Books like the ghost

The Ghost is a contemporary political thriller by the best-selling English novelist and journalist Robert Harris. In 2010, the novel was adapted into a film, The Ghost Writer, directed by Roman Polanski and starring Pierce Brosnan, for which Polanski and Harris co-wrote the screenplay.

In 2007 British prime minister Tony Blair resigned. Harris, a former Fleet Street political editor, dropped his other work to write the book. The ghost of the title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in mysterious circumstances.

The dead man had been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister named Adam Lang, a thinly disguised version of Blair. The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband. So astonishing are the implied allegations of the roman à clef that, had it concerned a lesser figure and were Harris a less eminent novelist, Britain's libel laws might have rendered publication impossible: Harris told The Guardian before publication, "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him." The thriller acquires an added frisson from the fact that Harris was an early and enthusiastic backer of Blair and a donor to New Labour funds.