Graham Norton

British talk show host Graham Norton is glad he waited until middle age to become a writer, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. “If I had been writing books in my 20s, they would have been glib, cynical, harsh, and funny in a kind of smartarsey way,” says Norton. “Now that I’m telling stories in my 50s, there’s more empathy.” Norton has long been famous in the U.K. for his freewheeling celebrity interviews. Crowding A-list guests onto a couch, he coaxes risqué anecdotes out of them and encourages interaction and cocktail drinking. But the Irish-born Norton has honed a different skill in recent decades, writing two memoirs and three novels. The latest is Home Stretch, set in his native country but centered around a young man who decides to leave, then to return. “Irish books are so often about leaving, or about going back,” he says.

The story opens in 1987 with its protagonist grappling with his role in a fatal accident. He’s also trying to decide whether to tell his parents that he’s gay—something that Norton, who is gay himself, never had to do: “I was a fey young boy, quite camp,” he says. The novel, after its opening, leaps around in time, said Petra Mayer in NPR.org. Much of what unfolds is tied to the crash, and Norton makes sure to circle back to Ireland to show how dramatically the country changed in 35 years, becoming a surprise leader on gay rights. Understandably, Norton was unable to finish on the note of revenge that he’d planned. Forgiveness, he decided, was the only conclusion that made sense. “Forgiveness is a sort of superpower,” he says. “If you can manage it, you win.”