Luke McCallin

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Luke McCallin

Goodreads Author


Born
in The United Kingdom
Website

Twitter

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Member Since
June 2014


Luke McCallin was born in Oxford, grew up around the world and has worked with the United Nations as a humanitarian relief worker and peacekeeper in the Caucasus, the Sahel, and the Balkans. His experiences have driven his writing, in which he explores what happens to normal people--those stricken by conflict, by disaster--when they are put under abnormal pressures.

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Luke McCallin It’s when your characters begin to take shape and, eventually, become creations. You start with one or two things—maybe a name, a description, an emot…moreIt’s when your characters begin to take shape and, eventually, become creations. You start with one or two things—maybe a name, a description, an emotion, an impression, a place, a time—and then bit by bit they come to life. My own character, Captain Gregor Reinhardt, literally walked into my dreams one night, and he sat there, patiently, for a long while thereafter. I knew a couple of things about him. He was a lonely man. He was a good detective. He was a German. But why was he lonely? How did he become a good detective? Why did I imagine him German? You start to answer these questions, and each answer leads to more questions and more answers, until you have a ‘character’.

The freedom to invent, to explore, to imagine. Inviting others into your world, the pleasure you take in their joy of it. All these things, and more, are true.(less)
Luke McCallin I spent six years working in Bosnia, and you can’t live there, or in Sarajevo, for long without it seeping into you. As much as it’s an overused analo…moreI spent six years working in Bosnia, and you can’t live there, or in Sarajevo, for long without it seeping into you. As much as it’s an overused analogy, Bosnia really is a historical and cultural crossroads, and it’s so contested. It defies any simple explanation, just like the finest puzzle or book or question. No matter the need to reduce and simplify it, there’s no one way to read it or play it, and a place and time like that gives you so many options as an author, for drama, action, reflection, for asking big questions and trying out the answers to them.

I was a political advisor to the United Nations mission, mandated to reform the country’s police forces and judiciary. I spent a lot of time with people from all walks of Bosnian life. Not just policemen and judges and lawyers, but mayors and town councilors, with priests and imams, with refugees and people still living in ruins, with war criminals and those who survived them, with those who lived the war and those who fled from it, with women holding families together, and men who had fallen adrift of life. I began to build up a collage in my mind. I kept wondering, asking myself, what would I have done in their place, and I began weaving that human and historical tapestry, which is one of the most complex and fascinating you can imagine, into my books, and into another time, that of the Second World War.

Out of all that, came the idea for The Pale House of how, too often, the guilty escape justice…(less)
Average rating: 4.11 · 8,369 ratings · 647 reviews · 16 distinct worksSimilar authors
The Man From Berlin (Gregor...

3.98 avg rating — 3,721 ratings — published 2013 — 28 editions
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The Pale House (Gregor Rein...

4.13 avg rating — 2,064 ratings — published 2014 — 27 editions
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The Ashes of Berlin (Gregor...

4.27 avg rating — 1,917 ratings — published 2016 — 22 editions
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From a Dark Horizon (Gregor...

4.26 avg rating — 637 ratings — published 2021 — 7 editions
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The Divided City: Gregor Re...

4.71 avg rating — 7 ratings
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The Pale House

3.80 avg rating — 5 ratings
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Conspiration

4.33 avg rating — 3 ratings2 editions
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Les cendres de Berlin

really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 2 ratings3 editions
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Where God Does Not Walk: Gr...

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Conspiration

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More books by Luke McCallin…
The Man From Berlin The Pale House The Ashes of Berlin From a Dark Horizon
(4 books)
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4.11 avg rating — 8,339 ratings

The Kindly Ones
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Quotes by Luke McCallin  (?)
Quotes are added by the Goodreads community and are not verified by Goodreads. (Learn more)

“You talk to me of choices?’ said Reinhardt. ‘I only know that the choices life makes you take strip away the person we wanted to be. Builds us up into something we never wanted. Until you look back on life, and you see that the track of your life is a scar that hides what might have been.”
Luke McCallin, The Man from Berlin

“The two of them headed over the narrow road and away from Vukic’s house. The houses up here were beautiful,”
Luke McCallin, The Man From Berlin

“any case, happiness did not mean conversation. Neither he nor Claussen had exchanged more than a couple of words since they left, but there was a comfort in that silence that he was loath to break for the sake of mere speech.”
Luke McCallin, The Man From Berlin

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