James Thackara

James Thackara (born 7 December 1944, in Los Angeles) is an American writer who has lived in the United Kingdom since 1971 and became a British citizen in 2007. He has published three novels – America's Children, Ahab's Daughter (1989), and The Book of Kings (1999).

Early life Thackara was born in Los Angeles, California to Argentinean-born James Justin Thackara and Ellen Louise Schmid from Greenville, Texas. His parents' marriage broke down before Thackara's birth and thereafter, his mother travelled with her young son through Europe and the Americas. At the age of eleven, he was sent to the first of several boarding schools. While studying at Harvard University, Thackara was mentored by Peter Taylor, resulting in a close personal friendship that lasted till the end of Taylor's life.

Ahab's Daughter was published by Abacus in 1989. A chronicle of World War II evoking the 19th-century style of the "great novel", it attracted praise for its moral vision, scale, – and writing in such "elaborately and burnished scenes...as a schooner setting sail, the discovery of a wrecked plane It also received criticism for its writing style, in particular, the dialogue, with characters "speaking in the tones of an oracle", its length and the use of multiple foreign languages. The Chicago Tribune called the book "an audacious undertaking in the ...breadth of its unfolding... [he] writes in the mode of the sublime romanticist..." A strong tribute was delivered by Malcolm Bradbury in The Times when he said of the book "it revives the form's classic power to chronicle history and society, manners, morals, politics, family dynasties and human anxieties, to move from individual to general, from the intense emotions of daily living to the sweeping forces of the world" The Economist on the other hand praised the writing, stating that Thackara had Tolstoy's "talent for painting the grand with small brush strokes", and the Seattle Times too drew parallels with War and Peace, calling The Book of Kings a "book nobody should miss reading [...] Thackara's acknowledged success is the consummate ability to gracefully mesh the personal with the political, the sense of the individual with the historical."