TEHRAN – A Persian translation of “Make Me” by the British author of thriller novels Lee Child has been published by Ketabsara-ye Tandis in Tehran.

Mohammad Abbasabadi is the translator of the book first published in 2015, which is a novel from Child’s Jack Reacher series.

“Why is this town called Mother’s Rest?” That’s all Reacher wants to know. But no one will tell him. It’s a tiny place hidden in a thousand square miles of wheat fields, with a railroad station, and sullen and watchful people, and a worried woman named Michelle Chang, who mistakes him for someone else: her missing partner in a private investigation she thinks must have started small and then turned lethal.

Reacher has no particular place to go, and all the time in the world to get there, and there’s something about Chang… so he teams up with her and starts to ask around. He thinks: How bad can this thing be? 

But before long he’s plunged into a desperate race through LA, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco, and through the hidden parts of the internet, up against thugs and assassins every step of the way—right back to where he started, in Mother’s Rest, where he must confront the worst nightmare he could imagine.

Walking away would have been easier. But as always, Reacher’s rule is: If you want me to stop, you’re going to have to make me.

Child was born in 1954 in Coventry, England, but spent his formative years in the nearby city of Birmingham. By coincidence, he won a scholarship to the same high school that JRR Tolkien had attended. He went to law school in Sheffield, England, and after part-time work in the theater he joined Granada Television in Manchester for what turned out to be an eighteen-year career as a presentation director during British TV’s “golden age”. 

During his tenure, his company made Brideshead Revisited, The Jewel in the Crown, Prime Suspect, and Cracker. But he was let go in 1995 at the age of 40 as a result of corporate restructuring. 

Always a voracious reader, he decided to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis and bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, “Killing Floor”, the first in the Jack Reacher series.

“Killing Floor” was an immediate success and launched the series, which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment. The first Jack Reacher movie, based on the novel “One Shot” and starring Tom Cruise and Rosamund Pike, was released in December 2012.

Photo: Front cover of the Persian translation of Lee Child’s novel “Make Me”.

MMS/YAW