72 | SATURDAY | 30.04.22 | The Guardian
CULTURE BOOKS
Audiobook
of the week
A
remarkable piece of narrative
reporting and a sweeping
family saga, New Yorker writer
Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning
book about the Sackler family and its
role in America’s opioid crisis begins
with the seemingly heart-warming tale
of three Brooklyn brothers realising the
dreams of their immigrant parents
by becoming doctors. The Sacklers
went on to become one of the richest
families in the U S – they have an
estimated fortune of $14bn – feted
for their donations to art galleries,
universities and medical institutes.
Drawing on newly available court
documents and more than 200
interviews, Empire of Pain reveals how
the family made its money from the
suff ering of Americans through the
aggressive sales techniques of Purdue,
the Connecticut-based pharmaceutical
company that became the biggest
producer of OxyContin. The slow-
release painkiller is twice as powerful
as morphine and signifi cantly more
addictive. Approved by an offi cial at the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
who, a year later, took a high-paying job
at Purdue, the drug contributed to the
deaths of nearly 500,000 people over 20
years and wrecked the lives of millions.
M a n y l i s t e n e r s w i l l k n o w K e e f e ’ s
voice from the hit podcast Wind of
Change , which investigated the
rumour that the titular power ballad
was written by the CIA. If the vibe
there was one of amusement, here he
adopts a calmly astonished tone as he
tells a shocking story of callousness,
cover-ups and monumental greed.
F i o n a S t u r g e sFurther listening
My Mess Is a Bit of a Life:
Adventures in Anxiety
Georgia Pritchett
F A B E R , 4 H R 1 3 M I N
Katherine Parkinson narrates this
bracingly candid and funny account
of living with anxiety, from the writer
of Succession and Veep.Assembly
Natasha Brown
PENGUIN AUDIO, 1HR 58MIN
A high-fl ying Black woman grapples
with prejudice and Britain’s colonial
legacy in this sharply observed debut
n o v e l. P i p p a B e n n e t t - W a r n e r r e a d s.Empire of Pain
The Secret History
of the Sackler Dynasty
Patrick Radden Keefe
PICADOR, 18HR 6MINThe author on Enid Blyton, his
early love of the Narnia stories and
spontaneous human combustion
M y e a r l i e s t
reading memory
I was three years old , we
lived in Purbrook, near
Portsmouth , and if I had
been good my mother
would order a book at
the local bookshop and a
month later we would go
and pick it up. I remember
a children’sHiawatha,
a beautiful edition of
The Pied Piper of
Hamelin illustrated by
Margaret Tarrant , and
an illustrated Mikad o.
Gloriously morbid stuff
for a three-year-old.
THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE
Neil
Gaiman
My favourite
book growing up
If you’d asked me at seven
or eight it would have
been the Narnia books –
I wanted to live in them.
But at nine or 10 it was
The Lord of the Rings.
I was convinced it was
not only the best book
anybody had ever
written but that it was
the best book anybody
ever would write.The book that changed
me as a teenager
Roger Zelazny ’s novelsThe book I discovered
later in life
Charles Dickens’s
Bleak House, a book
I only came to in my
late 40s. I suspect I
was only there for the
spontaneous human
combustion, which
really isn’t a terribly
important part of
the novel. But I fell
deeply in love with
the plotting, the prose- the whole thing.
The book I am
currently reading
I’m enjoying Penn
Jillette ’s forthcoming
novel Random. And on
Audible, I’m revisiting
The Black Ridge:
Amongst the Cuillin of
Skye by Simon Ingram ,
narrated by Richard
Burnip , a glorious book
about the Cuill in Hills
and the people who
climbed them.My comfort read
Wolfe’s The Book of the
New Sun. I read it each
decade and fi nd new
things in it. Although
during lockdown, when I
was on my own for many
months, my comfort
reads tended to be books
I’d loved as a child. The
most interesting were
by Nicholas Stuart Gray,
who is now unfairly
forgotten, but who
was, at his best, one
of the most brilliant
children’s authors of
the 20th century.Chivalry by Neil Gaiman,
illustrated by Colleen
Doran, is published
by Headline.Lord of Light and
Creatures of Light
and Darkness. He was a
beautiful writer, with a
marvellous prose style,
and he just made it look
so much fun to write.The writer who
changed my mind
Harlan Ellison , from his
introduction to a short
story called Count the
Clock that Tells the Time ,
in a collection called
Shatterday. He wrote
about wasting time,
how you look around
and time’s gone. I n
that moment I was
determined to become
a writer.The book or author
I came back to
Gene Wolfe was an
author I respected but
didn’t love, and when
I was 20 I struggled to
read the fi rst in The Book
of the New Sun series,
T he Shadow of the
Torturer. I don’t know
why I picked it up again,
perhaps a year later , but
I was surprised to fi nd
that it was now the
most interesting book
in the world.The book I could
never read again
I fi nd it very hard to go
back to Enid Blyton.
It’s weird because
I remember just
how much I loved
Blyton, and I’m
somebody who loves
going back to beloved
children’s books, and
yet whatever I loved
isn’t there when I go
back as an adult.Tom Gauld
MURDO MACLEOD/THE GUARDIAN