Ten years since we left him, now living back in his native Yorkshire, Brodie’s solitary existence has been interrupted by the arrival of his 13-year-old son, Nathan, for the summer holidays. Now, after three books set during the second world war (the Costa winners were followed by Transcription in 2018), Atkinson has returned to Brodie and a very contemporary theme: the sexual exploitation of women and children. In the intervening years, Jason Isaacs has brought him to brooding life on screen in the BBC series Case Histories, named after the first Brodie book, and his creator has produced her most acclaimed historical novels, including Life After Life and its sequel, A God in Ruins, both of which won the Costa Novel award. Which was exactly the opposite of how he felt now.I t’s nearly a decade since Kate Atkinson’s gruff private detective Jackson Brodie last appeared in print.
There was nothing there for him, just bad memories and a past he could never undo, and what was the point anyway when France was laid out on the other side of the Channel like an exotic patchwork of sunflowers and grapevines and little cafes where he could sit all afternoon drinking local wine and bitter espressos and smoking Gitanes, where everyone would say, Bonjour, Jackson, except they would pronounce it 'zhaksong', and he would be happy. For years he had thought about moving back north, but he knew he never would. He had come here more or less by accident, following a girlfriend and staying for a wife. "Jackson had never felt at home in Cambridge, never felt at home in the south of England if it came to that. His ability to connect comes from his own tragic childhood that still haunts him. He's unable to resist coming to the rescue and increasingly he becomes a magnet for the bereaved, the lost and the dysfunctional. Jackson's tough-guy exterior belies a deeply empathetic heart. A former soldier and policeman he now makes his money working from investigating infidelity and finding missing cats. Jackson Brodie is a private investigator, originally from Yorkshire.
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