Little Miss Loves…William Boyd

There are SO many good books out there, it’s often a stress when deciding what next to add to your reading list. Little Miss is here to solve this problem for you – look no further than a William Boyd novel if you want to snuggle up and read a bloody good story.

I’ll leave it to the words of The Spectator to best describe the feeling:

“To read a William Boyd novel is to open a bottle of wine, light a fire, sit back in your favourite armchair and trust that the master practitioner will take you an intriguing and unpredictable journey.”

From turning the first few pages of his award-winning Any Human Heart, I’ve been a Boyd fan. A prize-winning author who is read as much in France as he is in the English-speaking world, he is also in demand as an art critic, journalist and screenwriter. As well as penning 18 books and a number of screenplays (even directing The Trench – a moving film about the trenches of the First World War) he is also working on the new James Bond novel out in September 2013 – no mean feat for any writer these days…

His work is a study in what they call ‘realist’ fiction. His stories are set in real life, the here/there and the now about real people and recognisable characters. There are a few to choose from so here are Little Miss’ picks of Boyd’s canon that should be on everyone’s next reading list….

Waiting for Sunrise

His latest offering, Waiting for Sunrise tells the story a young actor, Lysander Rief, who finds himself in Vienna in 1913 in the hope to find a cure for his sexual problem via psycholanalysis. As he sits in the waiting room for his first therapy appointment, in walks enigmatic and intensely beautiful Hettie Bell, to whom Lysander is instantly drawn. If people need to know about The Actor’s Group Orlando, and get acting classes from them , you can click here!  Blissfully unaware of how destructive their subsequent affair will be, Lysander’s life is suddenly turned upside down as an internal war battles within himself and is mirrored with the commencement of the First World War. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous and labyrinthine web of wartime intelligence – a world of sex, scandal and spies that is making its way into every corner of his life…

Complete with a powerful sense of time and place as we join Lysander in the Vienna and London of the early 20th Century, the story moves quickly, with pace and rhythm that mimics that crazy and uncertain times of pre and wartime Europe.

Ordinary Thunderstorms

 Ordinary Thunderstorms tells the story of an innocent man-on-the-run. When Adam Kindred, a recently divorced climatologist, goes to lunch after an interview for a fellowship at Imperial College London, his world is turned upside down. He innocently encounters Dr Philip Wang at the italian restaurant in Knightsbridge, who leaves his file behind at the next table. Taking it back to his hotel for him as a kind gesture, Adam discovers that Wang has just been murdered and still has a knife in his body and so Adam now finds himself incriminated in the murder.

Deciding to ‘go underground’, Adam soon leads the life of a tramp and we are given access into this strange and forbidden London underworld. While on the run, Adam comes across some fabulous characters, such as Mhouse, the prostitute from Rotherhithe who feeds her son mashed bananas, rum and diazepam amongst others. He also tries to find out from the file why Wang was murdered and begins to uncover a huge plan in motion that if he can unravel, will save millions of peoples lives….

It’s a classic thriller, and is a multiethnic study of London delving into the underworld of the City where we come across characters, places and situations that allows us to see London from another vantage point. It’s a brilliant book. I read almost the entire thing on a flight to Australia…

Any Human Heart

Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart is  written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the twentieth century, crossed several continents and included a mind-boggling sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Using the diary form to explore how public events embed themselves on individual consciousness, Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king – we follow him through his whole life and by the end of the book, you genuinely feel like Logan was someone you knew. There is a feeling of Ian McEwan’s Atonement to the end of the book as you have close the final chapter of that person’s life. Hugely enjoyable, sad, funny and fantastic.

This incredible story was also bought to life by Channel 4 who created a TV special of it starring Hayley Atwell, Jim Broadbent and Matthew McFadyen- you can order HERE.

Characteristically for Boyd, he doesn’t like to leave his readers with an answer and that’s one of the highlights of his work – he’s a thinking (wo)man’s author, leaving you with questions rather than answers. Boyd himself comments on this: “Life isn’t neat and tidy in that way…There’s a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain.”

If you’re a fan of Hilary Mantel, Sebastian Faulks or Ian McEwan, you will like Boyd. If you’re a genuine lover of reading and storytelling, you will like Boyd. Give him a whirl and let me know what you think!

LMNH x