‘Readers need an antidote to an unsatisfactory everyday reality. If their car is stolen, they’ll never get it back. If their house is burgled, they’ll never see their stuff again, and the police will never catch the burglars. But they will in a book. Instead of a constant real-world buzz of low-level frustration, there will be a beginning, a middle and an end, by which time order will have been restored. A parallel or theoretical universe, where things happen, based on experience, but not constrained by fact, and from where the sheer satisfaction of a happy ending will osmose back into the real universe, in the form of contentment, compensation and consolation.’ Lee Child