Product Description
Sally Gilmartin can’t escape her past.

Living in the idyllic English countryside in 1976, Sally is haunted by her experiences during the Second World War.She also suspects someone is trying to kill her.With mounting fear, Sally confides with her daughter Ruth; a woman struggling with her own past.Sally drops a bombshell.She is actually Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré recruited as a spy by the British prior to the Second World War.For the past thirty years, Eva has led a second life hiding from the ghosts of her past.

Eva reveals her secret to her daughter through a series of written chapters for a planned book.As Ruth delves into her mother’s writing, she learns the shocking truth.Eva was recruited in Paris prior to the Second World War, following the death of her brother Kolia; also a British spy.Taught by an enigmatic spymaster named Lucas Romer, Eva learned the art of espionage and was made part of a unit specializing in media manipulation.Above all, she was taught ‘Rule Number One’ of spying: trust no one — a rule broken when she and Romer began a dangerous love affair.The affair had tragic consequences.

In 1941, Eva and Romer were assigned to the United States.They were given the task of manipulating the American media into motivating the public to support entry into the war on the Allied side.While in New York, Eva’s affair with Romer set in motion events that culminated in her betrayal and her flight from the British Secret Services.She found eventual refuge in a new life as Sally Gilmartin.

Thirty years later, Eva’s identity unravels with her confession to her daughter.Ruth struggles with the truth, and her own recent past fills her with self-doubt and insecurity.A failed relationship in Germany resulted in a son and an eventual return to England.Her mother’s confession leads Ruth to the realization that her mother is entangling her in one final mission — a showdown with Eva’s past betrayer.

Restless twists and turns through the double life of one remarkable woman.Through Eva’s life, William Boyd asks the intriguing question — How well do we truly know someone? ... Read more

Customer Reviews (56)

Come on Amazon!
This was a very fun read but I cannot let this one go without commenting on the autrocious Kindle version.The thing was riddled with mistakes all over regarding spelling and puncuation.COME ON how hard can it be to trnasfer a digitial copy to a digital copy?!!Don't you kindle people review your product before selling it??But worse is the publisher.If I was Boyd I'd be livid.

Absorbing novel from both grown daughter's POV and mother's (past)
Well-written, intelligent. Though this is my first William Boyd book, I'm an espionage novel aficionado and found this book first-rate. Fleshed out characters. Seems plausible. Well-plotted. Explores relationships between (single) mother in late-20's and her mother, a former agent. Read it on one night because I didn't want to put it down. (No matter that I'm not sure "Restless" was most descriptive title). Highly recommended.

surprizing
I really enjoyed this book even though I was not expecting to. The author blended history and present moments really well. Most books I have read that jump back and forth through time is confusing but I looked forward to the contrast between the mothers life and the daughters current one. Each detail of the mothers life as a spy was so given at a descent enough pace to keep me hooked until it was all laid out in front of me.The two stories he told blended quite well. It has always amazed me what parents were willing to do and did to protect their country and most of the time the children never knew the extent of the sacrifice that was made. The author gave good details without overwhelming the story and by the end the daughters character had actually matured by the things she learned about her mother. Because the story was being told from the daughters point of view and the mothers story as secondary it keeps your focus on the present day. Neither character overwhelms the story line. I would reccomend this book to any one who wants a quick lesson in WWII espionage and how it still affects the people involved to this day. The war has not ended for those individuals and won't til the day they die. It is definitely going on my read again shelf. The only aspect that was not needed was the information on the main characters ex and his brother. There was really no conclusion to their story line and I had to wonder why he included them. I would have liked to see more information or a followup to the characters.

Cure for Insomnia
First and last book I will attempt by this author - boring and pretentious going nowhere slowly.

as usual, Boyd delivers a terrific story
'Restless' contains two narrative threads, one modern (mid-1970s) and the other circa 1940, that are interlaced as alternate chapters.In the modern segment we had a young mother trying to sort out her life, and is coping with an increasingly odd-acting mother who announces that she is not who she thinks is; in fact she is a Russian-born WW II spy.In the pre-WW II thread we see how this woman became a spy and what sort of spying she actually did.Both narrative threads blend together beautifully; the book is immensely readable.It all comes together with a satisfying conclusion.


PS - I admit William Boyd is one of my favorite authors, and 'Restless' is on par with the best of his works. ... Read more

Product Description

In the heart of a civil war–torn African nation, primate researcher Hope Clearwater made a shocking discovery about apes and man. . . .

Customer Reviews (38)

Enjoyable as part of a total Boyd Experience, but...
I loved Boyd's Any Human Heart, enjoyed An Ice-Cream War (after a slightly slower start), and looked forward to savoring Brazzaville Beach - which fell into the "enjoyable enough" category, but didn't quite live up to the reputation Boyd had established with me!
The First person-Third Person back and forth narrative was a tad contrived in its execution; unfortunately, neither the prologue that warned the reader this was upcoming, nor the context of the story as it unfolds, failed to justify this somewhat disjointed flip-flopping of time and narrative voice. Ultimately, it didn't bother me too much in the reading - in fact, I did become engaged in the parallel story of the emotional rise and fall of Hope Clearwater's once-brilliant, mathemetician husband. And, if I felt like expending the energy to think literarily, I'm sure interesting analogies could be drawn between the England-side story and the AFrica-chimpanzee story (but unfortunately Boyd's crafting doesn't inspire that effort as well as I suspect it could have been done).

I read good fiction, in all honesty, to be moved, absorbed or - yes - entertained, at some level. The "fine writing" or "literary cleverness" part can't interfere with my being grabbed. I realize Brazzaville failed to inspire me, in part because I never believed in Hope as a credible female character. She was neither a real human woman, nor a fantasy super-female heroine, but lay nebulously somewhere in between. (TRIVIAL NOTE: MAJOR kudos to Boyd for throwing in an element of reality that, face it - we all wonder about, and rarely have our curiosities satisfied: namely, just HOW does the reality of having to pee or poop fit in with the story character(s) being taken captive?)

Even so, the only vividly real and intriguing character was Hope's husband. I'm left to conclude that Boyd just doesn't show his best with female protagonists, and fortunately, he has written more compellingly about men in other novels.
Nevertheless, I am glad I read Brazzaville Beach - it is entertaining and interesting enough - I'm merely judging the author by his later work. Anyone who wants to round out their 'Boyd experience' would enjoy adding this to the mix! If it's the first book by the author you read, be sure not to miss Any Human Heart!

I won't spoil it for you--Just Buy It!!!
"Any Human Heart" is considered by some to be Boyd's magnum opus, and it blew me away as a young man. I was not impressed by "Stars and Bars." Giving Boyd another chance, I purchased "Brazzaville Beach," and I found in it the excellent and mature writing of an established author. I only have a few things to say about it.

1) If I had to list a flaw about this book, I would say that the pages turn too quickly. It pulls you in, and you do not want it to end. You speedily approach the end, and it's not a good feeling.

2) Highly intelligent. Boyd writes from the perspective of a female primatologist, who, I freely admit, is smarter than I am. How many times smarter than I am does that make Boyd, I wonder?

3) It is a narrative with several different "layers", different stories being told at the same time, all of which involve the main character Hope Clearwater. By "layering" the narrative like this, the combined effect is that all of the narratives redouble their power. They gain a synergy, and they spur the reader to think more deeply, relating one narrative to another.

4) I have made this review deliberately vague so as not to give anything away.

5) If a good director made this into a movie, it would be a good film, but the book would most certaily be better.

6) If you are like me, and you enjoy popular scientific writing such as Dawkins, etc. you will enjoy this book.

7) If you enjoyed the book "A Beautiful Mind," you will enjoy this book.

Insightful, intelligent, captivating, sensitive, complex, realistic fiction for the adult. A huge success. Bravo to Boyd and his skill, and thank you to him for hours of enjoyment. You can scarcely ask for more.

brazzaville beach
I read this many years ago and loved it. One of my all time favorites. Re- read it recently and was once again blown away by what an amazing novel this is. Interesting and out of the ordinary characters. Insightful and profound. Don't let your life pass with out reading it.

Fascinating
Brazzaville Beach was the first book I read by this author and I was spell-bound from the first page.It is intelligent, intriguing and sad: very, very real.

an excellent novel
This is the first novel that I've read by William Boyd, and i found it to be an inspired work.He has clearly mastered the art of storytelling in a unique way.The characters are developed in a very interesting way, such that, even though we don't get much interaction with several of them, there are subtle hints about what they are like.The main characters are brilliantly developed.The narrative style was maybe more controversial.Switching between first and third person, and the jumping around in time are both neat little tricks.I'm not sure how much was added by using the third person, but perhaps a second reading will reveal more of that.Otherwise, this particular device seemed overly cute.The time jumps were more obviously useful to the way the book was written, allowing for three suspenseful elements to climax at the same time.I also thought that Boyd did an admirable job of writing from a woman's point of view.All in all, I've not been so excited about a novelist in awhile, and I'm off to read another of his works. ... Read more

Product Description
From the award-winning author of A Good Man Africa and An Ice-Cream War comes Armadillo, a brilliant satirical noir set in contemporary London.

To his colleagues, Lorimer Black, the handsome, mild-mannered insurance adjuster rising through the ranks of his London firm, is known as the guy who has it all: the sleek suits, the enviable status. But when Lorimer arrives at a routine business appointment and finds his client hanging from a water pipe, his life spirals out of control. His company car is blowtorched after he investigates a fire at a luxury hotel. He becomes the fall guy of a new colleague who puts the company in the red and the victim of a vicious attack by the possessive husband of a mysterious actress.

As Lorimer becomes increasingly entangled in an apparent conspiracy that involves everyone he knows, his own past comes to light. A brilliant satirical noir, Armadillo confirms Boyd's place as England's most versatile, sublime novelist.Amazon.com Review
Lorimer Black may suffer from a serious sleep disorder and an obsessionwith the labyrinths of the British class system, but Armadillo'speculiar protagonist is the star insurance adjuster of London'sFortress Sure PLC, unaffectionately known as the Fort. At the very start ofWilliam Boyd's noir-ish seventh novel, however, things take a decided swervefor the worse. On a bleak January morning one of his cases has apparentlychosen to kill himself rather than talk: "Mr. Dupree was simultaneously thefirst dead person he had encountered in his life, his first suicide and hisfirst hanged man and Lorimer found this congruence of firsts deceptivelytroubling."

Soon our hero, who himself has a lot to hide, finds himself threatened by adodgy type whose loss he has adjusted way down and embroiled with thebeautiful married actress Flavia Malinverno. "People who've lost something,they call on you to adjust it, make the loss less hard to bear? As if theirlives are broken in some way and they call on you to fix it," Flaviadippily wonders. Lorimer also has his car torched and instantly goes froman object of affection to one of deep suspicion at the Fort. Then there isanother case, the small matter of the rock star who may or may not befaking the Devil he says is sitting on his left shoulder.

Needless to say, Lorimer is "becoming fed up with this role of fall guy forother people's woes." Boyd adds a deep layer of psychological heft and alighter level of humor to this thinking-person's thriller by exploringLorimer's manifold personal and social fears. This is a man who desperatelycollects ancient helmets even though he knows they offer only "the illusionof protection." Another of Armadillo's many pleasures: its dose ofdelicious argot. Should Lorimer "oil" the apparent perpetrator of theFedora Palace arson before he's oiled himself? Or perhaps he just needs to"put the frighteners" on him. Boyd definitely puts the frighteners on hisreaders more than once in this cinematically seedy and dazzling literarydisplay. --Kerry Fried ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

An off-kilter, bent look at a yuppie's mysterious past
Never thought I'd be interested in insurance, but my wife likes Boyd and urged this on me. He has a knack for getting you intrigued by what intrigues him-- such as the obsession for armor here-- and as with "The Blue Afternoon" about Hollywood, or "Brazzaville Beach" about Africa, I found this novel another reliable entertainment from Boyd.

As Reviewer Price noted earlier, it reminded me of Martin Amis' take on his city; see my review of "London Fields." Streets are named carefully by Lorimer, fashions noted meticulously, tics revealing one's status in a very class-conscious and place-obsessed megapolis. What stayed suprisingly subtle were the Transnistrian Gypsy background of Lorimer's family; another author might well have drawn upon this far more, but as with the obsessions of Lorimer himself, many of them appear oddly less amplified than I'd expected.

This tone, then, makes for an off-kilter story. It's from Lorimer's p-o-v, so that enhances his deadpan recital of such awful satirical types as Torquil, one of the most splendid louche layabouts I've ever met-- luckily not in reality. Yet, so much of the backstory of Lorimer, as with the Scottish scenes that gradually are amplified to a climactic explanation of L's earlier re-invention of himself-- don't gain on the page the same weight that Boyd intends for them.

As with the whole "lucid dreams" sub-plot, there's less payoff than I'd have liked. Flavia's an intriguing character, but too much of her mystery remains. Boyd is realistic in introducing types we know less about than we'd like at first, but then he withholds information later on that keeps us at a distance. He seems not to want to reveal all the mysteries, and while some may like this teasing, oblique approach, I found it perplexing by the story's conclusion.

Best avoided.
Bought this because of promising reviews and never been let down by Boyd. It meanders between tolerable to awful. Simply not worth the effort.

London calling
Armadillo is also a great book for all London-minded readers. It is fun to be able to recognise places and routes mentioned in the book. But I would not recommend the TV adaptation of the book: a lot got lost in it, even though it was adapted by the author himself. The humourous bits and all things about London had gone.

Not what I had hoped for.
Whilst I can see and appreciate the main themes within this book - being afraid to be yourself and the absurdity of the British class system.I didn't really feel like I got to know any of the characters that well.The twist and turns of the plot seemed pretty far fetched to me.I found it more sad than amusing.Perhaps it speaks more to men than to women,I wouldn't recommend this book to a friend.

boyd's best
I spent a year of my life working the 2AM shift flipping burgers, and Boyd brought that world back to me.I don't know anyone who has ever written so well about sleep, nosleep, and the inner world of the solitary working stiff ... Read more

Product Description

One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back.

Customer Reviews (39)

Good read
This book starts out a little slowly but really builds up as it progresses.I like that better then authors that seem to get out all their ideas in the first half.I was so concerned for the hero that it seemed quite painful at first, but got over that hump as did the hero :).

Excellent Novel about Little Known, Contemporary London
Engrossing read. Elegant, stylish writing. A journey through a London little known to many of us, into the belly of the underworld and of the working poor. Also, a journey down the Thames where we are treated to a close look at the tides, the flotsam and jetsam, the very waters - their color and substance - that lend credence to the Thames still being the hub of London life.

Importantly, what drives the story is the transformation of genteel academic Adam Kindred who, with hopes of an interview for a top job, inadvertently becomes a murder suspect after being embroiled in the assassination of a stranger. From posh to lower class, he turns into a homeless in hiding at the edge of the Thames, a hobo wandering and rediscovering the city, before growing in street smarts, assuming another identity, and outwitting an assassin. During his journey, Adam, in essence, reinvents himself and builds a new, more fulfilling life.

Pretty Good
This was my first time reading Boyd (thanks Stephen King for the suggestion) so I intitially thought this was going to be a serious thriller.I was dissappointed the Adam character wasn't a stronger, more courageous protagonist.But before too long, I realized that every character in this was just that- a character.When examined from your own point of view, their eccentricities are at times pretty hilarious.Sort of like a Carl Haissen novel- only less overtly humourous.Even the hired killer has likeable, funny qualities.
I do agree that I could have done with a more complete ending.Two pretty major situations are left unresolved.

potboiler boyd
Any Human Heart and New Confessions were great books by Boyd, but this is almost a pot boiler. Once read, easily forgotten.

thriller with social commentary
I enjoyed this well written novel.The characters are well drawn and elicit sympathy.Though the ending might not ring true, it's been great fun along the way.The author brings London and its less glamorous side vividly to life.The themes--corporate corruption and greed and the individuals victimized by them--are hardly new, but neither are they tiresome.I enjoyed the author's novel, Restless, a bit more, but felt I had wasted neither time or money reading this one. ... Read more

Product Description
In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.

After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.Amazon.com Review
Morgan Leafy had high hopes when he first headed out to thesmall African nation of Kinjanja to serve as Her British Majesty'srepresentative. But once there, Leafy's dreams of professionaladvancement and personal happiness soon fade: this son of an airportcatering manager finds himself overtaken on the career ladder byother, newer recruits to the diplomatic corps who come from the rightfamily and attended the right schools. What's worse, the girl of hisdreams has just become engaged to someone younger, thinner, and betterconnected. And if all this weren't enough to make a career civilservant miserable, Leafy is also being blackmailed by a representativeof one of Kinjanja's many political parties who has presented him witha puzzling task: get to know the Scottish medical doctor at a localuniversity.

Author William Boyd has written about Africa before,most notably in his bestselling novel Brazzaville Beach. InA Good Man in Africa, Boyd spins a darkly comic tale ofpolitical corruption, revolution, sexual misadventure, blackmail, anddeath. By novel's end, Leafy may not have become a better man--or evena much wiser one--but he has acquired a kind of dignity and grittycourage for which he is well suited. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (18)

Surprize ending
From the moment I started reading, I wondered how I was going to reconcile, or even find some goodness in the main character.Kept reading, and loved the mystical ending . . . will say no more.

My husband was not pleased
A good Man in Africa came with high praise.So, it goes to show that no two people are alike.My husband became totally bored after reading dozens of pages setting the stage in great detail.His statement was, "Get it done!"He left the book at a doctors office.Perhaps someone else will like it.

A funny Englishman in Africa
As always, excellent writing from Mr. Boyd.I found the novel to be much more humorous than I expected.It was a very
pleasant surprise, and I enjoyed the novel the novel very much, but, my favorite Boyd work is still "Any Human Heart",
followed closely by "Restless".Wm. Boyd never disappoints his readers.

forget this
Not interesting and did not care to finish it even though my book club read it.

Boyd is a sure thing
I've read several of his books and they are all great. His character development is especially strong. ... Read more

Product Description
William Boyd’s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, art dealer, spy—as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth century.Amazon.com Review
Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, writer, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. William Boyd's novel Any Human Heart is his disjointed autobiography, a massive tome chronicling "my personal rollercoaster"--or rather, "not so much a rollercoaster", but a yo-yo, "a jerking spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child." From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism and abject poverty.

Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Strike, the Spanish Civil War, 1930s Americans in Paris, wartime espionage, New York avant garde art, even the Baader-Meinhof gang--all with a stellar supporting cast. The most sustained and best moment comes mid-book, as Mountstuart gets caught up in one of Britain's murkier wartime secrets, in the company of the here truly despicable Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Elsewhere author William Boyd occasionally misplaces his tongue too obviously in his cheek--the Wall Street Crash is trailed with truly crashing inelegance--but overall Any Human Heart is a witty, inventive and ultimately moving novel. Boyd succeeds in conjuring not only a compelling 20th century but also, in the hapless Logan Mountstuart, an anti-hero who achieves something approaching passive greatness. --Alan Stewart, Amazon.co.uk ... Read more

Customer Reviews (49)

Terrific: One man's walk through the 20th Century
Bravo.Any Human Heart tells the life story in diary form of novelist and literary critic Logan Mountstuart (1906-1991), a likable and roguish hero.We live through his marriages, dalliances, literary success and frustrations, good decisions and bad, and his successes and failures.He is afforded good luck and bad (as he might put it).He meets an entertaining array of prominent 20th Century figures including Hemingway, Picasso, Evelyn Waugh, Frank O'Hara, Jackson Pollock, Virginia Wolff, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, James Joyce and others, which is tremendous fun (all of these figures are convincingly portrayed and none suffer through gratuitous cameos).

Mountstuart's life comes to include many genres -- spy, adventure, romance, marital drama, historical drama -- and what you get in the end is the mix of half-successes, failures, fantasies, longings, intrigues and relationships good and bad that comprise lives, and that in this case come together as quite a moving story.It was pleasant and enlightening to share 70 years with Mountstuart; when it's over, one misses his company.Mountstuart is not a romantic figure with grand, world-changing goals, but he has his set of standards and tries to uphold them over time.The credo he adopts in the Spanish civil War has two hates and three loves: hatred of injustice, hatred of privilege, love of life, love of humanity, love of beauty.He describes the spirit of the Cosmopolitans, a French school of pre-WWI poets about whom Mountstuart writes his third book, thusly: "They are all about romance, about life's excitement and adventure and its essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer - stoical in their hedonism."It is the spirit in which Mountstuart lives his life.

Boyd's literary style is elegant but not flashy, just right for the diary form.The evolving voice of the character at different ages is totally convincing, as is Boyd's evocation of a diverse set of places and times.As Mountstuart says, "You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy." Well said.

I loved it, read it quickly and now feel lucky to have found a great new (to me) author.

The Epic Sentimentality of a Life Lived
This novel (in journal form) is the life account of one Logan Montstuart, a man who was alive in each decade of the 20th century. It's a book that makes you think and put into perspective the events of a person's life, and it makes you remember that your own time on earth is all too fleeting. There is definitely a sense of sentimentality you take away from this book when you look upon the sucesses, the tragedies, the loves and the losses in the life of Logan Montstuart. Because of this, there is a tremendous sense of realism with the main character. His character, although fictional, is as genuine as any character you will find in literature. If but for this reason only, Any Human Heart is a worthwhile read. Some other good points worth mentioning about this book include it's crossover with actual events in the 20th century. Montstuart encounters Hemmingway, Picasso and Edward VIII. He studies at Oxford (one of the best sequences in the novel). He becomes a writer. He travels widely. I must also point out that in this genuine portrayal of a man, you discover the flaws of the man as well. At times, I felt dissapointed in Logan Montstuart. I'm purposely not giving away any specifics. You will find out for yourself when you read this book, but suffice it to say: The portrayal of the main character is interesting, it is real, it is profoundly insightful and it makes you look upon your own life differently.

I will include one specific example that hit hard with me (it's a minor element, not a spoiler). Logan Montstuart, although a published writer, never gets around to completing his final novel. Sadly, it made me think of some of the things that I wanted to do in my life, but have never got around to doing. This is just one example of how this book touched me emotionally. There were other moments as well. This is a quality that the best of books have.

The Only Novel With An Index !
This is a fine novel, and I admit that I enjoyed reading it, but it would've been a great novel if only . . .

IF ONLY he hadn't included all those detailed accounts of vacuous cocktail parties and gatherings where numerous names (most authentic, some fictitious ) are dropped with a report of how much each one drank. If only he hadn't kept a running tally of what the protagonist drank each day and how much. I suppose that the name-dropping makes the diary more realistic, but like the nonfiction Diary of H.L. Mencken, it makes for tedious reading.Most of the famous names he introduces are dragged onstage to utter a single line, then shuffled off. If only he had dispensed with the once-conventional device of mentioning each time someone lights a cigarette.

Without such chaff, "Any Human Heart" would be a much better novel, and it would be about 200 pages shorter.

(Now I suppose that some schmarty-pantz will list a dozen other novels with an index, but there are so many names here that this book really needs one.)

There seems to be something about British authors which apparently makes them resist deleting anything from their manuscripts. They have lost all ability to be succinct, and they must regard the deletion of a single sentence as an affront to their personal honour or an indignity, as if someone had failed to stand for God Save the Queen.

any human heart by william boyd
a beautifully written book by a highl,y accomplished and engrossing author.

i would recommend this work to anyone who enjoys fine writing and has an inclination towards modern history and travel.

Fiction skillfully interwoven with history
Following a character through his or her life can be very absorbing. That is what this novel, written in the form of an "intimate journal," does and it includes most of the major events of the 20th century. It is fiction skillfully interwoven with history.

Any Human Heart tells the story of Logan Mountstuart through his diaries, and his experiences. Born male, rich, good looking and arrogant at the beginning of the century, he dies a modest, kinder and wiser man. Logan's life might seem preposterous but it is certainly engaging. ... Read more

Product Description
"A perfect-pitch story of love and redemption" (The New York Times), Boyd's atmospheric new novel confirms his reputation as heir to the grand narrative traditions of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. In 1936 Los angeles, as her long-estranged father tells architect Kay Fischer the story behind her secret parentage, he plunges readers into a tale of grisly murders and an illicit passion that still obsseses him 30 years later. 384 pp. Author tour.Amazon.com Review
Boyd, the author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach, here gives us somethingentirely new, part suspense, part romance, all grand storytelling.A young woman, waylaid by an old man who claims to be herfather, hears his story of corruption and intrigue as the two of themembark on a remarkable journey. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (19)

Missing the Boat
This is one of those books, like the movie Titanic, that begins in one time period, flashback to an earlier one, and then returns to the first for its climax. In the case of The Blue Afternoon, two out of three isn't bad.

We are drawn into the strory when a woman whose baby has died is approachted by a down-and-out stranger who claims he's her real father. That's intriguing. The setting of 1936 Los Angeles is not particularly believable. This part is told in the first person and the woman's sensibilities a seem a bit more contemporary than that period.

The second part, detailing the man's history in American occupied Manila is incredible. William Boyd has a gift for history and the details of the (then) young doctor's medical practice ring very true. As a character (now told in third person, limited) he is much more fully realized here than in the other two sections of the book. But the account calls for some resolution we hope will occur when we return to the daughter's perspective. It does and it doesn't. For one, we have been overpowered by the man's story and barely remember the original narrator's loss. Second, he again becomes a two-dimensional figure, but now we are less inclined to accept this after all we have gone through with him.

In theory the two themes of loss should meld together. They just don't. Plenty to think about though, and I give the author full credit for allowing us to draw conclusions. But this novel with all the right ingredients, somehow, like the young doctor in 1902 Manila, misses the boat.

A book that mentions the Philippine American War
This is the first fiction-based book I have read that has mentioned the Philippine American War--the author is not even Filipino! For that, I give the book 5 stars. People should know about this forgotten and important war. Okay, I can go on and on about this... And now about the whole book: It's not what I expected and I guess this is why I like it a lot. The character development is well done and the description of the locals and events were intriguing. I also really love the side story about the plane (you just have to read it).

Great, smart read
Highly recommend it.One of those rare books - great story and beautifully written.A bit of a mystery, a bit of romance, a bit of a world long gone.
I also recommend:
-"Good man in Africa" by the same author
-anything my Tome Wolfe
-anything by Balzac and Zola
-"Power of One" by Bryce Courtenay
-"Fear and Trembling" by Amelie Nothomb

a romantic, historical novel with charm ... and loose ends
William Boyd is an excellent writer.The prose, characterizations and dialogue are uniformly excellent in all his books I've read, including 'The Blue Afternoon'.In this book we have, in effect, a romance between a doctor and a married woman ... plus a number of interesting side stories (murder, war, mayhem and yes, more romance).The 1903 Manila setting, just after the Spanish-American war, gives the story a historical and fascinating twist.

Like his other books, 'The Blue Afternoon' isn't an entirely believable read.But it is such a pleasurable story that one wishes it was all fact, not fiction.My only complaint with it is the ending.Some open-ended matters concerning subplots are not closed.The author has seemingly done this purposely to tease the reader.I wasn't teased, just annoyed.However this doesn't tarnish the overall pleasure of reading 'The Blue Afternoon'.


Bottom line: a rich, charming fable.Why it hasn't been made into a film is anyone's guess.Recommended to all.

Love story from a man's angle, with plot aplenty
As a woman, if you're ever so slightly bored of modern women writers, this is for you. William Boyd's achingly beautiful writing weaves an engrossing plot involving, but not limited to, a love story told from the man's point of view. And it's refreshing to read of a man's utter devotion, told ungushingly but with such feeling and realism. In addition to the love, there is the story set mostly in the Far East, a little murder, infidelity, characters which jump out at you but allow you to fill in the gaps.... and a prologue that will have you desperate to drop the kids off at school and leave them there all week while you finish. This is a book for everyone, and the only criticism is that you won't want to read anything else once you're done! ... Read more

Product Description
One of the most beguiling storytellers on either side of the Atlantic delivers a luminous new collection whose 14 stories are a series of variations on the theme of love–and its shady cousin lust. A film director’s journal becomes an unintended chronicle of his deepening and ruinous obsession with a leading lady (“Notebook No. 9”). While flying business class, a well-behaved English architect feels the chill onset of an otherworldly visitation that will shatter his family and career (“A Haunting”). An unhappy young boy, neglected by both his father and adulterous mother, finds an unexpected friend in an elderly painter (“Varengeville”). Wise, unsettling, humane, and endlessly surprising, Fascination lives up to its title on every page, while confirming William Boyd’s stature as a writer of incandescent talent.

... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A taste of William Boyd
His style is rich and his characters are so interesting!You do get in their head.
The best recommendation I can make is that I just came across his short stories, Fascination, by
accident and as soon as I finished, I ordered 5 more of his books.I highly recommend this one for
a good taste of William Boyd.
The only negative, if you can call it that, would be his English references, which I didn't always get.Still,
that is a minor issue because his writing was so enjoyable.

Studies in Humanity
I generally don't like short stores - they are over before they begin. But I loved the character presentations in these.I was quickly involved in most of them right away.Not having read this author before, I started to think that Boyd must be very clever to create so many different stories under one roof. A wealth of riches so-to-speak.Can't wait to read his novels.

A virtuoso performance
Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd's use of these different forms is not just a writer's trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer.

He does the Police in voices
There's always something to like in a book by William Boyd.He is never less than a witty raconteur with an unswerving instinct for the mot juste.As the present collection of short stories, "Fascination," attests, he is also a brilliant ventriloquist, capable of embodying, alternately, an adolescent bicyclist, a 19-year-old asthmatic whose parents are both bodybuilders, a female performance artist, a writer named Edward with delusions of his own grandeur (in the collections's best two stories), and a host of dysfunctional middle-aged men.These are narrators who are driven largely by "fascination" for unattainable love objects, like the American publisher in 1940s Cape Cod who meets "The Woman on the Beach with a Dog" and is capable of forgetting his own marriage even when hers intrudes.The fascination here is in the unexpected twists and turns these stories take, including a side trip into Chekhovian territory in "The Pigeon."I enjoyed reading these stories; each is a testament to Boyd's mastery of the form; but I wasn't particularly engaged by any of them.The plotting, to put it bluntly, is perfunctory.I barely got interested in a character or situation, when the story concluded and I was shuffled on to the next character and situation.I got the impression that these might be sketches for books that Boyd never got around to writing--compressed novels, as it were.That being said, this is a much more satisfying collection than the earlier "The Destiny of Nathalie X," which, with the exception of the mordantly funny title story (an insider's take on Hollywood), is even sketchier than "Fascination."Boyd, as his fans know from "On the Yankee Station" (his first collection of stories), "A Good Man in Africa," and a raft of other books, is capable of so much more.I'm certain Boyd has another comic masterpiece like "Stars and Bars" up his sleeve.In the meantime, enjoy this collection for the jeu d'sprit it is. ... Read more

Product Description
In this extraordinary novel, William Boyd presents the autobiography of John James Todd, whose uncanny and exhilarating life as one of the most unappreciated geniuses of the twentieth century is equal parts Laurence Stern, Charles Dickens, Robertson Davies, and Saul Bellow, and a hundred percent William Boyd.

From his birth in 1899, Todd was doomed. Emerging from his angst-filled childhood, he rushes into the throes of the twentieth century on the Western Front during the Great War, and quickly changes his role on the battlefield from cannon fodder to cameraman. When he becomes a prisoner of war, he discovers Rousseau's Confessions, and dedicates his life to bringing the memoir to the silver screen. Plagued by bad luck and blind ambition, Todd becomes a celebrated London upstart, a Weimar luminary, and finally a disgruntled director of cowboy movies and the eleventh member of the Hollywood Ten. Ambitious and entertaining, Boyd has invented a most irresistible hero. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Boyd Is A Genius
William Boyd is without a doubt a literary genius. I loved this
book and I tore through it at a rate of knots which is unusual for
me because I usually take my time to read a book. Boyd is one of our
greatest living writers. I urge anyone to get totally lost in the strange
world of John James Todd.

a very different opinion
I'm a great admirer of Willian Boyd, a person who has enjoyed his earlier novels. I was really looking forward to reading "The New Confessions". I started it and I persisted through the first 100 pages or so, but I couldn't finish it - a very rare way for me to treat a book. But the protagonist of "Confessions" is such a bitter misanthropic voice that the book was spoiled for me.

I urge those who haven't yet read any Boyd to begin with one of his books of shorter fiction, or best of all, with "Brazzaville Beach", one of the best novels I've read in years. Then follow up with "Restless", another excellent and innovative book.

Perhaps after those two, if you're as disenchanted with "Confessions" as I was, you'll still read Boyd's next work. Had this been my first exposure to him, it might have been my last.

Shades of Tristram Shandy (Stern) and Tom Jones (Fielding)
A wonderful rampage through the twentieth century in the vein of the best eighteenth and nineteenth century chroniclers, Boyd's fictional hero is so well drawn, so detailed and so human that each page produces new fascinations.From the turn of the century until the 1970s when he stands on the wealthy promontory of life, by the Mediterranean, looking back on his journey, Boyd produces a young man desperate to (1) lose his virginity (2) avoid dying in a trench somewhere near Ypres during the Great War and (3) find a purpose.

I was lent a copy of this book by a friend and I have enjoyed it so much that, not having read Boyd before, I have ordered two other Boyds plus this one, so I can return my borrowed copy.It should be compulsory reading for 18 year-olds studying English lit, but I suspect it won't be because it will be deemed 'too long.' Although 476 pages, they are long pages (small letters, 40+ lines) and the book, sized the same as a 'typical' paperback, would weigh in at closer to 700 pages, although the length detracts not a jot from the book's brilliance and it never feels padded, unlike many shorter books.

another sweeping saga by Boyd fully entertains..
William Boyd is a terrific storyteller.His prose is of high quality, characterizations livid and entertaining.I'm glad to say 'The New Confessions' is standard William Boyd material.It is a faux autobiography of a Scotsman as he reminisces through his full life of the first three quarters of the twentieth century.He experiences the horror of trench warfare in WW I, he becomes a famous silent film director of the Germany avant-garde cinema, and then lives several years in turbulent Hollywood before retiring on an island in the Mediterranian.He is no hero, and not a particularly nice guy.But is life story is very rich; I wish I had a grandfather like him!

However 'The New Confessions is not perfect.The ending is a bit of a disappointment, and overall the book seems too much like his 'Any Human Heart' (..which he wrote later but I read earlier).I do wish William Boyd would return to the stellar form he demonstrated with 'Brazzaville Beach', a less ambitious but much more powerful novel.


Bottom line: thoroughly competent but Boyd can do better.Still, any average effort by Boyd is worthy read.

An Outstanding Fictional Memoir
This fictional memoir displays Boyd's consummate skill and style to full effect, ranging across time an place to create a vivid tale. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions is (perhaps arguably) first tell-all memoir, and here Boyd updates it through the reminisces of James Todd. The story unfolds chronologically from his birth in 1899 and upbringing in Edinburgh to the 1970s, when he sits incognito on a quiet island writing his memoirs. The years between are a picaresque journey through the first half of the last century and one man's attempt to create meaning in his life.

The early years in his domineering father's household document an unhappy child yearning for love and approval. His father's quest to perfect and patent medicines provides an uncommonly interesting background for this. When a family friend introduces him to photography, the die is cast. As a teenager, like so many British men of his age, he is swallowed by the first World War, where he is wounded at Ypres. Here, Boyd's descriptions manage to breath fresh life into carnage whose horror has been well-documented. Fortuitously, he is then transferred to a propaganda unit, where his talent in photography is applied to the new realm of film. Captured by the Germans, he languishes in prison, where a guard befriends him and gives him a copy of Rousseau's Confessions to pass the time. The work insinuates itself into him, and it percolates in him in the postwar years as he works in the London silent film industry. Despite marrying and fathering several children, his ambitions remain thwarted and he moves to Berlin to pursue his pet project of making an epic version of Rousseau's book.

In Weimar Berlin he embraces the vibrant (if pfenningless) art community and reconnects with his former guard, who is now an actor. Working together, and with Armenian producers, their careers start to take off and Todd becomes embroiled in a lifelong love affair with an actress. Boyd's description of the inter-war Berlin film scene is so vivid, and the discussion of Todd's career so convincing that one is tempted to put the book down and rush to the video store to see his films. With the juice to get his pet Rousseau project made, Todd throws himself full-tilt into the project, only to see the emergence of "talkies" scuttle it. This propels him to Hollywood, where makes some quiet B-Westerns embedded with subtle social messages until t he next war finds him scrambling around as a war correspondent for third-tier U.S. newspapers.

Following WWII, he falls afoul of the McCarthy witch hunts for communist in the entertainment industry and appears before HUAC. Here, is perhaps the book's one flaw. The HUAC hearings provide Todd with an opportunity to both stay afloat by naming names (some of whom have already named him), and exact revenge on his longtime archnemesis-but he doesn't take it. Although he's presented as variously idealistic and honorable, it's the one time in the book where the character doesn't hold true. And from here, the book bogs down a little, as Todd's current situation as apparent exile starts to loom over the proceedings. Despite a somewhat unsatisiying ending, the story's overall quality is head and shoulders above the pack. Once again Boyd has researched a plethora of subjects and places, and recreates them perfectly. At the same time he occasionally deploys a light comic touch to lighten this story of the search for meaning and the role of chance in life. ... Read more

Product Description
This new collection of eleven stories by the author of The Blue Afternoon takes readers back in time from a contemporary Hollywood film shoot to World War I in Vienna, introducing an unforgettable cast of characters. Artful, witty, moving, The Destiny of Nathalie X is a confirmation of Boyd's standing as a master storyteller.Amazon.com Review
The author of TheBlue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beachconfirms his mastery of story with this wide-rangingcollection. Traveling from Lisbon and London to contemporaryHollywood, from World War I to the present, these stories are singularand eclectic, each wholly distinct from the other. Their range ofreference is also sweeping and varied, from Ludwig Wittgenstein toDavid Hockney, burgeoning fascism to burgeoning capitalism, foreignlanguages to Hollywood-speak, an imaginary Brazil to cinémavérité. Their tone covers the spectrum from despairto high comedy. The true constants are Boyd's sharp eye andmultifaceted prose. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

a mish-mash of mediocre stories; Boyd has done MUCH better
'The Destiny of Nathalie X' was a total disappointment for me.I have read perhaps a half dozen novels by William Boyd and found them to be either very good or great.He is a brilliant storyteller.But this collection of short stories seem to have been written by someone else, or perhaps by a William Boyd before he reached manhood.Regardless, they are all trite and confused.I suspect the problem has to do with the format.Specifically, short stories don't provide this talented write enough runway to allow is talents to be fully expressed.Instead we are left with dribble.


Bottom line: not recommended for anyone, especially William Boyd fans.

A remarkable collection by a gifted writer
These dense, finely etched stories are my introduction to William Boyd.Such an ordinary name for such a fancy writer!The title story is set in a place I know well near LAX; indeed I can almost see the exact setting of most of the scenes, where a French director, a black auteur, as it were, is composing his film.The setting is purposely banal in the extreme: a cheap pizzeria next to a nondescript motel within litter distance of the airport, chosen instinctively to comment on the low culture of America, I suppose, when all of Hollywood and Bel Air, West L.A. and Brentwood, avec filmdom execs, etc., beckons just beyond.This is explained by understanding that "He's an artist, he don't look back," to re-gender a Bob Dylan lyric, as Boyd does on page 11.

The second story, "Transfigured Night," set in Austria and Poland during the first world war, is somewhat Kafkaesque and not typical of this collection.The third story, "Hôtel des Voyageurs," begins in Paris and is rendered in a self-revelatory first person narrative that is the book's signature technique (although this is just a warm up to the near-perfection of "Alpes-Maritimes" and "The Persistence of Vision" in which Boyd's narrators give themselves away completely, much to the reader's amusement).One might call "Hôtel des Voyageurs," a one-night stand (actually afternoon) for sophisticates in which a euro trash girl plays a Comtesse that the narrator coyly, in the British manner, brags about bedding.This inadvertent self-revelation by the first person narrator is a technique that Boyd has worked to perfection.

The next story, "Never Saw Brazil" continues the cosmopolitan, polyglot exposition.Boyd seems to know several European languages and is not shy about sparkling his text with italicized dialogue in a number of tongues including Portuguese.He is also very big on food and presents a variable cookbook of dishes throughout.The story, "Lunch," is almost a toast to gastronomy.

"The Dream Lover" and the aforementioned "Alpes-Maritimes" are set in the south of France and concentrate on love and self-discovery among twenty-something expats expressed with irony, delicacy and a kind of ultra sophistication much envied, I understand, by assistant editors at Elle and The New Yorker.(Probably also at Granta, where four of these stories first appeared.)

In "Cork" Boyd presents a female narrator who has a love affair with a strange but touching man who was once in her employ in Portugal harvesting and selling cork.Here the narrator seems reliable and self-aware.

The final story, "Loose Continuity" begins in 1945 at the corner of Westwood and Wilshire near UCLA were I went to school while flashing back to Germany in the twenties as the female narrator, Gudrun, recalls a lost love as she watches the workmen finish her café design.

Boyd use of language is innovative and, at times, startling.Some examples:

The narrator in "The Dream Lover," as he ascends to the roof of an apartment building: "To my vague alarm there is a small swimming pool up here and a large glassed-in cabana....."

In "Alpes-Maritimes" Boyd's narrator (who wants the twin sisters for himself alone) reflects on the intrusion of Steve, now with them, "The trio becomes a banal foursome, or--even worse--two couples."

The dilettante artist in "The Persistence of Vision" reveals himself with this statement about his infant son: "I found it hard to paint in the house now that its routines revolved around Dominic's noisy needs rather than my own."

On the next page, after noticing somebody out of the corner of his eye, the narrator remarks, "...[Y]our instinctive apprehension is often more sure and certain than something studied and sought for: the glance is often more accurate than the stare."

In a bit of unconscious self-projection (and foreshadowed irony) on page 134, the narrator remarks on the man who will later, unbeknownst to him, abscond with his wife, "I felt sad for him, with his pointless wealth and the cheerless luxury of his life...."

Sometimes one is forced to turn to the dictionary to understand exactly what Boyd has in mind.In "Cork" Lily's lover has sent her an invitation for a rendezvous including these instructions: "...[P]lease do not depilate yourself--anywhere."

Boyd's style is precise, measured, polished, erudite, a trifle showy, and very sensitive.He has a sharp eye for fashionable detail and any sort of pretension.He stays off to the side himself, but maintains the sort of iron control over his characters, especially his leading narrators, that Nabokov insisted on.He delves into the human condition with tiny needles like an acupuncturist or a miniaturist with a magnifying glass.He is an extraordinary writer, original in technique, subtle in resolution with witty and ironic overtones.His control of voice and tone bespeaks a man who has mastered several languages and many of the nuances of human psychology.He is also a writer that other writers can learn from.

His Novels Are Much Better...
I read this collection of eleven short stories (all previously published in various periodicals)in preparation for an interview I was to do with the author, who is also a screenwriter, for Creative Screenwriting,magazineotherwise, I would not have picked it up. As it was, I found little to holdmy attention, and I skipped past many a story after reading half. Not mycuppa tea... Boyd's novels, on the other hand, are extremely good,especially The Blue Afternoon.

Can't say enough good
Can't say enough good about Wm. Boyd:he is hilarious, erudite, humane, urbane, witty, twisted, clever, poetic, "relatable"--everything you want in a novelist and storyteller.On a par with the great KingsleyAmis and V.S. Naipaul.Read him.

Can't say enough good
Can't say enough good about Wm. Boyd:he is hilarious, erudite, humane, urbane, witty, twisted, clever, poetic, "relatable"--everything you want in a novelist and storyteller.On a par with the great KingsleyAmis and V.S. Naipaul.Read him. ... Read more

Product Description
"A perfect-pitch story of love and redemption" (The New York Times), Boyd's atmospheric new novel confirms his reputation as heir to the grand narrative traditions of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. In 1936 Los angeles, as her long-estranged father tells architect Kay Fischer the story behind her secret parentage, he plunges readers into a tale of grisly murders and an illicit passion that still obsseses him 30 years later. 384 pp. Author tour.


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Product Description
"Rich in character and incident, An Ice-Cream Warfulfills the ambition of the historical novel at its best."
--The New York Times Book Review

Booker PrizeFinalist

"Boyd has more than fulfilled the bright promise of[his] first novel. . . . He is capable not only of some very funnysatire but also of seriousness and compassion."--Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times

1914. In a hotel room in German EastAfrica, American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. Ashe sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decisionto return to the Dark Continent--and to her husband. On a farawayEnglish riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, andcurses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the
world's daily chatter: rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likesof which no one has ever seen.

In An Ice-Cream War,William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generationupswept by the winds of war. After his German neighbor burns hiscrops--with an apology and a smile--Walter Smith takes up arms onbehalf of Great Britain. And when Felix's brother marches off todefend British East Africa, he pursues, against his better judgment, aforbidden love affair. As the sons of the world match wits and weaponson a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makesbedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family. By turnscomic and quietly wise, An Ice-Cream War deftly renders livescapsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity forlove.

"Funny, assured, and cleanly, expansively told, aseriocomic romp. Boyd gives us studies of people caught in the sidepockets of calamity and dramatizes their plights with humor, detailand grit."--Harper's

"Boyd has crafted a quiet,seamless prose in which story and characters flow effortlessly out ofa fertile imagination. . . . The reader emerges deeply moved."--Newsday ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Sex and Death, Please.We're British.
I suppose most people, at some point in their lives, have been outside, say, an art gallery where art students, eager for extra dosh, will sketch your profile in a matter of minutes with amazing accuracy.This is, with words rather than with charcoal or ink, what William Boyd does to all his characters at the beginning of the book.They are stereotypes, of course, but stereotypes exist because, to some extent, they mirror reality.The characters whom Boyd leaves as they are, as two-dimensional "types" - the most notable being the hilariously nonchalant Wheech-Browning - serve as comic relief in what Harper's magazine is pleased to call the "seriocomic romp" aspect of the book.The ones Boyd chooses to develop and make three-dimensional: Felix, Gabriel, and Charis in particular are what make the novel worth the read.

Regarded as historical WWI fiction, per se, the book is not spectacular.Please read the wonderful Olivia Manning if you want that sort of reading experience.Boyd's modus operandi is quite different: He draws in the reader's sympathy for these three characters through their ever-changing sexual identities.He's a sort of much-abbreviated, very British Proust in this sense. Felix, originally typecast as your standard dandyish Oxford undergraduate with not very well-suppressed homo-erotic feelings for his brother Gabriel, becomes, after his affair with Gabriel's wife, Charis - a rather androgynous, Pre-Raphaelite figure - as efficient as soldier as one can become in the muddle that constitutes the British East Africa campaign.Charis herself, after a rather odd initiation into her sexual role during her brief honeymoon with Gabriel, and her pleasurable but guilt-ridden affair with Felix, becomes a tragic figure due to this confused sexual awakening.The most interesting of the three is Gabriel, who, first typecast as a manly, dashing and stoic British soldier, develops a dizzying schoolgirl infatuation with the very masculine nurse, Liesl, in a German POW hospital.So, rather than present us with static characters with static erotic proclivities, Boyd masterfully reworks them into the dizzyingly mutating and constantly evolving nature of their characters, of life and circumstance.

Of course - as Wheech-Browning pops in to remind us every so often - there is a very bloody war on and, by the end of the book, tragedies have befallen all the major players here described.Boyd may not be a master stylist, or one to bother much with the overuse of cliché, but he is an enrapturing storyteller whose characters come to life and breathe for the reader - a greater feat than many imagine.

Good for atmosphere, but not so original
This is a pretty weird book with an ironic title that must derive from a popular derogatory description of WWI in Africa as an ice cream war in comparison to the trench warfare in Europe. In fact, pretty much everyone in this book comes to an awful end, often after many trials and tribulations that seem pretty useless when the character was just going to die anyway.

That's the story with Gabriel Cobb, who suffers mightily, then ends up in a German (African) hospital working as an orderly (more or less) often being captured. He falls in love with a long-suffering German nurse who has a horrible Anglo/German husband, and she may be in love with him, too, but we don't know, and the two never come together.

Meanwhile, his brother Felix has come half way around the world to find Gabriel because Felix is afraid Gabriel will learn that Felix has had an affair with Gabriel's wife, and that she has as a result drowned herself.

At the same time, there is the American planter Walter Smith intersecting the Felix plot line now and then and having many blackly amusing misadventures with a British functionary named Wynge-Phipps or something like that.

In other words -- horror and futility of war British colonial (East African) division. Good for color and atmosphere, but ultimately not so enlightening or original.

First-rate historical fiction
"An ice-cream war" was what a British soldier confidently predicted would be the extension of World War I to the colonial outposts of German and British East Africa.But the British badly bungled their invasion of German East Africa in November 1914, and the war in Africa, just as the war in Europe, ended up being far different than the glorious enterprise envisioned in the summer of 1914.In AN ICE-CREAM WAR, which was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1982, William Boyd tells the story of this satellite war, primarily through the experiences of two English brothers of relative privilege and affluence, Felix and Gabriel Cobb.Other principal characters are an American who has taken up farming in British East Africa, near the border with the German colony, and, from across the river, his German neighbor and his wife.The novel begins in June 1914, before the war erupts, and scenes shift back and forth between East Africa and England until, at the end, the principal characters have all come together in East Africa and the war is over, with some of them dead.

AN ICE-CREAM WAR is first-rate historical fiction, so much so that perhaps I should drop the vaguely limiting adjective "historical".In addition to the story itself, which has plenty of twists and turns, there are the deeper themes of the horrors and absurdities of war -- and, of life itself.

Example: "Gabriel thought maps should be banned.They gave the world an order and reasonableness which it didn't possess. * * * Nothing today had been remotely how he had imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events.Here he was, strolling about the battlefield looking for his missing company like a mother searching for lost children in the park."

And the novel underscores that the human cost of war is not limited to the soldiers who are killed in battle or die behind the lines, from wounds, or disease, or accident.There also is the "collateral damage" to civilians, which is both physical and psychological, which occurs both at the front in Africa and back home in Kent, England.

William Boyd manages his rather sprawling story very ably, and his writing is excellent, always in service of his narrative and never calling attention to itself.My only criticism is that several of the characters are not wholly convincing to my mind.Still, this is a fine novel.I recently read (and reviewed) "Land of Marvels", by Barry Unsworth.There are certain superficial similarities between it and AN ICE-CREAM WAR:both are historical fiction, both begin in 1914, and the plots of both are driven by the collision between the expanding imperialism of Britain and Germany.Many Amazon reviewers have raved about "Land of Marvels".But AN ICE-CREAM WAR is much superior.It is not quite as good as "Restless", the only other novel by William Boyd that I have read, but both are popular fiction that might arguably be elevated to the status of literature.I will definitely read more of Boyd (God willing).

One GREAT novel that will deeply move all who read it.

An Ice Cream War, by William Boyd, is a wonderfully crafted novel.Boyd really soars as a writer, not only in his stylish and artful prose, but also in a story line that would, with many authors, be too much to write on without the inevitable choppiness that plot can create.Boyd is an author many, I here-to-for included, don't know.That should change for justice to be done for this gifted writer.An Ice Cream War, originally published some twenty four years ago, is a must read for both those who love rather old fashioned novels, with real and raw human emotion, and those who simply derive pleasure from the beauty of the written word.Boyd is going right up there with Norris, Stegner, Oates and Wharton (among others) that I think are absolute must reads.Treat yourself to some real art - read this novel.

a fun read
A wonderful work on the absurdities of war at home and abroad.

A classic piece of historical fiction.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Justa head's-up
This book is not a critical study of Rousseau's Emile, nor is it even the whole work itself.It's only a digest of the work, containing selections from Emile.Just thought I should point that out to any potential buyers. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Dream Lover: Short Stories
What a disappointment.Being a really big fan I just look forward to all his new work.I purchased "The Dream Lover" thinking it was a new collection of writing.Yes, I knew that he had written a short story with that same title but I assumed he hadreworked it.To open a book and find that I had read all the stories already was a major disappointment.It reeks of either needing money or just keeping his name out there.A very sad statement either way.
... Read more

Product Description
Sharply observed and brilliantly plotted, Stars and Bars is an uproarious portrait of culture clash deep in the heart of the American South, by one of contemporary literature’s most imaginative novelists.

A recent transfer to Manhattan has inspired art assessor Henderson Dores to shed his British reserve and aspire to the impulsive and breezy nature of Americans. But when Loomis Gage, an eccentric millionaire, invites him to appraise his small collection of Impressionist paintings, Dores's plans quite literally go south. Stranded at a remote mansion in the Georgia countryside, Dores is received by the bizarre Gage family with Anglophobic slurs, nausea-inducing food, ludicrous death threats, and a menacing face off with competing art dealers. By the time he manages to sneak back to New York City–sporting only a cardboard box–Henderson Dores realizes he is fast on the way to becoming a naturalized citizen.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Couldn't Get Interested
I only gave this three stars because I'm trying to be fair. After about 15 pages I thought Well, it's just a slow beginning, it'll get good. I told myself I'd give it 50 pages. Turns out I couldn't get to page 50, I only made it 30 pages in. If the rest of the book is like the first 30 pages, it only deserves one star. If the rest of the book is really good, I guess it's my loss.

I don't know if the main character was boring, or if it was just the writing style that didn't appeal to me. Most of the books I read have me interested within within the first couple of pages, then hooked within the first 10 pages. This book was not one of them.
Sorry!

Light Comic Romp into Regan-era America
Years ago, I was assigned to interview Boyd for a film magazine on the topic of adapting books into screenplays, and dutifully picked up A Good Man in Africa to try and come up with some half-decent questions. While that book wasn't brilliant, it was awfully good and led me pick up others of his, and in the course of that, he's developed into one of my favorite writers. I realized the other day that I still hadn't gone back to read some of his older books, so I pick this one -- which came out in 1984 -- and blew through it in a few days. As always, it's a pleasure to read Boyd's prose, and his ear for the comic touch is in early evidence here. However, it relies a little bit too much on stereotypes for its plotting, and as a result, feels somewhat less polished and assured than most of his work.

The story is a classic fish out of water tale -- here the fish is Henderson Dores, an English art historian in his late 30s who has sought to change his life, and indeed, his very nature, by moving to New York to work for an auction house. Henderson is a kind of classically inept British gentleman, never comfortable in his own skin, constantly getting the wrong end of the stick, and generally getting into awkward situations through faults entirely his own. In Manhattan, he has begun to woo his ex-wife, while also engaging in a clandestine, prickly relationship with another woman. When he is sent to the deep South to investigate an elderly recluse's cache of impressionist paintings (a trove that may finally put his firm on the map), wacky antics ensue and Henderson may or may not find his true self emerge.

Contrasting against Henderson are a wide array of American types -- the Horatio Algerish old coot whose paintings he's trying to acquire, the man's perpetually angry son and the son's drawling pregnant wife, the man's mysterious sunglass-wearing southern gothic daughter, a Vietnam vet with an endless line in war anecdotes, a bevy of New Yorkers (including yapping dogs), and so forth. It's hard not to feel that Boyd wrote this book with a British audience firmly in mind, with Henderson's adventures down South as an exaggerated wry window into 1980s America. While the book more or less succeeds as a comic romp (it kind of depends on your taste for that kind of thing), one reads on not to unveil the next misadventure, but to find out whether Henderson will be able to redeem himself by the end.

Note: The novel was made into an apparently mediocre film starring Daniel Day Lewis as Henderson.

Very Disappointing
I have loved other books by William Boyd, and expected to like this one.But no.The main character, Henderson Dores, is infuriatingly gormless; he inevitably makes the wrong decision which gets him into supposedly funny situations.He is presented as a stereotypical Brit (shy, quiet, polite, self-effacing) and that is what brings him into conflict with the stereotypical Americans he meets who are loud, grasping, profane, and so on. None of this is funny to me.I didn't like any of the characters and quit reading after four chapters -- although I did skip to the end to see how it all came out.Sometimes that makes me want to read the book after all, but not this time.
Boyd has written some other books since this loser, novels with incredible imagination that feature engaging characters with depth. I'm thinking of Brazzavile Beach, The New Confessions, An Ice-Cream War, Restless, and Any Human Heart.
The question here is just how funny cultural clashing is.Is it funny enough to sustain an entire novel?Is funny at all?This is an early Boyd novel. It is virtually juvenalia.

Stars and Bars - William Boyd
I discovered William Boyd quite a few years ago and was very impressed with the two novels I read. Then he fell off my radar screen. Recently, I've begun reading more of his novels and I have yet to be disappointed. In Stars and Bars, Henderson Dores is unhappy with his life and after a brief self-analysis, decides all his problems are the result of his English tendency to "shyness", an extreme timidity in asserting himself. He admires Americans as the consummate models of confidence and self-assertion. He takes a job in New York with a private art dealer and attempts a reconciliation with his American ex-wife while simultaneously beginning an affair with another American woman. He is sent to a rural area of Georgia to acquire some valuable paintings and finds himself in a series of disastrous but humorous events which spiral out of his control. I was reminded of Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, where bizarre circumstances seem to bring out the man's every weakness. If you like British black humor, you'll enjoy this.

Cartoon Characters Mar Comedic Novel
William Boyd's novel about a repressed Englishman trying to break free of his natural shyness and repressive habits is more like a series of set-piece vignettes than a coherent novel. The book has sketches of aggressive New York Jews, tweedy Wasps, evil and dangerous Italians, and impossibly benighted and Gothic Southerners. It's almost as if Boyd gave vent to every nasty prejudice he could mine -- all in the guise of writing a humorous novel. Because his characters' unpleasant aspects are so overdrawn, the resulting characters aren't believable, even in comedy. The only redemptive feature in this otherwise muddy little piece of work is that Boyd has an undeniable imagination, and he manages to write his characters in and out of some funny scrapes.But that strength cannot overcome the novel's fundamental flaw. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Artist Nathwell Tate was born in 1928 in Union Beach, New Jersey. On January 8 1960 he contrived to round up and burn almost his entire output of Abstract Expressionism. Four days later he killed himself. This book offers an account of Tate's life and work which can be seen either as straight art biography or as fiction. It is an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, the wholly false and the utterly real. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

An enigma wrapped in a mystery
Yes, this book is fiction masquerading as fact. However to suggest it's just a cynical literary prank to confuse art groupies is akin to saying that Macbeth is about a boy and his mother. What Boyd does is create a narrative which suggests a poetic truth about life, art and identity. The idea that fiction is more moving when tied to real events and people is not a new one. it may also in fact, be more true than reality. Nate Tate is a sort of "everyman" artist and Boyd plays with the curious idea that to be famous, one need only be obscure and leave just enough tantalizing facts scattered around. Word of mouth will do the rest. Famous Artists, like actors, only survive their demise by oral history. Stories like "My aunt knew Marilyn Monroe before she was famous, or "The guy in Memphis who made my burger could've been Elvis" suggest that myth, fact, and memory are all shades of the same truth, and not seperate as once believed. This blurring of fact and "near fact" is crucial to understanding the American national psyche. it's no accident Boyd cleverly draws attention to that in the title of this book. Anyone who followed the Priavte Jessica Lynch docudrama over the past year will realize that Boyd was way ahead of his time and should've been a government "Spin Doctor". Art and truth, continue to reside squarely in the eye of the beholder.

Predictable praise from a William Boyd fan
William Boyd demonstrates hisversatility with this wonderful satire onmodern biographies of arty types. Nat Tate is a fictional artist drawn byBoyd to possess every possible cliche-ridden characteristic, and whose lifenever deviated fromthat expected of him by the gullible art consumingpublic.In fact, so cleverly is the book presented that where I bought it inthe Sydney (Australia) Art Gallery, there is a sign that directs purchasersto see the sales clerk before buying it- presumably to let you into thesecret that the book's a joke, before you embarrass yourself beforefriends!The shallowness and predictability of the artist's (guess what)short life will bring a chuckle to the reader on every silly page. WilliamBoyd's reputation as a great modern comic writer is firmly reinforced by "Nat Tate".

"Nat Tate" reveals a Zelig-like presence in 20th century art
The idea behind "Nat Tate" is an excellent one-- the life of an obscure (and fictional) American artist set against the backdrop of the triumph that was American (and specifically, New York) painting after World War II. The problem, however, is that this particular treatment of a Zelig-like character, as published, reveals only a kind of abstraction, and little that suggests a living, breathing individual. Tate's obscurity notwithstanding, the testimonies of those who brought to life the "facts" of this artist's life belie their relationship with the man as less than we might have imagined them to be. The book is filled with interesting photos documenting Tate's life and his relationships with the famous and notso-famous, at times blurred to suggest a kind of off-handedness, or that the photos had no particular importance when they were taken. Troubling, however, is that an error (even if only a typo) which captions a photo as being that of Frank O'Hara, circa 1935, is troubling since, in 1935, Frank O'Hara, a famous American poet and art critic, was only 9 years old. In a book full of deliberately fictional assertions meant to be taken as truth, one needs to accurately depict those historical truths surrounding the fiction to maintain this sort of story's credibility. ... Read more

Product Description

Chasing the Wind will take you from the mountaintop down to the valley as you travel through the journey of William Boyd Chisum’s life. From the day he was born, receiving a mismatched blood transfusion to the day he realized his first true love, Boyd chronicles each milestone in a way that leaves you captivated, anxious to turn the page.

Boyd has experienced countless physical, spiritual and emotional challenges and as he presses on, chasing the wind, he realizes the true meaning of life in Jesus Christ. Weaving together anecdotes from his past, he divulges detailed pieces of history from his home away from home as a child, Texas Scottish Rite Hospital for Children.

You will not only experience every emotion imaginable while reading about Boyd, but you will feel a part of his life. This is a story of forgiveness and grace and reflects the image of so many who frantically search the pleasures of the world in order to fill the emptiness that only Christ can satisfy. If you’re seeking inspiration and meaning in your life or in need of the strength that passes all understanding, this is "your book." It’s time to stop "Chasing the Wind."

Customer Reviews (2)

Awesome Testimony
I found it very difficult to put down after reading the first few pages. So touched, ordered one for each of my Children and my Husband.

Wonderful
Can't put it down.It comes straight from the author's heart & soul.I paired it with the CD.They make a great pair. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

A taste of William Boyd
His style is rich and his characters are so interesting!You do get in their head.
The best recommendation I can make is that I just came across his short stories, Fascination, by
accident and as soon as I finished, I ordered 5 more of his books.I highly recommend this one for
a good taste of William Boyd.
The only negative, if you can call it that, would be his English references, which I didn't always get.Still,
that is a minor issue because his writing was so enjoyable.

Studies in Humanity
I generally don't like short stores - they are over before they begin. But I loved the character presentations in these.I was quickly involved in most of them right away.Not having read this author before, I started to think that Boyd must be very clever to create so many different stories under one roof. A wealth of riches so-to-speak.Can't wait to read his novels.

A virtuoso performance
Fascination by William Boyd is a set of sixteen short stories. This may not sound either surprising or original until one considers their form. The author uses at least nine different and clearly identifiable forms in which to present this work. One takes the form of a video. There are childhood memories, a diary, a journal, an A-to-Z listing. One story is a set of dialogues over lunch. Another is a set of monologues. And William Boyd's use of these different forms is not just a writer's trick to impress a critic. In each case to form complements the story, adds interpretation to the events and helps our understanding of the characters. Fascination is thus no less than a fascinating read, a tour de force in miniature by a great writer.

He does the Police in voices
There's always something to like in a book by William Boyd.He is never less than a witty raconteur with an unswerving instinct for the mot juste.As the present collection of short stories, "Fascination," attests, he is also a brilliant ventriloquist, capable of embodying, alternately, an adolescent bicyclist, a 19-year-old asthmatic whose parents are both bodybuilders, a female performance artist, a writer named Edward with delusions of his own grandeur (in the collections's best two stories), and a host of dysfunctional middle-aged men.These are narrators who are driven largely by "fascination" for unattainable love objects, like the American publisher in 1940s Cape Cod who meets "The Woman on the Beach with a Dog" and is capable of forgetting his own marriage even when hers intrudes.The fascination here is in the unexpected twists and turns these stories take, including a side trip into Chekhovian territory in "The Pigeon."I enjoyed reading these stories; each is a testament to Boyd's mastery of the form; but I wasn't particularly engaged by any of them.The plotting, to put it bluntly, is perfunctory.I barely got interested in a character or situation, when the story concluded and I was shuffled on to the next character and situation.I got the impression that these might be sketches for books that Boyd never got around to writing--compressed novels, as it were.That being said, this is a much more satisfying collection than the earlier "The Destiny of Nathalie X," which, with the exception of the mordantly funny title story (an insider's take on Hollywood), is even sketchier than "Fascination."Boyd, as his fans know from "On the Yankee Station" (his first collection of stories), "A Good Man in Africa," and a raft of other books, is capable of so much more.I'm certain Boyd has another comic masterpiece like "Stars and Bars" up his sleeve.In the meantime, enjoy this collection for the jeu d'sprit it is. ... Read more