March Fiction

A big-hearted tale of music and perseverance from a living country legend is our top literary pick this month

In 2018 the ever-prolific James Patterson got together with Bill Clinton to write the best-selling The President Is Missing: a novel that combined Clinton’s insider knowledge with Patterson’s own taste for old-fashioned, slightly corny thrills. Now he does something very similar with the international treasure that is Dolly Parton.

Not altogether surprisingly, the main setting is Nashville, where a young singer-songwriter called Annielee Keyes arrives with nothing but talent and a crazy dream. She even has to borrow a guitar when she persuades the manager of a randomly chosen bar to let her sing a few of her songs at an open-mic night, which naturally ends in triumph.

Not only that, but as luck (and the book’s needs) would have it, the bar is owned by Ruthanna Ryder, “one of country music’s grandest queens”, who soon takes Annielee under her kindly, regal wing. Within a couple of months, a star is duly born.

From there, though, things go rather less smoothly—not least because Annielee is nursing a sorrow so secret that it takes us most of the novel to discover it.

Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson (Century, £20)

James Walton is a book reviewer and broadcaster, and has written and presented 17 series of the BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff