William Boyd
All Books By William Boyd
Any Human Heart
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2011
- Language: English
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4.28(15021 ratings)
Bestselling author William Boyd—the novelist who has been called a “master storyteller” (Chicago Tribune) and “a gutsy writer who is good company to keep” (Time)—here gives us his most entertaining, sly, and compelling novel to date. The novel evokes the tumult, events, and iconic faces of our time as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, and man of the world—through his intimate journals. It is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects.
The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book, then on to Paris where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al., and to Spain, where he covers the civil war. During World War II, we see him as an agent for naval intelligence, becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer in the world of 1950s abstract expressionism, then on to West Africa, to London where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and, finally, to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity. This is a moving, ambitious, and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.
... Read moreLove Is Blind
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Roy McMillan
- Length: 11 hours 58 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
When he is hired as the personal piano tuner for a brilliant pianist, Brodie Moncur suddenly finds himself swept up into a life of luxury that he could never have imagined. But while accompanying his new employer on tours from Paris to St. Petersburg, Brodie falls madly in love with the Russian soprano Lika Blum: beautiful, worldly, seductive—and forbidden. Though seemingly doomed from the start, Brodie’s passion for Lika only grows as their lives become increasingly more intertwined, more secretive, and, finally, more dangerous. A tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavor and the illusions it can create; of the possibilities that life offers and the cruel speed with which they can be snatched away, Love Is Blind is a dazzling work of historical fiction that unfolds across fin de siècle Europe.
... Read moreOrdinary Thunderstorms
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Gideon Emery
- Length: 12 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: February 23, 2010
- Language: English
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3.68(5894 ratings)
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.
The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down–underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London’s lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam’s quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London’s denizens–aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen–and version after new version of himself.
Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd’s electric follow-up to his award-winning Restless, is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.
... Read moreRestless
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Rosamund Pike
- Length: 6 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 03, 2006
- Language: English
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3.92(14147 ratings)
“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.
Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past–the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help. William Boyd’s Restless is a brilliant espionage audiobook and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is listening at its finest.
... Read moreRestless
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Rosamund Pike
- Length: 6 hours 32 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 03, 2006
- Language: English
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3.92(14147 ratings)
“I am Eva Delectorskaya,” Sally Gilmartin announces, and so on a warm summer afternoon in 1976 her daughter, Ruth, learns that everything she ever knew about her mother was a carefully constructed lie. Sally Gilmartin is a respectable English widow living in picturesque Cotswold village; Eva Delectorskaya was a rigorously trained World War II spy, a woman who carried fake passports and retreated to secret safe houses, a woman taught to lie and deceive, and above all, to never trust anyone.
Three decades later the secrets of Sally’s past still haunt her. Someone is trying to kill her and at last she has decided to trust Ruth with her story. Ruth, meanwhile, is struggling to make sense of her own life as a young single mother with an unfinished graduate degree and escalating dependence on alcohol. She is drawn deeper and deeper into the astonishing events of her mother’s past–the mysterious death of Eva’s beloved brother, her work in New York City manipulating the press in order to shift public sentiment toward American involvement in the war, her dangerous romantic entanglement. Now Sally wants to find the man who recruited her for the secret service, and she needs Ruth’s help. William Boyd’s Restless is a brilliant espionage audiobook and a vivid portrait of the life of a female spy. Full of tension and drama, and based on a remarkable chapter of Anglo-American history, this is listening at its finest.
... Read moreSolo
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Dominic West
- Length: 7 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: October 08, 2013
- Language: English
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3.52(3417 ratings)
Bond. Is. Back.
It’s 1969, and, having just celebrated his forty-fifth birthday, James Bond–British special agent 007–is summoned to headquarters to receive an unusual assignment. Zanzarim, a troubled West African nation, is being ravaged by a bitter civil war, and M directs Bond to quash the rebels threatening the established regime.
Bond’s arrival in Africa marks the start of a feverish mission to discover the forces behind this brutal war–and he soon realizes the situation is far from straightforward. Piece by piece, Bond uncovers the real cause of the violence in Zanzarim, revealing a twisting conspiracy that extends further than he ever imagined.
Moving from rebel battlefields in West Africa to the closed doors of intelligence offices in London and Washington, this novel is at once a gripping thriller, a tensely plotted story full of memorable characters and breathtaking twists, and a masterful study of power and how it’s wielded–a brilliant addition to the James Bond canon.
... Read moreSweet Caress
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: William Boyd
- Length: 15 hours 47 minutes
- Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
- Publish date: September 15, 2015
- Language: English
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3.95(5670 ratings)
Born into Edwardian England, Amory’s first memory is of her father standing on his head. She has memories of him returning on leave during the First World War. But his absences, both actual and emotional, are what she chiefly remembers. It is her photographer uncle Greville who supplies the emotional bond she needs, who, when he gives her a camera and some rudimentary lessons in photography, unleashes a passion that will irrevocably shape her future.A spell at boarding school ends abruptly and Amory begins an apprenticeship with Greville in London, photographing socialites for the magazine Beau Monde. But Amory is hungry for more and her search for life, love, and artistic expression will take her to the demi monde of Berlin of the late ’20s, to New York of the ’30s, to the blackshirt riots in London, and to France in the Second World War where she becomes one of the first women war photographers. Her desire for experience will lead Amory to further wars, to lovers, husbands, and children as she continues to pursue her dreams and battle her demons. In this enthralling story of a life fully lived, illustrated with “found” period photographs, William Boyd has created a sweeping panorama of some of the most defining moments of modern history, told through the camera lens of one unforgettable woman, Amory Clay. It is his greatest achievement to date. Reviews “One of the very best prose stylists and storytellers in the English language.” (The Atlantic) “Superbly written . . . One of the most smoothly readable novels of the year.” (Chicago Tribune on Restless) “Its pleasures are countless . . . Supremely entertaining.” (Washington Post Book World on Any Human Heart) “Few contemporary writers are able to evoke the ambiance and drama of our recent past as forcefully as Boyd . . . And [his] characters are as beguiling as his prose.” (Washington Post Book World on Waiting for Sunrise) Entertaining and seemingly effortless in their fluency, [Boyd’s] novels conceal insights into human behavior that are more intricate than may first appear. (Liesl Schillinger, The New York Times Book Review, on Waiting for Sunrise) About the Author William Boyd is the author of eleven novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Waiting for Sunrise; and, most recently, Solo: A James Bond Novel. William Boyd lives in London and France. www.williamboyd.co.uk
... Read moreThe Romantic
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Kobna Holdbrook-Smith
- Length: 15 hours 30 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2023
- Language: English
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4.25(2803 ratings)
From the award-winning, internationally best-selling author, a beguiling romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a nineteenth-century everyman
“Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game.” —The Guardian
One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is—which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
Trio
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Imani Jade Powers
- Length: 12 hours 0 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
A rollicking novel with a dark undertow, set around three unforgettable individuals and a doomed movie set—from the award-winning, best-selling author of Any Human Heart
A producer. A novelist. An actress. It’s summer 1968—a time of war and assassinations, protests and riots. While the world is reeling, our trio is involved in making a disaster-plagued, Swingin’ Sixties British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. As the movie shoot zigs and zags, these layers of secrets become increasingly more untenable. Pressures build inexorably. The FBI and CIA get involved. Someone is going to crack—or maybe they all will. From one of Britain’s best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel—by turns hilarious and heartbreaking—that asks the vital questions: What makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?
... Read moreWaiting for Sunrise
- By: William Boyd
- Narrator: Robert Ian MacKenzie
- Length: 13 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: April 17, 2012
- Language: English
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3.61(5740 ratings)
Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy for a troubling ailment of a sexual nature, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police to press charges of rape, however, he is stunned, and his few months of passion come to an abrupt end. Only a carefully plotted escape–with the help of two mysterious British diplomats–saves him from trial.
But the frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that steadily dismantles Lysander’s life as he knows it. He returns to a London on the cusp of war, hoping to win back his onetime fiancee and banish from memory his traumatic ordeals abroad, but Vienna haunts him at every turn. The men who helped coordinate his escape recruit him to carry out the brutal murder of a complete stranger. His lover from Vienna shows up nonchalantly at a party, ready to resume their liaison. Unable to live an ordinary existence, he is plunged into the dangerous theater of wartime intelligence–a world of sex, scandal, and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code that is threatening Britain’s safety, and use all his skills to keep this murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life.
Moving from Vienna to London’s West End, from the battlefields of France to hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a mesmerizing journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller, and a literary tour de force.
... Read more