269-] English Literature , William Boyd

269-] English Literature

William Boyd

Best Selling Author and Screenwriter

William Boyd is the author of seventeen novels, including A Good Man in Africa,  winner of the Whitbread Literary 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; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection. William Boyd’s new novel The Romantic is to be published on 6th October 2022.

The World of William Boyd

A St James’ art dealer with a penchant for postwar British painting finds terrifyingly new horizons opening up for him in East London, in William Boyd’s savagely funny new series.

Adventures in the Human Heart

William Boyd talks to Sam Leith from The Spectator, about his latest novel The Romantic which is about the incredible life of Cashel Greville Ross born in 1799.

The Romantic – Press reviews

Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity ― Telegraph

The Romantic is certainly a crowd-pleaser, an old-fashioned bildungsroman that kicks off in the early 1800s and follows the hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatectic life . . . Boyd knows how to time the hights and lows, how to blend triumphs and tragedies, personal and historical . . . genuinely poignant and wise ― Sunday Times

Picaresque . . . these is a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that ― Scotsman

If it’s true escapism you’re after, William Boyd can always be relied upon to transport the reader from reality and his next offering, The Romantic, another epic that follows Cashel Greville Ross from 19th-century Country Cork to Zanzibar via Oxford and Sri Lanka, offers a wonderful literary getaway as the nights draw in ― Vogue, A Most Promising Page-Turner of the Season

A globe-trotting adventure through the 19th century ― i, Best Books for Autumn

Boyd’s pile-up of set piece escapades offers a huge amount of fun ― Daily Mail

One of our best contemporary storytellers ― Spectator

What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel?  ― Sunday Telegraph

Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game ― Guardian

This breakneck pace seems to be a function of Boyd’s exceptional imaginative facility, which sees him just as irresistibly drawn to new ideas as his hero is. Boyd, too, is the romantic. And yet there’s something irresistible about that energy – Financial Times

William Boyd at his boy’s own, balloon-flying, continent-hopping, historical name-dropping Boydiest. Our hero is Cashel Greville Ross, born in Co Cork in 1799, whose life spans swooping geographical leaps and great historical transformations. Think the Napoleonic battles, railways, Romantic poets, the source of the Nile, flushing loos, love affairs and pure, pure escapism ― The

THE ROMANTIC, published 6th October.

From one of Britain’s best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set in the 19th century

The Romantic

A new “whole life” novel from William Boyd, the author of Any Human Heart. Set in the 19th century, the novel follows the roller-coaster fortunes of a man as he tries to negotiate the random stages, adventures and vicissitudes of his life. He is variously a soldier, a lover, a husband, a father, a bankrupt, a friend of famous poets, a writer, a jailbird, a farmer, an African explorer – and many other manifestations – before, finally, he becomes a minor diplomat, a consul based in Trieste (then in Austria-Hungary) where he thinks he will see out the end of his days in well-deserved tranquillity. This will not come to pass…

Spy City – all six episodes streaming now on Britbox.

AFM: Edgar Ramirez, Gugu Mbatha-Raw to Star in Isabel Coixet’s Romance ‘Nobody’s Heart’

The film — about love and loss in 1930s Portugal — is being introduced to buyers at the online AFM by WestEnd Films.

Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet (The Bookshop, Learning to Drive) has cast the duo of Edgar Ramirez (The Girl on the Train, Joy, Jungle Cruise) and BAFTA nominee Gugu Mbatha-Raw (Misbehaviour, Belle, The Morning Show) in her next feature.

Nobody’s Heart, adapted from bestselling author and screenwriter William Boyd’s short story Cork, and based on the life of celebrated Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, is described as a “beautiful, poetic story of love and loss” set against the backdrop of Lisbon in the 1930s. WestEnd Films has launched international sales on the project.

The film follows Lily after the sudden and devastating death of her husband. She inherits his cork factory and begins to form an unexpected, highly charged relationship with his enigmatic co-worker, igniting repressed imagination and passion, and discovering unknown truths about both herself and her late husband.

 “This is a fascinating, twisted and sexually charged love story between two characters sharing a unique passion with the background of Portugal in the 1930s,” said Coixet . “After reading William Boyd’s script, I completely fell in love with the story and I know there’s a hunger out there for stories like Nobody’s Heart.”The film will begin shooting in January in Portugal. WestEnd will be introducing the film to buyers at AFM Online where it will show a video presentation. CAA Media Finance is representing North American sales.

“Nobody’s Heart is a rich, evocative and moving drama, and we know Isabel Coixet will elevate the film even further with her eye for nuance and beauty,” said WestEnd managing director Maya Amsellem. “At WestEnd, we have a continued focus on female-centric narratives through our WeLove brand, and this is a great example of the type of story audiences want to see more of.”

By Alex Ritman

A producer, a novelist and an actress – all leading secret lives. But what happens when the trio’s private worlds begin to take over their public ones?

Happy paperback publication to Trio, the Sunday Times bestselling novel from William Boyd

One Night in Nihonbashi by William Boyd

RESTLESS has been chosen as one of four novels for the Duchess of Cornwall’s new Instagram-based reading group, I’m delighted to report. This is the hardback cover of the 2006 first edition, published by Bloomsbury. RESTLESS was my 10th novel and followed ANY HUMAN HEART (2002). I had done a lot of research into WW2 espionage for Any Human Heart and had stumbled across the extraordinary and pretty much unknown account of British espionage in the USA before Pearl Harbor. British agents, instructed by Churchill, tried to manipulate US media to encourage the States to join the war in Europe. They were very ingenious and very successful. Sometimes you get lucky as a novelist! This was a gift from the literary gods. And this the background against which the story of the young British spy, Eva Delectorskya , plays out. Restless features on @duchessofcornwallsreadingroom for two weeks from February 12.

Restless

A Good Man in Africa, first edition hardback. Published 40 years ago this week in January 1981. Still in print in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Germany, Spain.

cover2

08.22-william-body-book-jac

GOOD MAN IN AFRICA was published by Hamish Hamilton. This photograph was taken by the late, great JERRY BAUER (1934-2010). It was the first official publicity photo designed to accompany my debut novel. Jerry became a friend and took jacket/publicity photos of me for decades. The last one was on RESTLESS (2005). Jerry made photographing writers his unique speciality. Over the years he photographed everybody: Samuel Beckett, Muriel Spark, Alberto Moravia, Simone de Beauvoir etc etc. His amazing archive can be accessed via Jerry.bauer.photos@gmail.com. HINT — someone should produce a book of them….

@penguinukbooks @aaknopf @curtisbrownbooks #agoodmaninafrica #julietnicolson @vikingbooks

My Trio talk with Francine Stock 2.30pm Saturday 28th November. Not to be missed!!!

Cold War spy-thriller, Spy City. Starring Dominic Cooper as a British spy in Berlin during the summer of 1961. The summer before the Wall went up.  Coming to a TV near you soon.

William Boyd in conversation with Douglas Rae at the 2020 Petworth Festival.

Trio review from the Sunday Times.

‘Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.’

William Boyd’s new novel, Trio is out now.

This exhilarating and tender novel set in the summer of 1968 asks: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn’t?

Reviews

Trio is about double lives. Three characters are central to it: Talbot Kydd, a middle-aged film producer; Elfrida Wing, a novelist with writer’s block; and Anny Viklund, a glamorous young actress. What brings them together is the making of a film in Brighton in high summer 1968.

The late 1960s have been enjoying something of a literary vogue this year: vibrantly chronicled in Craig Brown’s Beatles biography, One Two Three Four; gaudily resurrected in David Mitchell’s novel Utopia Avenue. Trio’s return to the period has a triple motive: to let the sunshine in again on its psychedelic euphoria, to highlight its political hinterland, and to spotlight gay liberation after the 1967 Sexual Offences Act.

The film, with its camply whimsical title, “Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon”, and the banana-yellow Mini in which its lovers zip around Brighton, her purple kaftan glinting with tiny mirrors, his cerise hussar’s jacket matched by red boots, snazzily evokes the era. As William Boyd’s earlier fiction has shown — his depiction of the electric excitements of the 1920s Berlin film world in The New Confessions (1987), his ironic take on Hollywood in his short story The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995) — cinema fascinates him.

Trio sends an affably satiric shimmer over the making of its film, with the never-nonplussed Talbot adroitly manoeuvring his way through a maze of complications: ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings, preposterous demands from investors, an absconding key performer.

Some of the figures involved seem like comic stereotypes from central casting: Dorian Villiers, a booming thespian trying to reboot his career; Sylvia Slaye, a cleavage-and-wink sexpot from saucy 1950s screen romps, now amply past her curvaceous prime. But the plot keeps things moving along entertainingly. At the same time, deeper concerns are broached.

An epigraph from Chekhov, “Most people live their real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy”, indicates Trio’s main theme: duplicity. Simulation, an essential component in film-making, pervades the book. Fraud, chicanery, covert theft, surreptitious adultery and fake friendship lurk. Names can’t be taken on trust. Rousingly billed as Troy Blaze, the film’s lead is Nigel Farthingly from Swindon. The film-maker exotically upgrades from Reggie to Rodrigo. Jacques Soldat, a preening Parisian intellectual, was once Mehdi Duhameldeb.

Talbot, a closeted homosexual, has another name too. As “Mr Eastman”, unknown to the wife he has lived with in “manufactured intimacy” for 26 years, he keeps a clandestine flat in Primrose Hill where he can photograph male models found by placing coded ads in magazines. Leading a double life, he approvingly notes that “there were two words in Japanese to describe the self . . . a word for the self that existed in the private realm and another, completely different, word for the self that existed in the world”.

Talbot’s situation is paralleled by those of Elfrida and Anny. The former, whose talent has dried up as her eagerness for drink has welled up, is concealing an alcoholic lifestyle that begins with breakfast tipplings of vodka slyly stored in Sarson’s White Vinegar bottles. Anny, sustaining her equilibrium with Equanil pills, is struggling to hide the return of a nightmare from her past: her ex-husband, now a terrorist hunted by the FBI.

In a thriller-like narrative about an insurance expert obsessed with armoury, Boyd’s 1998 novel Armadillo explored the urge to feel safely shielded and the way a social carapace can become more encumbrance than protection. Trio treats the same themes in a more relaxed style. Although one of its storylines takes a darker turn than might have been expected, its prevailing tone is jaunty and its conclusion optimistic. Full of neat phrases (“Brighton’s gull-clawed air”) and quirkily funny scenes (between takes naked actors in a porn film grouse about the rise in local vandalism), it’s an elating read.

Review from the Sunday Times.

Viking £18.99 pp345