Read something that deserves it. Books for jazz musicians, stoners and rockers, and in general anybody who is still fucking alive.
— JFK Løvlien
It is half past eleven on Christmas night. The family have gone to bed. The dishwasher is on. You have a drink in your hand and something burning in the other one, and two hours entirely to yourself for the first time since October.
And your present from your sister is a gentle novel about a woman who inherits a bakery.
This is a list for the other person. The one who got given the bakery book and is now looking at their phone wondering what to actually read.
- A Christmas list for adults who want a book with drugs, money, sex and nerve in it, not a cosy mystery about a cat.
- Seven books by other people that still have teeth, and then mine.
- Glamorama is the dividing line. Thrillers got sanded down after it and most of them have not recovered.
- Nirvana Nights, book five of the Feeder Series, out 1 November 2026. Kindle on preorder.
- Order paperbacks in the first week of December. Print on demand plus the post is not a thing to discover on the twentieth.
Table of Contents
- Glamorama, and Where It All Went Quiet
- Seven Books That Still Have Teeth
- And Then There Is Mine
- The People You Will Meet In There
- The Audiobooks, Which Are Funnier Than They Should Be
- Who This Is For
- Where to Buy, and When to Order
- Summary
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Related Reading
Glamorama, and Where It All Went Quiet
Bret Easton Ellis published Glamorama in 1998. A male model who cannot think his way out of a paper bag drifts into a terrorist cell made entirely of other models, in Europe, with a film crew following him that may or may not exist, and confetti everywhere. It is five hundred pages long, it is very funny, it is genuinely frightening, and about a third of the way through you stop being able to tell what is happening on purpose.
No publisher would touch that book today. Not one. They would ask for a likeable protagonist and a clearer third act and could we lose the confetti.
And that is roughly when the thriller got put on a diet.
Everything since has been competent. Short chapters, a twist on page two hundred, a woman on a train, an unreliable narrator who turns out to be mildly unreliable. It is fine. It is all completely fine. I have read a hundred of them and I could not tell you the name of a single character in any of them.
I got bored. That is the whole reason I write what I write. I wanted the book you cannot predict and cannot entirely defend, the one that goes too far in chapter nine and then keeps going.
And I should be clear that this is not a pose. I am a very serious man. I work seven days, I have five novels, four audiobooks, several businesses and a game in build, and I did not get any of that by being charming about it. The books are the least ironic thing I own.
What I am tired of is the tameness, and it is not confined to fiction. Everywhere you look there are people commentating, reacting, having opinions about the people who are doing things, and almost nobody is making anything. Say what you like about the ones who actually build. At least they are building. They put something into the world that was not there before and they take the consequences in public, which is more than can be said for the audience.
That is what I want in a novel, too. I would rather read five hundred pages about somebody who built an empire and wrecked himself doing it than two hundred about a man who has a quiet realisation in a kitchen.
And credit where it is owed. Bret Easton Ellis has been doing this for forty years and has not softened once, which almost nobody manages. He took the beating for American Psycho, kept going, and wrote three more books that nobody else could have written. Every one of us working this side of the street owes him something, and I would rather say so out loud than pretend I arrived at it alone.
Seven Books That Still Have Teeth
Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis. Start here if your reader has somehow missed it. Beautiful people doing terrible things, and a plot that dissolves under them like wet paper. Hand it to someone who thinks they have read everything.
The Carpetbaggers, Harold Robbins. 1961, and dirtier than anything published this year. Aviation money, Hollywood, a man building an empire out of pure appetite. Robbins outsold everybody on earth and the literary world never forgave him, which tells you what you need to know about both of them.
American Tabloid, James Ellroy. Three bad men running at Dallas, 1963. The prose comes at you like a machine gun and the opening line informs you that America was never innocent. Will take the top of somebody's head off on Boxing Day.
When the Lion Feeds, Wilbur Smith. Banned in South Africa on publication, which is the best review a book can get. Two brothers, a continent, and violence written by a man who had been standing in the places he describes. I have written elsewhere about what Wilbur Smith does in a first chapter, which is more than most writers manage in a career.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck. Not a thriller, and on this list anyway, because it is the greatest novel ever written about inherited rot. Two generations, two sets of brothers, a father who cannot see what is in front of him, and Cathy Ames, who is the most frightening human being in American fiction and does not raise her voice once. If you want to understand why I write about bloodlines and what gets handed down, it is all in there. Steinbeck called it the only book he ever wrote.
And if the name is in your head because of the Netflix series, with Florence Pugh as Cathy, I watched the whole thing in one go and it is superb. Zoe Kazan did not flinch, which is more than most adaptations manage. Then read the book, because there are things on the page that no camera is ever getting at.
Casino Royale, Ian Fleming. Not the films. The actual book, which is short, cold, and contains a chapter of cruelty nobody is expecting. I have stood in the house where he wrote it, looking at the same water, which did not make me a better writer but did make me a more confident one.
Hollywood Wives, Jackie Collins. Put it on the list and watch the room flinch. Collins sold five hundred million copies writing about power, sex and money with total command of all three, and she was patronised for precisely as long as it took everyone to work out she had been right about Hollywood the entire time. Enormous fun. Far better built than its reputation.
And Then There Is Mine
Here is the part where I sell you something. Declared up front, rather than slipped in at number four and hoping you would not notice.
Nirvana Nights is book five of the Feeder Series and it is out on the first of November, which puts it on the shelf with seven weeks to spare.
Leif Martin is twenty-four. Harvard behind him, a gold Rickenbacker in the trunk of a blue Porsche, and the largest fortune on earth waiting for him to grow up. He is on the road with Jaguar Filet, the band his father pays for, and it starts with a woman in a yellow polka dot dress knocking on his car window in a Jamaican storm. Four days later she is gone and the hotel has no record she was ever there.
By Rio there are hours he cannot account for. By Santos there is a taste of metal in his mouth and a telephone that rings every night.
What is in it: cocaine money and Jamaican diamonds. A laboratory in Haiti under a junta. Peter O'Toole, drunk and magnificent at three in the morning in a Kingston studio, reading lyrics about a woman he says he used to know. A festival field in Denmark with a hole in the mud packed with enough weed to flatten a small town, and a Dane who walks out of the fog, sits down and smokes the entire thing in one go. A puma the size of a lion on a mountain in Brazil. A woman stepping out of a helicopter over a Welsh tidal island with a suppressed SIG and two hours before the pilot comes back. A billionaire in a black hood taken to a warehouse by the river, where a woman he cannot see pours him Krug and tells him everything he did not know about his own family. And a P-51 Mustang coming off a three thousand five hundred foot strip on Tortuga with nothing at the end of it but ocean.
The Roskilde one happened. I was there. People always pick that one out as the unbelievable bit.
It is set in 1994 because 1994 is the last year a man could lose three days and have nothing on earth to check them against. No phone. No camera in every hand. That is not set dressing. That is the engine of the entire plot.
There is explicit sex in it. There is real cruelty in it. There is one chapter I know will divide people, and it is meant to.
It is not a book for everybody and I have never for one second wanted it to be.
The People You Will Meet In There
One of the things I do that almost nobody else does any more, and I do it on purpose.
In Luxe Rage you sit with Ernest Hemingway. Not a reference to him. Not a man who reminds somebody of him. Hemingway, in the room, talking, and you will know within three lines whether I have got him or not, because everybody thinks they know how Hemingway sounded.
In Nirvana Nights there is Peter O'Toole in that Kingston studio, and the whole scene turns on whether you believe a man like that would say a thing like that at that hour. Robert Mitchum giving advice on a beach, which he was qualified to give. Miles Davis. Jimi Hendrix. Marco Pierre White in the kitchen that made his name, Ronnie Scott handing out an invitation, a sitting prime minister over dinner, and both Kennedys.
All of it invented. None of it accidental.
They are there because a man with the Martin fortune in 1994 would have been in those rooms, and a room only feels real when the right people are standing in it. But the reason you can see them, and readers tell me they can, is that I do the work. How a man held a glass. What he drank and at what hour. The cadence of how he actually spoke, from recordings, not from the biography. Whether he would have been charming that night or vicious, because by then he was usually one or the other.
You cannot fake that. People who were alive for it will catch you inside a page, and they will never trust another sentence you write.
And the research does not stop at who drank what. I pay attention to everything, including the material most novelists will not go near. Hours of it, for years, and here is who is actually worth your time.
Ross Coulthart is an Australian investigative journalist who spent a career doing proper newsroom work before he went anywhere near UAP, and it shows. He sources things. He names his documents. Whatever you make of the subject, he treats it with a reporter's discipline rather than a showman's.
Julian Dorey runs three-hour interviews and then gets out of the way, which is rarer than it sounds. Intelligence people, criminals, journalists, the occasional lunatic. The length is the point. Nobody maintains a performance for three hours.
The Why Files, made by AJ Gentile, is the best-produced thing in the entire field and genuinely funny with it. He builds the case, shows his working, and then tells you which part of it he thinks is rubbish. That last move is why I trust him.
Caspersight does the unexplained quietly, which after a few hours of the louder end of the internet is a considerable relief.
Jess Connell does long-form book reviews and a great deal on the Kennedy assassination and the family around it. That one fed directly into this novel. Both Kennedys appear in Nirvana Nights, and the reason they behave the way they do on the page is hours spent with people who have read everything about them.
I do not believe most of what I watch, and that is the point. Very little of it survives five minutes of checking, and I check. But MKUltra was real, it ran for twenty years, the files were destroyed on purpose in 1973 and the ones that survived are declassified and sitting there for anybody who wants to read them. That is not a theory. That is a filing cabinet. A man who dismisses the whole subject out of hand is going to miss the half of it that actually happened, and the half that actually happened is where the plots come from.
So I read it all, I throw most of it out, and what is left goes into the books with the serial numbers filed off.
That is the whole promise of Luxe Noir. Real history underneath, researched until it holds weight, and then the fiction stands on top of it and does whatever it likes.
The Audiobooks, Which Are Funnier Than They Should Be
Something I did not expect when I started narrating these.
They are funny out loud. Not the plot. The plot is a lot of things but it is not a comedy. It is the people. Rich men talking to each other, musicians on the road, a band arguing in a van, somebody being told exactly what they are in a room they cannot leave. Read silently it is dry. Read aloud it is a different animal entirely, and there are lines that land like a slap.
The people who have told me this are musicians, mostly. A few who have had the kind of career where they recognise the rooms. One of them emailed me at four in the morning about a single paragraph.
If one of these ever finds its way to Charlie Sheen, I would pay money to watch his face. Not because of anything in particular. He would simply recognise the hotel, the corridor, the man at the end of it and roughly what happens next, and he would know I was not making it up.
Woody Harrelson as well, though in his case I suspect he would just put it on, roll something, and let the whole thing play out to the end of the island.
So if your reader is the sort who ends up listening rather than reading, with headphones on and the lights off, the audiobooks are in The Listening Room and the first chapters are free.
And since we are being bold about it. If anybody ever films these, it should be Quentin Tarantino. The dialogue, the music, the fact that the violence arrives mid-sentence in the middle of somebody ordering a drink. I am not holding my breath. I am also not being modest, because false modesty is just lying with better manners.
Who This Is For
I know exactly who reads my books, because they write to me.
They are old rogues. Men and women of a certain age who have done the things, been in the rooms, and still have the stories and about forty per cent of the liver. They do not need a thriller explained to them. They need one that does not insult them.
They are young party animals. The ones who are out at four in the morning on a Tuesday and will read two hundred pages on the Wednesday because they have nothing else on.
They are musicians. Every band in these books is a band I have been in or stood next to, and they recognise it on the first page, usually the argument in the van.
They are the ones who read The Dirt by Mötley Crüe and Neil Strauss in two sittings, put it down, and have been looking for something that does that again ever since. Nothing has. That is the gap I am writing into, except mine is fiction and the fiction lets me go further than four men with lawyers ever could.
And they are the ones who are simply, unmistakably alive. Loud, curious, slightly too interested in how rich people behave when the door shuts. Not shocked by much. Not bored by anything.
That is the list. If somebody on yours is one of those, you are done.
Do not buy it for your mother unless you know exactly what your mother is like.
Where to Buy, and When to Order
Kindle, on preorder now, lands on the device on the first of November. This is the one that saves you if it is already the twenty-fourth.
Paperbacks from my own store from release day, and from Amazon.
The audiobook from The Listening Room from the tenth of November. First chapters free, no app, no subscription.
The whole series, if you are going to do this properly. Five books. The Feeder, Alien AI, Goldblood, Luxe Rage, and Nirvana Nights. Start at the beginning and they will not be seen again until January.
One practical thing. Paperbacks are printed when you order them and then they have to travel. If you want one under a tree, order in the first week of December, not the third. I say this every year and every year somebody emails me on the twenty-second.
Summary
- A Christmas list for adults who want a book with teeth, written by somebody who got bored of the alternative.
- Glamorama is the line in the sand. Thrillers were sanded smooth after it and I write what I write because of that.
- Seven books that still have teeth: Ellis, Robbins, Ellroy, Wilbur Smith, Steinbeck, Fleming and Jackie Collins.
- Nirvana Nights, book five of the Feeder Series, out 1 November 2026. 1994, a fortune, a missing woman and three days nobody can account for.
- Hemingway in Luxe Rage. Peter O'Toole, Miles Davis, Mitchum and both Kennedys in Nirvana Nights. All invented, all researched until they hold weight.
- The audiobooks are funnier out loud than on the page, and the first chapters are free.
- Kindle saves a late present. Order paperbacks in the first week of December.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best thriller to give as a Christmas present?
Depends entirely on who is unwrapping it. For a reader who has exhausted the bestseller lists, something older and nastier beats something new and careful every time. Ellis, Robbins, Ellroy and Wilbur Smith all do things that current publishing will not go near.
What should I buy for someone who has read everything?
Start with Glamorama if they somehow missed it. If they did not miss it, they are exactly the reader Nirvana Nights was written for.
I just watched East of Eden on Netflix. What should I read next?
The book first, obviously. Steinbeck put things on the page that Florence Pugh and a camera cannot reach, however good she is, and she is very good. After that, if what gripped you was the bloodline and the rot passed down a family rather than the farming, that is the whole subject of the Feeder Series. Start with The Feeder, or with Nirvana Nights if you want the son rather than the father.
Are there real people in the Feeder Series?
Yes, and they talk. Ernest Hemingway in Luxe Rage. Peter O'Toole, Miles Davis, Robert Mitchum, Jimi Hendrix, Marco Pierre White, Ronnie Scott and both Kennedys across Nirvana Nights. All of it fiction, none of it accidental, and researched hard enough that people who were alive at the time have not caught me out yet.
What do I buy for someone who loved The Dirt?
Nothing else in that line comes close, because the memoirs all stop where the lawyers tell them to stop. Fiction does not have that problem. That is most of the reason the Feeder Series exists.
Is Nirvana Nights suitable as a gift?
For an adult who likes adult books, yes. Explicit sex, drug use, violence and language. It is not a gift for a teenager and it is not a gift for anyone who prefers things gentle.
Are the audiobooks worth it?
I narrate them and I am therefore the last person who should answer, so try them instead. First chapters are free in The Listening Room, no app and no subscription. The dialogue does things out loud that it does not do on the page.
When is Nirvana Nights out?
1 November 2026. Kindle on preorder now, paperbacks from release day, audiobook from the tenth of November.
Do I have to read the first four books first?
No. It stands alone. But a good deal of it rests on the earlier four, and several things land very differently if you already know what John Martin is capable of.
What is the last date to order a paperback for Christmas?
First week of December to be comfortable. Books are printed on demand and then shipped, so the gap between ordering and a parcel arriving is longer than people expect, especially internationally.
Related Reading
- Nirvana Nights Is Finished, and It Is Out on the First of November
- What Wilbur Smith Teaches in the First Chapter of Monsoon
- Hemingway: The Marlin Fight Is Where the Book Lives
- The Tenant by Freida McFadden is Domestic Basic Instinct Without the Sex
- Why Shantaram is a Masterpiece
- What Lee Child Teaches: Six Craft Lessons from the Opening of Killing Floor
