Ordinary Thunderstorms audiobook

Stop me if you‘ve heard this one before. An innocent person discovers someone who has just been murdered, and then they stupidly pick up the weapon, end up covered in blood and then they’re accused of the crime. That scene has played out so many times in pop entertainment that I think anyone with more than ten working brain cells would instantly know that the one thing you should never do if you find a body is pick up the murder weapon. Then I met Adam Kindred in Ordinary Thunderstorms. Adam is a British climatologist who had been living in the U.S., but is trying to get a job in London following a painful divorce. After his job interview, Adam stops for some lunch and strikes up casual conversation with Dr. Philip Wang. Wang leaves a file at his table, and Adam decides to do a good deed and return it to him at his hotel. When he arrives at the hotel room, he finds that Wang is dying after being stabbed. With his last breaths, Wang begs Adam to pull out the knife.You see where this is going, right?Dumb-ass Adam yanks out the knife, gets himself covered in blood, and Wang promptly dies. (This is also exactly what they tell you NOT to do from a medical standpoint if you ever find someone with a knife stuck in them.) Adam still might have been able to convince the cops that he didn’t kill Wang, but instead of contacting them immediately, he has a complete mental meltdown and decides to stop at the pub and have a few drinks first. Before he can get his shit together, he’s attacked by Wang’s killer and barely escapes. Completely freaking out, Adam goes turtle and instantly joins the ranks of London’s homeless.As Adam hides out by dropping off he grid, other characters become entangled in the events that the murder started. There’s a beautiful police woman who discovers the body and struggles with the disapproval of her aging damn-dirty-hippie father. The CEO of a pharmaceutical company is excited that a breakthrough discovery of a new drug is leading to a blockbuster merger, but he’s starting to worry about his business partners. A young prostitute hustles to make the rent and care for her son. And the ex-soldier hired to kill Wang is getting seriously angry that he can’t find Adam Kindred.Describing Adam‘s discovery of the body probably makes you think that this a pretty standard thriller. But the story does not follow the usual storyline you see in these types of books. One of the more interesting points is the many ways that Adam reinvents himself as he’s on the run.This was an exciting story that gives wildly different views of London life. From the richest executives living the high life to the poorest street people, all the characters are fully formed and unique. For starting with such a clichéd set-up, the plot has a lot of surprises.

Readers who pick up Ordinary Thunderstorms, having not read William Boyd before, expecting a high octane chase thriller through the tough streets of London maybe disappointed. For me, William Boyds intention is to amuse as well as thrill reading like one of Graham Greenes 'entertainments' with a Dickensian cast of characters. Happily, for me, I am a big fan of the author and was thoroughly entertained. A big suspension of disbelief is required early on but if you manage to do that, you will have a great time. Warmly recommended.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is an extremely flawed novel. It's ostensibly a mystery, but it never completely solves that mystery. The protagonist makes a series of very odd choices that don't strike me as being believable. The ending is kind of a non-ending with a lot of loose threads, yet it's clearly not setting up a sequel. Yet, I give it 4 stars for the beauty of the writing. Boyd does an amazing job describing his characters and the setting. He uses an astounding vocabulary, but doesn't sound like he's using a thesaurus. The imagery in this book is incredible. It's just the plot that was weak and full of holes. I suppose I should have given this book three stars, but I was impressed enough with the word craft to give it an extra.The narration was very good. Gideon Emery puts emphasis on all the right parts, but doesn't sound like he's acting out the part. I liked this book a lot, but it's probably not a good choice for those who want a tight plot and a solid wrap-up in their mysteries.

William Boyd is Scottish by descent, was born in Ghana, and educated in Scotland and France. He completed a PhD in literature at Oxford. He is to my thinking a hybrid, an intellectual who has written a dozen novels, won awards but is considered British because he lives there part of the time. (You will see where I am going with this.) I have always been curious about his books, though Ordinary Thunderstorms, his 12th novel, is the first I have read. It won't be the last.Recently I have come across several discussions on various lit blogs about highbrow vs lowbrow novels and whether or not literary fiction is passe because it doesn't sell well. Some see a trend where literary authors are trying their hands at genre fiction is an effort to sell more copies of their novels. Others see it as a marketing ploy by publishers in an effort to sell more books.I find most of this speculation to be hogwash, though I am pretty sure marketing personnel are the key suspects. After all, it is their job. I think an author should write what he or she wants to write, should experiment, not always write the same story over and over for the sake of fans, income or profits. Basically, if an author can write well, I will read just about any novel by that author despite subject matter or genre.William Boyd has a pretty solid reputation as a literary writer. Ordinary Thunderstorms was marketed as a "literary mystery about crime and punishment." See what I mean? Well, it is tremendously exciting, it does involve murder, crime, the dastardly side of big pharma, and the underbelly of London. The violence is brutal and the mystery is complex. Not one truly admirable character inhabits its pages.However, the novel is about identity. Adam Kindred has returned to the country of his birth after many years in the United States. He is in London to interview for a job. A respected and successful climatologist, he has made a mess of his personal life. While he intends to start anew in London he was surely not planning the drastic transformation he undergoes.Within 24 hours he is a prime suspect for a murder he did not commit. He makes the decision to go "underground" for a while until he figures out what to do. He goes about as far underground as a person can go in a major metropolis, sleeping in a park, begging for food, and becoming a man with no social identity.In an interview, William Boyd says his intention was to write about what happens to a person who loses everything that makes him who he is. One thing that happens is that a person who loses his social identity finds he still has a self. Adam is intelligent, resourceful, often impulsive and foolish, a risk taker where people he cares for are involved. His innate goodness and humanity bring him up against a couple of true psychopathic personalities. His intelligence and something like bravery make him a Dickensian character in a modern world.William Boyd calls no attention to himself as an author, but in straightforward prose tells us a powerful and exciting tale full of heart while it is steeped in all manner of human degradation.In no way would I call the novel lowbrow. I suppose one could read it just for the thriller aspect, as Boyd does not write in any sort of wordy or obscure manner. He is certainly several cuts above Brad Thor, David Baldacci, and the like. Does that mean he is highbrow?

PROTAGONIST: Adam Kindred, climatologistSETTING: London SERIES: StandaloneRATING: 4.75A chance encounter leads a man to lose everything—his identity and his life as a respected professional—in this chilling psychological adventurePublicity Contact: Katherine Beitner, [email protected] Kindred is a promising young climatologist who is in London for a job interview with a prestigious university. After the interview, he is in the mood for an Italian dinner. If only he had chosen Chinese or Greek, perhaps his life wouldn’t have gone completely down the tubes. At the restaurant, he meets another lone diner, with whom he has a brief conversation. After the meal, he realizes that the other man, Dr. Philip Wang, has left behind a file folder. Not having anything better to do, Adam decides to return the folder and perhaps share a drink with Philip. But when he enters the apartment, he finds that he has interrupted a murder and that Dr. Wang is in his death throes. Foolishly, Adam removes the knife from Wang’s gut. He means to go to the police, but is deterred when he is almost attacked at his hotel. From that point on, he is a desperate man on the run, a man who has to give up everything just to survive.One of the first things that Adam does is to try to find a safe place to shelter. He builds a little niche for himself by the Chelsea Bridge, and for the first time in his life sleeps rough. He can’t use his credit cards or bank accounts; ultimately, he survives by begging. He has rapidly moved from thriving professional to scruffy homeless man, leaving behind a life of relative luxury for one with very few assets—and surprisingly not missing his old life very much at all! Several encounters with others prove fortuitous, one resulting in his association with the Church of John Christ which provides him to some temporary shelter with a woman who is down on her luck and her young son. Eventually, he takes on another person’s identity and is able to hold a job and even rent an apartment. But that doesn’t mean that the danger that he is in isn’t always there; an extremely motivated hired killer is always one step behind him.ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS was a fascinating study of a resourceful young man who relies on his wits and a bit of luck to survive. He realizes that most of his problems have to do with the meeting with Wang—what was in the folder that was so threatening that it led to his murder? Using the skills he had in his former life, Adam researches Wang’s professional accomplishments and finds that he was on the verge of exposing the malfeasance of a major pharmaceutical company who were about to put an asthma drug on the market despite the fact that drug trials had shown it to have problems.Boyd did a masterful job of building a suspenseful narrative with a riveting plot and flowing prose. I found the book quite un-putdownable. The preface of the book points out that ordinary thunderstorms have the capacity to transform themselves into multi-cell storms of great ferocity. That’s a perfect analogy for what happened to Adam, a perfectly ordinary man who is transformed into a person of great complexity. ORDINARY THUNDERSTORMS is a remarkable book, and I highly recommend it.

Immensely enjoyable, Ordinary Thunderstorms is a literary thriller set in the world of global pharamceutical companies and packed with enough plot twists for half a dozen novels. It takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of London society, from millionaires to illiterate prostitutes via academics, hospital porters, dissolute lords, police officers and self-styled African bishops.The plot springs into life within the first few pages when, after a chance encounter in a cafe, the hero, Adam Kindred, stumbles upon a violent crime. From that point on his life will never be the same.I was reminded in places of a Hitchcock film and certainly this novel has all the ingredients. But it's not just thrills and spills. There's also terrific characterisation, some lovely description that you barely register as the need to unwind the plot drives you on, and above all, lots of humour.I took this on holiday and even Ryanair didn't seem too bad.

The most astonishing thing about William Boyd's fine new novel is how hackneyed its opening chapter is. It reads so much like a parody of thriller conventions that you expect Alfred Hitchcock to waddle out and drawl, "Good eve-en-ning."On the first page, we learn that a young climatologist named Adam Kindred has "no idea how his life is about to change in the next few hours -- massively, irrevocably -- no idea at all." Okay, then, we're ready for excitement -- massively, irrevocably ready: Noticing that a man at a nearby table has left behind some scientific papers at a restaurant where he's eating, Adam calls the man and offers to take the papers to his apartment. But when Adam arrives a few minutes later, he discovers that the man has just been stabbed. "The file," the dying man whispers. "Whatever you do, don't -- ."And then -- damn the luck! -- he dies right before he can tell Adam what to do with the file. Should he call an ambulance? The police? "NO! NO! RUN!" he thinks, realizing this will "probably be one of the most important decisions of his life." And if you doubt that assessment, it's repeated 10 lines later: "So he made his decision, one of the most important decisions in his life."As a reader, this is the kind of opening that makes me think, "NO! NO! RUN!" But Boyd is the author of a dozen respected novels, shortlisted for the Booker, winner of the Whitbread and the Somerset Maugham and the Costa Novel of the Year. Surely, you keep hoping, his first thriller will get better than this.And it does.Once Boyd lays out that thread-worn crisis, in fact, the rest of his novel quickly grows rich and engaging. He creates the wide spectrum of London -- from its lawless slums to its posh boardrooms -- with arresting cinematic detail. And the many characters who populate these pages, from drug-dealing prostitutes to drug-making chief executives, are surprising and sympathetic.But what really interests Boyd in "Ordinary Thunderstorms" -- and what will make you self-conscious about every step you take -- is the way a single, random event can spark a storm of complex reactions. By kindly offering to return that folder of lost papers, Adam finds himself swept up in a deadly plot to silence a rogue medical researcher who was about to blow the whistle on a faulty new asthma drug. The police assume he stabbed the doctor, while the murderer is determined to rub out an inconvenient witness. In a moment of panic, Adam abandons his life and disappears onto the streets of London, sleeping by the side of a highway, begging for coins and snacking on pigeon.For a pampered academic, it's like falling into some ghastly negative image of London. Previously invisible people become Adam's friends and colleagues: addicts and runaways, illegal immigrants and religious fanatics, the kind of nameless people who are pulled dead from the Thames.This is a novel about the frailty of identity, the anonymity of modern city life, the frightening and thrilling possibilities of personal reinvention. Boyd gives a harrowing sense of how close and yet how distant the nether life of a large city is, accessible to anyone willing or forced to step outside the web of modern technology: "No cheques, no bills, no references, no mobile phone calls -- only payphones -- no credit cards, only cash -- nothing. That's how you disappear in the twenty-first century -- you just refuse to take part in it. You live like a medieval peasant: you scrounge, you steal, you sleep under hedges."What follows is the story of a hunted man, the chapters propelled along thrillingly at just the right moments by sudden reversals, revelations and reprisals. Penniless and hunted, Adam has few resources to mount a criminal inquiry or pursue a pharmaceutical scandal, but he toughens up quickly on the streets and manages an ingenious investigation to clear his name. Nevertheless, through it all, he's madly pursued by a retired British soldier-turned-hit-man who honed his grisly techniques in Afghanistan. I'm still trying to blot out of my mind what he does to a captured man's hands. . . .The novel's most impressive quality is the way Boyd rotates through a large group of characters, allowing us to experience this crisis from a variety of perspectives -- each slanted and usually wildly mistaken. Adam, his determined assassin, a tenacious young policewoman and the wealthy president of a pharmaceutical company are all racing to understand what's happening to them. Boyd reminds us that we're pattern-hungry creatures, deeply biased toward the belief that events are connected, that motives underlie actions. But sometimes the only connection is the one we imagine. And kill for.Admittedly, the evils of big pharma felt like a fresher theme a decade ago, when John le Carré wrote "The Constant Gardener," but Boyd provides a slick primer on the way new drugs are marketed -- from helpful public service announcements to anodyne branding commercials, all designed to bully government regulators, stoke public demand and maximize profits. Chemicals and genes aren't the only thing being manipulated here."Ordinary Thunderstorms" never sounds too polemical, though, because at the center of this Death Star of corporate malignancy, Boyd places one of his most complex and humane characters: Ingram Fryzer, president of Calenture-Deutz Pharmaceutical. He's a corporate tycoon, a man of impeccable taste and extraordinary power, but ultimately he has no more control over his life than poor Adam. Once this storm of fraud and conspiracy gets roaring, nobody can manage it.http://articles.washingtonpost.com/20...

Very enjoyable story of a man”s will to survive whilst on the run in London. A young man stumbles upon a murder scene and instead of going to the police he decides to try to live life on the streets until he can clear his innocence. A little far fetched but what novel isn’t - lots of twists and turns, great characters, . London locations well described and I have no hesitation to recommend the book to anyone who likes a good thriller. The end is left open. I hope there’s a follow on.

Depois de uma semi desilusão com Inquietude, descobri esta peça de literatura que joga com o balanço do thriler, a devassa da vida privada pelos meios tecnológicos, a misteriosa vida da indústria farmacêutica e a sobrevivência dos desmobilizados das guerras actuais. E a magnífica improbabilidade de tudo ser igual amanhã. (ok, depois de amanhã).

This is a really, really good book: the plot is clever, the characters are well drawn out, the scene depictions are exquisite, the language is smart without being show-offy, and the message of the book (your life can be turned upside down in an instant but with luck and brains you can set it right again) comes across toughly sweet. The pacing keeps the reader in suspense up until the very end. And the end is where I downgraded the book from a five to a four-star read.For the book to get an "amazing" 5 stars, Boyd would have had to tie up a few more strings. As it is, he leaves the reader guessing as to what really happened. One gets the feeling that for him, this was not the point of the book. The point, it seems for him, is how haphazard life can be, how a thunderstorm can be created by the right conditions. How a person can be more than what he has made himself out to be. How a person can be mistaken about himself, his friends, his family. Perhaps he felt it would have been too "neat" to have certain things explained or revealed or solved. I get that, and yet, because it is also a murder thriller, it would seem that the author "owes" it to us to bring that side of the book to a satisfactory conclusion. And I don't think a sequel would do it here.

The core of this book is a steal from The 39 Steps, with an innocent man finding himself at the wrong place at the right time, interrupting a murder for which he is subsequently framed. Spinning out from this we have the familiar tropes of such thrillers recast with a modern, literary bent: the hero goes on the run, but rather than fleeing to Scotland he loses himself in the murky London underworld of outcasts and the homeless; the murderer is clear from the outset, though who he’s working for is less clear; the conspiracy goes right to the top, taking in corruption in the Pharma industry and private security contractors to the Government.Much of this is wonderful, written with the lurid imagination of an airport thriller but the subtlety and humanity of an author creating something character-driven. What this means is that so many of the aspects which could have dripped with cliché are given an unexpected spin; the obligatory ‘tart with a heart’ figure is a single mum who drugs her child to sleep; the bad guy is just a slightly insecure drone doing a job, the hero’s sanctuary is a church with an odd slant on Christianity and possibly run by a con-man. Boyd clearly has so much fun interweaving the plots that it seems a little unfair to criticise, but there are flaws. Chief among them is the plot’s reliance on coincidence, which seems odd given how much he avoids other pitfalls. There’s also a slight unevenness in tone: the pharma CEO character, whilst always entertaining, seems to have been ported in from some sort of grotesque satire. I enjoyed reading about him but he seemed entirely separate from the plot. Finally, there’s a central romance which is not entirely convincing and appears to serve the plot rather than the characters.Criticisms aside, this is an entertaining and at times powerful read, with a nice line in refusing to go where you expect it to.

Have you ever set aside a book promising yourself to read it later, because another book came along that you were dying to read? Then another book comes along that was well hyped and then another. Eventually you find that first book under a pile of other books you have read. You finally get a chance to read it and it turns out this book is better than many of the other books you read since you first set this one aside. Ordinary Thunderstorms: A Novel is that book. Adam Kindred is a young man who strikes up a casual conversation with a stranger in a small Italian bistro in a suburb of London. From this minor encounter his life begins to fall apart like a tumbling row of dominoes. He is soon running from not only the police, but also a killer who is desperate to find him. Adam sees only one way out, to disappear. But how do you disappear in a city that has more closed circuit televisions scanning the populace than any other city in the world. How do you not leave a trail, when any financial transaction or a meeting with a public official could be recorded and lead back to you. It is after all, the information age. We are all tied in myriad ways to the grid. How do you utterly disappear in the heart of London? I enjoyed this book very much. I felt a couple of the scenarios were a bit thin, but the author pulled them off. The writing was very good overall. The characters were deftly brought to life. I found myself routing for the hero to persevere. Perhaps we all have that subliminal desire from time to time to vanish from our present lives and see if we could start over again. This book was provided for review by the well read folks at Harper Perennial.

I found myself enthralled by this intelligent, unusual thriller about a young academic, Adam Kindred, who has left his position as a climatologist at an Arizona university and has come to London for a job interview. After a chance conversation in a cafe, he finds his whole life and identity completely overturned. Suddenly he is the prime suspect in the vicious murder of a pharmaceutical research scientist, whereupon he decides that his only recourse is to flee and join the vast underground of the homeless and the missing.It's a fascinating tale, in which we meet all sorts of eccentric characters, including an evangelist who leads a cult called the Church of John Christ, which holds that the apostle John, not Jesus, is the true savior; a policewoman and her pot-smoking, aging-hippie father; dodgy Big Pharma executives; and an ultraviolent mercenary employed by a private security firm.This novel is beautifully written, with the third-person point of view alternating among several different characters and the subplots involving them. The pace is more leisurely than in most thrillers, with lots of detail, but I found the narrative always gripping and the book nearly impossible to put down. I recommend it to readers who might enjoy a thought-provoking suspense novel that deals with the fragility of identity and conspiracy and corruption in big business.