There are lots of William Boyd’s trademark themes in Ordinary Thunderstorms and the sentences are as dense as ever.Adam Kindred’s life is turned upside-down on the day he takes an interview for a prestigious post at Imperial College in his field of climatology. He bumps into a doctor who works in...
After an interview for a fabulous job in London Adam Kindred meets a strangely behaving man in a restaurant and, soon after witnesses a murder. He realises that all the evidence -circumstantial and physical (DNA) places him firmly in the guilty spot and so he goes to ground, literally. A small pl...
In offering a review of a novel by William Boyd I could certainly be accused of bias. I would proudly plead guilty, since I regard him as one of just four or five British writers who are capable of constructing supreme works of fiction, written in a framework that is both informative and thought-...
One sign of a good book is the sense of emptiness that lingers once the last page has been reluctantly turned. So it was with Any Human Heart, which completely and utterly spoiled me for whatever came next*. On finishing the book I found I missed the central character, Logan Mountstuart enormousl...
How to put this? A book about misunderstandings, of failures of communication is perhaps the underlying theme of this greatly enjoyable read.Almost from the start are the two-way failures of understanding, of empathy, and these keep recurring through the novel - sometimes funny, sometimes poigna...
What a brilliant novel! I first read it in the early 1980s, perhaps not long after it was first published, and thought it was marvellous. Thirty years later it still seems just as entertaining, with a dazzling mix of humour and tragedy, with a healthy dose of parody of the overwhelming self-sati...
GOOD story!I have now read four books by William Boyd. I like how he writes. This is a mystery, and I am not a mystery reader, but I picked it up simply because I was pretty darn sure I would not be disappointed. I wasn’t.I am beginning to see a pattern in his writing. In this book, as in his ot...
Hope Clearwater, the protagonist of William Boyd’s novel, Brazzaville Beach is a young English ethologist who’s come to the Grosso Arvore Research Center in central Africa to make a study of chimpanzees and to forget her broken marriage to a brilliant mathematician back home. In this engrossing ...
I'm a big fan of William Boyd. He’s a writer who produces one-off novels that can surprise, entertain and sometimes prompt the reader to think rather more deeply on a subject than they otherwise might. I don't always like his books – I disliked Armadillo intensely – but I can never fault the qua...
A rather pointless collection of unremarkable stories that has taught me to avoid the works of William Boyd in future. He's everything I dislike in a writer -- an adherent of understatement, a low concept technician, obsessed with trivial domestic situations and petty character interaction, bland...
Sometimes it’s merely the uncanny juxtaposition of two simple words that lets us know we’re reading a great writer. “(V)ast insouciance” — from the short story “The Pigeon” — is such an example.William Boyd is not just a wordsmith; he’s a magician who pulls rabbit-words out of hats, throws them...
I love the books of William Boyd. His Any Human Heart is one of my top favorite novels, up there with Kavalier and Clay, Atonement and Cloud Atlas. His Ice Cream War, set in the little known African theater of World War One, is among the finest of the war/imperial novels, right up there with anyt...
This was a rather enjoyable darkly satirical novel that reminded me a lot of Boyd's earlier work, A Good Man in Africa. It tells the story of Lorimer Black, an insurance loss adjuster in London. His job is to investigate claims made by clients, with a view to lowering them. The novel opens with h...
I was just thinking this evening, as I walked along the Ring before coming here, how impressive it was. Exceptionally well laid out with a generosity of scale that you won’t find in –’‘You like the Ring?’ Hoff said, incredulous.‘Emphatically. I think it’s –’‘You do realize these are new buildings...
the Englishman said, as Liesl von Bishop handed him his crutches. He smiled at her. He had a broad face. Square, as if his jaw muscles were overdeveloped. “Danke schön,” he repeated. “Excellent, Mr Cobb,” cried Dr Deppe. “An accent of first class quality!” Liesl suppressed the usual stab of irrit...
He looked at his watch. Six o’clock. He had been waiting two hours at the corner of Peachtree and Edgewood for Beckman and his car. Two empty hours. Enough was enough. He walked back to Monopark 5000 to collect his case. He had managed to secure a place in the hotel car park for Beckman&rsq...
“Excuse me, Dr Carriscant, Dr Cruz sends his compliments and would like you to visit him in his theatre. It’s a matter of some urgency.” Carriscant was very surprised. He and Cruz had barely exchanged a word since the row over Delphine’s appendicitis. “In his theatre...
They were in a large, loud bar off Leicester Square—the place was full of foreigners, all chatting away in their incomprehensible foreign languages, Jonjo thought, looking around him. Even the bar staff were foreign. He, Darren and this other bloke who’d been introduced as ‘Bob&...
I almost don’t mind suffering from the conditions they describe. Some of the so-called ‘beautiful diseases’, perhaps. But I exaggerate: for most of my life everything was normal – I only realized I was in trouble when I went to Berlin. Berlin gave me my name and was the making of me. Before Berli...
B. OGILVY-GRANT MA (CANTAB) OG Palm Oil Export and Agricultural Services Ltd was to be found in a light-industrial estate halfway between Sinsikrou city and the airport. Bond had telephoned from Ridgeway Barracks, but there had been no reply, so he decided to pay a personal visit. Christmas drov...