76 now, he tells us wonderful stories of his days as a reporter, a spy, and a flyboy. My thanks to the author and the Penguin First to Read program for a complimentary copy.
    • 4/5
      I heard an interview with Forsyth on "Fresh Air" and was curious to read about his life after the teasers on the show. It's worth the read if for no other reason than the droll understated style. It may force me to read his novels!
    • 4/5
      The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue by Frederick Forsyth is a compelling autobiography by the master of spy fiction. As a young child he was obsessed by planes and flying and swore he would do that when he grew up. He did learn to fly planes but wasn't accepted into the Royal Air Force because of eyesight issues which was a great disappointment to him. As a child he had lived in both France and Germany to learn the languages which stood him well when he entered the foreign service and was stationed in East Germany which gave him much material when he turned to writing spy novels. He had a very successful career as a novelist. Many of his books would be familiar to you. I liked the book and would encourage you to read it if you have some interest in spy fiction.