The Professor of Truth - Couverture souple

   When I think of Nilsen now, how he came and vanished again in that one day, I don’t feel any warmer towards him in the remembering than I did when he was here. I don’t even feel grateful for what he gave me, because he and his kind kept it from me for so long. But I do think of the difficult journey he made, and why he made it. What set him off, he told me, was seeing me being interviewed on television, after Khalil Khazar’s death. He said he’d watched the interview over and over. He’d wanted to feel what I felt. But you cannot feel what another person feels. You cannot even imagine it, however hard you try. This I know.
   When Khalil Khazar died, the news went round the world in minutes— in text messages, in e-mails, through social networks, on radio and television, via websites and by telephone. I got the call at home from Patrick Bridger, a BBC journalist I knew and trusted. We’d talked, a week or so before the end, about what we would do and where we would film, knowing that it could not be long. ‘Alan, I’m on my way with a cameraman and a soundman,’ Patrick said. ‘We’ll pick you up and head straight to the location.’ I didn’t take any more calls. I was giving Patrick an exclusive. It was a way of controlling things. 
   While I waited for their car I thought about how the news would be received in different parts of the globe. There would be tears, I knew, but also there would be laughter. There would be grief and jubilation, clasped hands and clenched fists, loud dismay and quiet satisfaction. There would be one family mourning, other families celebrating. Some people would feel a sense of resolution, of justice having been done. Others would feel, as I did, a sense of things unresolved, of justice having not been done. A guilty man or an innocent man had gone to his grave: it depended on your perspective.

The Professor of Truth is James Robertson's acclaimed novel about grief, truth and justice.Twenty-one years after his wife and daughter were murdered in the bombing of a plane over Scotland, Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, still doubts the official version of events surrounding that terrible night. Obsessed by the details of what he has come to call The Case, he is sure that the man convicted of the atrocity was not responsible, and that he himself has thus been deprived not only of justice but also of any chance of escape from his enduring grief.When a terminally ill American intelligence officer arrives on his doorstep with information about a key witness in the trial, Alan decides to act. Will this lead to the truth for which he has waited so long?'Superb. A mystery thriller, a haunting evocation of grief' Daily Mail'A great storyteller. It is a tense and gripping read, beautifully imagined' The Times'Powered by action and mystery, and profoundly invested in the lives of its characters' ScotsmanJames Robertson is the author of four previous novels, The Fanatic, Joseph Knight, The Testament of Gideon Mack and And the Land Lay Still. The Testament of Gideon Mack was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, picked by Richard and Judy's Book Club, and shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year award. And the Land Lay Still was the winner of the Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award 2010.