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.

In one of the book's first reviews, The Economist praised the "trenchant novel"...for "depicting the drama of Oppenheimer torn between lust for scientific achievement and horror of prospective success.

[17][18] The Chicago Tribune called the book "an audacious undertaking in the ...breadth of its unfolding... [he] writes in the mode of the sublime romanticist..."[13] The San Diego Union Tribune said "the writer... sweeps us up into it with the passion of a great storyteller whose subject is not merely a particular cast of characters but a world in agonizing transition"[10] The New York Times viewed the novel as "melodrama", "with swaths of very good writing and quite a bit that is dreadful".

"[19] 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"[12] The Observer issued a famously scathing review (later reprinted in The Guardian) by Philip Hensher, calling it "so awful, it's not even funny.

"[17][20] The Economist on the other hand praised the writing, stating that Thackara had Tolstoy's "talent for painting the grand with small brush strokes",[5][7] 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.