William Boyd | Biography, Books and Facts [Cite This] William Boyd William Boyd is a renowned British popular fiction writer. His major contributions to contemporary English literature include A Good Man in Africa and An Ice-Cream War. Born on March 7, 1952, in Accra, Ghana, Boyd grew up in Ghana and Nigeria. He received his early education from Gordonstoun School and studied for a Diploma course of French Studies at the University of Nice, France. Later, he earned a Masters degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Glasgow. Finally, he attended Jesus College, Oxford and was awarded a PhD in English Literature. Upon completion of his higher studies, Boyd was offered a lectureship at St Hilda’s College, Oxford in the English department, where he taught from 1980-83. While teaching he began working on his first novel A Good Man in Africa, which was published in 1981. It is a black comedy set in the fictional West African country of Kinjanja. The central character, Morgan Leafy, is a disaster-prone British Diplomat with a questionable record. This dark comedy also touches upon the dynamics of British political influences in relation to Western African.

Boyd’s reprehensible and morally deplorable character, Morgan Leafy, serves as a representative of British politician and their deplorable behavior. In fact, Leafy makes appearance in Boyd’s another two short stories. According to the author, there is an autobiographical element to his novel and the character of Dr. Murray serves as a portrait of his father. A Good Man in Africa received positive response from most of the critics and became an instant success. Boyd was honored with Whitbread Book Award and Somerset Maugham Award for his contribution. On the success of his novel, he published a short story collection, On the Yankee Station and Other Stories, the very same year. Subsequently, he wrote another novel, titled An Ice-Cream War, in 1982. It is set in colonial East Africa and focuses on the World War I campaigns. The novel is a dark satire that highlights the tragedy of a war waged between the Great Britain and Germany on East African soil. The darkly comic treatment of WWI had the book shortlisted for a Booker Prize and won John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.

Another one of his key works is considered to be Any Human Heart (2002) in which he fictionalized and incorporated the creator of James Bond phenomenon, Ian Fleming . It is written in the journal entry form and charts the life of a fictitious 20th century writer, Logan Mountstuart. In addition to novel writing, Boyd also served in the Hollywood as a screenwriter. He adapted Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop in a feature film Stars and Bars (1988). His own novel’s movie adaptation, A Good Man in Africa, was released in 1994. For television he is credited for screenwriting dramas, including Armadillo (2001), Any Human Heart (2010) and Restless (2012). William Boyd’s is known for his satiric and comic narratives, which he took a little too far with his publication of a fake biography of Nat Tate. Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 sketches the life eponymous abstract expressionist painter. The author withheld the status of the book being fictional till its launch party.

A number of prominent guests claimed to have known the fictional painter oblivious to the nature of the book. It created quite a buzz at the revelation of the truth. Moreover, Boyd has adapted a literary work of Anton Chekhov for theater as well. His recently published book is a James Bond novel, titled Solo (2013). Buy Books by William Boyd William Boyd - Literature Literature Biography William Boyd was born in Accra, Ghana, on 7 March 1952. He was educated at Gordonstoun School, Glasgow University and Jesus College, Oxford. Published while he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, his first novel A Good Man in Africa (1981) won the Whitbread First Novel Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. In 1983 Boyd was named by Granta as one of the 20 ‘Best of Young British Novelists’.

His other novels include An Ice-Cream War (1982), winner of the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, Brazzaville Beach (1990), which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction and the McVitie’s Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year, and The Blue Afternoon (1993), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Fiction). Armadillo (1998) is set in London and follows the adventures of insomniac loss-adjuster Lorimer Black. In 1998 Boyd also published Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, an elaborate hoax ‘biography’ of a neglected genius, which embarrassed a number of prominent art critics who claimed to have heard of the wholly fictional painter. Boyd’s eighth novel Any Human Heart (2002), a history of the twentieth century told through the fictional journals of the novelist Logan Mountstuart, won the Prix Jean Monnet for European Literature in 2003 and was nominated for the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Restless (2006) won the 2006 Costa Novel Award. His most recent novels are Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) and Waiting for Sunrise (2012). Boyd has also published the short story collections On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Natalie ‘X’ (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008), and a collection of non-fiction, Bamboo (2005). A former television critic for the New Statesman (1981-3), William Boyd has also worked extensively as a screenwriter for both film and television. He wrote the television screenplays Good and Bad at Games (1983) and Dutch Girls (1985) (collected in book form as School Ties in 1985), and has adapted two novels by Evelyn Waugh for television: Scoop (1987) and Sword of Honour (2001).

He wrote and directed the First World War film The Trench (1999) and has also adapted his own novels Stars and Bars (1988) and A Good Man in Africa (1994) for film, and Armadillo (2001), Any Human Heart (2010) and Restless (2012) for television. A new radio play, the ghost story A Haunting, was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in December 2001. Longings, adapted from two short stories by Anton Chekhov and Boyd’s first work for the stage, opened at the Hampstead Theatre in London in February 2013. In 2012 Boyd was commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write an official James Bond novel, which was published in 2013 on the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Fleming’s Casino Royale. Fleming himself made a cameo appearance in Any Human Heart. William Boyd lives in London. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1983, and is also an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

He was awarded a CBE in 2005. He is married and divides his time between London and South West France. Awards Critical perspective William Boyd is perhaps best described as a wry historian of 20th-century life, and an ironic commentator on the ways that life has been represented, not only in literature, but in the companion genres of visual art, film and photography. While his geographical settings vary from the conflict-stricken west African coast of Brazzaville Beach (1990) to the romantic vistas of the Philippine islands in The Blue Afternoon (1993), his recurrent character focus is the English personality and how it adapts – or fails to adapt – to the demands of a foreign landscape. Like Henderson Dores, the introverted Englishman turned extrovert Manhattanite in Stars and Bars (1984), Englishness under pressure is seen to undergo the most radical metamorphoses, and yet remain, at the same time, irrepressibly resilient.

In his 1981 debut novel, A Good Man in Africa, Boyd displayed his affiliation to an English tradition of the comic novel of expatriate life, together with his allegiance to one of his many literary mentors, Evelyn Waugh. In the figure of Morgan Leafy, a hapless British diplomat struggling to master the complexities of his posting to a corrupt west African country (the fictional Kinjanja), Boyd also echoed the post-war formula of the ‘Angry Young Man’, his bumbling, gauche, but ultimately sympathetic protagonist even leading some critics to hail the author as a natural successor to Kingsley Amis (D. J. Taylor, After the War (1993, xxi). Like Amis’s Jim Dixon in the 1954 comedy Lucky Jim, the accident-prone Leafy pursues his love interest through a series of career crises and ham-fisted sexual encounters, ‘an aristocrat of pain and frustration, a prince of anguish and embarrassment’, until he eventually regains his girl, and his self-respect, against all the odds of his situation. But Boyd’s first novel also hinted at his sensitivity to Africa as a continent bedevilled by poverty, exploitation and misguided foreign interference.

His portrait no doubt builds on his own childhood experiences in Ghana, something he discusses in the autobiographical essay included in his 1998 Protobiography. Though perpetually self-absorbed, Leafy nonetheless registers the misery and decrepitude of his surroundings in the overpopulated capital of Nkongsamba. ‘Set in undulating tropical rain forest, from the air it resembled nothing so much as a giant pool of vomit on somebody’s expansive unmown lawn.’ And while the plot of A Good Man is driven by a comedy of diplomatic manners, the novel also conveys the heat, sweat, and endless frustrations of a crumbling post-imperial system, with the chaos of a continent throwing into relief a legacy of British incompetence. Boyd addressed this subject with more seriousness in his second novel, An Ice-Cream War (1982), which delves into the clashes between British and German forces in the East Africa campaigns of the First World War. The historical and military material of this book is recreated in vibrant detail, and in his intense descriptive passages Boyd brings out the full colour and desolation of the ravaged landscape of Tanzania.

The African scenes are intercut with episodes set in Kent, in the south of England, telling the parallel stories of two brothers, Gabriel and Felix Cobb, whose lives change irreparably as they are drawn, one after the other, into the war. The quiet civility of Edwardian England contrasts starkly with the confusion and panic of the Africa conflict, experienced first-hand by Gabriel, as he leads his regiment into an attack on the town of Tanga: ‘Nothing today had been remotely how he had imagined it would be; nothing in his education or training had prepared him for the utter randomness and total contingency of events. Here he was, strolling about the battlefield looking for his missing company like a mother searching for lost children in the park.’ When Gabriel is taken prisoner, his brother Felix searches for him in an African landscape transformed into an absurd nightmare of squalor, insects, torrential rain and countless human casualties. And the novel swings ultimately from romance to elegy, providing a brilliant evocation of the long reach of war behind the front lines and into ordinary domestic existence.

Much of Boyd’s writing utilises the awkward intersection of private and public life, and the suffering of individuals who – like the unfortunate protagonist of his screenplay Good and Bad at Games (1983) – cannot match the cultural demands of their environment. In this respect, he is also intrigued by the way in which individuals register the intimate details of their lives, something which developed into his use of a diary or journal form in several novels. In Armadillo (1998), a low-level thriller set in a London insurance company, the central character’s journal is his means of containing and interpreting the nature of coincidence, chance, unpredictability and risk in everyday life. And a diary of sorts provides the basis for Boyd’s 1987 epic, The New Confessions, in which film-maker John James Todd’s overriding obsession with Rousseau’s Confessions becomes the basis for his own confessional memoir of a life lived, through war, romance and ambition, in tandem with the twentieth century. The New Confessions showcases not only Boyd’s superb historical instinct but also his ability to perceive the significance of modern cultural representation through the evolution of photography, journalism and cinema.

In this novel, the story of the heyday and decline of silent movies and B-westerns underlines the idea that art forms, like people, have their own biographies. The author’s attention to this fact, and to the gaps which emerge between imagination and finished work, later fuelled his 1998 spoof on the New York art world, Nat Tate, and also his forays into architecture, film and music in short fiction. But Boyd’s most daring commentary on artistic representation – and indeed, his most ambitious use to date of the fictionalized diary format – is reserved for an engrossing commentary on literature itself. Any Human Heart (2002), the journal of Uruguayan-born, British-bred writer Logan Mountstuart, spans the defining episodes of the twentieth century and crosses several continents in tracking the meandering life of a modern man-of-letters through a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Again, the diary is a means of exploring how public events impinge on individual consciousness, so that Mountstuart’s journal alludes almost casually to the war, the death of a prime minister or the abdication of the king.

But Boyd also uses it to play ironically on the theme of literary celebrity, bringing his protagonist into contact with a series of ‘real’ writers in a sequence of comic or petty encounters – a spat with Virginia Woolf in London, a possible sexual encounter with Evelyn Waugh at Oxford, a clumsy exchange with James Joyce in Paris over the translation of the term ‘scribouillard’. Any Human Heart is a self-consciously clever novel, a 20th-century picaresque conceived in the tradition of Anthony Powell or Anthony Burgess, and loaded with veiled tributes to Boyd’s literary heroes Cyril Connolly and William Gerhardie, whose flamboyant and affected styles haunt Mountstuart’s own prose. It signals too, towards Boyd’s lingering feelings of uneasiness with colonialism and the British establishment, which he also explores in several of the essays collected in Bamboo (2005). Any Human Heart is also, more simply, a rich and frequently moving study of the inevitability of life’s passage.

The elderly Mountstuart, watching teenagers on a French beach, is struck by the simplicity of this fact: ‘And suddenly I wonder; is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living – and will live – and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. You must live the life you have been given.’ Boyd has argued that ‘like a vitamin pill, a good short story can provide a compressed blast of discerning intellectual pleasure, one no less intense than that delivered by a novel’ (The Guardian, 2 October, 2004). It could be said that both his stories and his novels are governed by the ideal of a ‘discerning intellectual pleasure’, sustained by his ability to marry individual interest with historical scope, and to fuse conceptual purpose with the power of compelling narrative.

This combination is pursued once again in Restless (2006), a less emotionally involving novel than Any Human Heart, but which similarly highlights Boyd’s ongoing preoccupation with recreating the scenes and textures of 20th-century history. The novel has two female protagonists: Ruth Gilmartin, a postgraduate student in 1970s Oxford, and her mother Sally, whose eccentric and homely English exterior masks a previous existence as Russian émigrée Eva Delectorskaya, and whose wartime career in espionage has returned to haunt her 30 years later. The narrative of Restless alternates between Ruth’s investigation into her mother’s past, and Eva’s own account of her life as a spy, working for the secret British Security Coordination organisation in Belgium, London and, most importantly, the United States, as Boyd mines submerged histories of British wartime propaganda and American Anglophobia to weave a tense and complex web which threatens to undermine post-war myths of a ‘special relationship’ between the two powers.

As Eva gradually involves her daughter in her plans for revenge on her former spymaster with whom she was romantically involved, the novel displays many of the conventions of a romantic thriller, and in the constant role-playing and double bluffing occasioned by the spy genre, personal relationships and allegiances are perpetually at risk. In sharp contrast to the confident personal narrative of Any Human Heart, Restless marks a return, of sorts, to some of the awkward convolutions of identity which flavoured Boyd’s early fiction, and to a British social landscape still troubled by ingrained historical insecurities. Boyd returns to the thriller genre in his tenth and eleventh novels Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009) and Waiting for Sunrise (2012). With a nod to John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, Ordinary Thunderstorms opens as Adam Kindred, a divorced climatologist, arrives in London for a job interview and almost immediately becomes incriminated in a murder. Unlike Buchan’s protagonist, however, Kindred decides to remain in London, abandoning his identity and initially living rough on a piece of waste ground in Chelsea, existing on handouts and charity, as he tries to piece together the circumstances of the killing.

Kindred’s profession is something of a red herring, and inasmuch as the novel has any contemporary target it is the international pharmaceutical trade: the murdered man had been developing a new cure for asthma, and Kindred is in possession of a file which casts doubt on the effectiveness of the new drug, leading to a brutal manhunt by private security operatives. This is Boyd’s London novel, and there are obvious Dickensian echoes in Kindred’s experiences in the underworld, and in the way that Boyd seeks to draw characters from disparate social backgrounds into his narrative. The course of this thriller is perhaps hindered by the number of digressions and subplots, and its pace is often as leisurely as the River Thames around which much of the action unfolds. A false accusation also sets the plot of Boyd’s subsequent novel in motion. In Waiting for Sunrise, Lysander Rief travels to Vienna in 1913, seeking therapeutic treatment for an embarrassing sexual problem. There he falls into a tempestuous relationship with a fellow patient, the neurotic sculptress Hettie Bull, who after some months accuses him of rape.

Indebted to a shadowy pair of attachés at the British consulate who enable his escape to England, on the outbreak of war Rief is compelled to become involved in a complex operation to trace the leaking of details of military movements on the Western Front to Germany. The early sessions of therapy offer a convenient means of establishing the back story of the Anglo-Austrian protagonist, whose pre-war employment as an actor and facility for disguise prove central to his mission, which offers Rief ‘the chance to see the mighty industrial technologies of the twentieth-century war machine both at its massive, bureaucratic source and at its narrow, vulnerable human target.’ Waiting for Sunrise displays some familiar Boyd preoccupations, including the ekphrastic description of invented works of art and references to the early days of cinema, and the novel demonstrates his enduring interest in recreating specific historical and cultural milieux: initially Vienna immediately before the First World War (there is a cameo appearance by Sigmund Freud) and subsequently wartime London, with brief sorties to the trenches of the Western Front and to Geneva.

Like previous works, the novel has an important confessional dimension, as the narrative is interspersed with extracts from Rief’s journals, which permit some formal innovation in the inclusion of some poems and some fragments of dialogue rendered in playscript. Boyd’s recent success in refreshing the conventions of spy fiction should serve him well in his forthcoming project of writing the next official James Bond novel, published in 2013. Dr Eve Patten, 2008, Dr Guy Woodward, 2013 Bibliography A writer's life: William Boyd - Telegraph A writer's life: William Boyd Toby Clements 12:01AM BST 03 Sep 2006 The author tells Toby Clements why he is fascinated with spying and its impact on identity. William Boyd has just written a spy novel, so there was something wonderfully apposite about his choice of meeting place. The Café Riche, in the Place Gambetta, in Bergerac, France, is perfectly anonymous and the square itself dusty and subfusc, the sort of place that microfiche might safely be left in a folded copy of the day's Le Monde.

The real smart bomb came only when I got home and listened to the tape of the interview. Instead of pronouncements as to whither the English novel or deep thoughts about the role of the interlocutor in Yeats's early poetry - which might have been something we touched upon - the tape was filled with the roar of passing motorcycles, the constant babble of excited conversations at the next-door table, a series of wolf whistles and, most alarmingly, the deafening bongs of some nearby church bells. Our words were almost completely inaudible. At one point, an owl seemed to hoot for the best part of five minutes. The author himself exudes a slightly distracting anonymity. Sitting at what looks like a favourite table with a newspaper and a café renversé, at first glance he appears to be the sort of Englishman who might flinch at meeting a compatriot abroad - floppy hair, Oxford blue shirt, chinos and soft leather shoes. But William Boyd is not English.

He is Scottish (something it is possible to detect in his softly rolled "R"s and fluted "O"s) and was born in Accra, Ghana, after which he spent the first 20 years of his life in West Africa, commuting to and from Gordonstoun boarding school in Scotland. In this sense, he is of the last generation who might have been brought up abroad, but could still think of themselves as being distinctly British. "It shaped me and coloured me in ways I do not particularly want to analyse," he says. "But I feel I have been deracinated - in a nice way - so that I have usually been the outsider looking on. Maybe that's useful for a novelist." It is this sense of being apart - of having the distance to analyse dispassionately - that provides much of the energy and elegance behind Boyd's nine novels, two collections of short stories and 13 screenplays. His characters are mainly misfits, flawed drifters on the run from something or somehow imprisoned by their alien environment. These characters give Boyd the room to play with the misconceptions and misunderstandings that exist between host and guest.

His first two novels, written in his late twenties, naturally enough drew on the life he had so far lived. A Good Man in Africa (1981) won the Whitbread award for best first novel and described a thinly disguised Nigeria, telling the story of Morgan Leafy, a typically English blunderer grappling with the lunatic intricacies of a sub-Saharan post-colonial meltdown. An Ice Cream War (1982) was set in East Africa during the First World War, but it described an African country pulling itself apart in a civil war, something Boyd was familiar with from Nigeria in the late 1960s. "All my received wisdom about what conflict was like was exposed as utterly false, so I wanted to write a war novel to put my theories to the test," he says. By the time his third novel, Stars and Bars, was published, Boyd's wanderings had taken him to Glasgow and Nice universities and then on to a PhD at Oxford, where he spent eight years inching his way up the greasy pole of academia, doing the jobs that none of the Fellows wanted to do.

It was only when he was offered a college lecturership, which involved a greater number of teaching hours, that he realised he would have to choose between teaching and writing. By this time he had also had his first film made: Good and Bad at Games. "I had always known that I needed to do something else other than write novels, but there is a terrible Catch-22 about film writing," says Boyd. "You want to write films, but have you ever written a film? But then Channel 4 offered non-film writers such as me, Salman Rushdie and various others the chance. And mine got made and it started from there." He describes it as a "very good other thing to have going on" and usually has six or seven projects on the go. He clearly enjoys the collaborative aspects of film-making and the people he meets through the industry, but he acknowledges that films are something very different from novels. "You don't go out to see Verdi's Falstaff and then come home and read Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and say: 'My God! Look what he's left out.' " He is in two minds as to whether his latest novel, Restless, published next month, would make a good film.

It is the story of a mother revealing in a series of letters to her daughter that she is not all that she seems to be - that she is not Sally Gilmartin, as widely supposed, but Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigré co-opted by the British secret services in the run-up to the Second World War. It is a tense drama, tightly plotted and tremendously exciting. "After Any Human Heart [his previous novel, a sprawling 500-page imagined Life], I wanted to do something 'well-carpentered' and the idea of having two women at its heart was an intriguing imaginative exercise," he says. During his research for Any Human Heart, Boyd had become interested in the "psychology of spying" and the motivations of Burgess, Philby, Blunt and Maclean in particular. He has various theories about what might have driven these men ("members of White's, for God's sake") to spy for the Soviet Union, but the heroine of Restless is a small cog in the machine that flourished before Pearl Harbour with the specific intent of luring the Americans to join the Second World War. This consisted of planting fake maps and spinning anti-German stories in foreign newspapers - dirty tricks and media manipulation.

As with many men his age (Boyd is 54), along with spies, he has become fascinated by post-war politics and the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain in particular. He speaks with real passion about Churchill's humiliation at the hands of Roosevelt and Stalin and gets quite carried away on the subject of American Anglophobia. But behind all the clinical stuff and the pleasure he takes in describing the spy's craft, there is something more fundamental about Restless that goes back to his earlier novels. "It is a spy novel, of course, but in a sense it is also about identity," says Boyd. "What it is to lose it, to hide it and to fake it, really.

In that sense, this is the third novel in a loose trilogy, along with The New Confessions and Nat Tate: American Artist 1928-1960 [a hoax biography of an invented artist], and I suppose it all goes back to not really being who you appear to be and how that might affect not only your life but also that of those around you." 'Restless' is published by Bloomsbury on Sept 4 at £17.99 and £11.99 (pbk) William Boyd’s ‘Solo’ is boldest departure of new James Bond series - The Washington Post William Boyd’s ‘Solo’ is boldest departure of new James Bond series The inside track on Washington politics. Be the first to know about new stories from PowerPost. Sign up to follow, and we’ll e-mail you free updates as they’re published. You’ll receive free e-mail news updates each time a new story is published. You’re all set!

Got it By Art Taylor By Art Taylor October 13, 2013 For the Ian Fleming centennial in 2008, the author’s estate kicked off a new project: a series of stand-alone James Bond novels, each penned by a notable novelist handpicked for the mission. Three writers — Sebastian Faulks , Jeffery Deaver and now William Boyd — have taken up the challenge, and just as they’re a mixed bunch (two Brits and an American), so too has this series proven a mixed bag. Faulks’s “ Devil May Care ” seemed a kind of period piece, picking up where Fleming’s original series left off and indulging in the trends of the Summer of ’67. Deaver chose to relocate Bond to the present day for his relentlessly paced “ Carte Blanche, ” which took 007 from London to Dubai to South Africa, with some hints of African genocide to push the plot forward. Now, for “ Solo ,” Boyd steps back to the late ’60s once more and centers his story on a civil war in the fictional West African country of Zanzarim.

This is a setting connected less to anything in “Carte Blanche” than to Boyd’s own background and bibliography: He was born in Ghana and has written several books with African themes, among them “ A Good Man in Africa ,” “ An Ice-Cream War ” and “ Brazzaville Beach .” As its title suggests, this new novel stands as a solo effort in many ways. To some degree, though, a Bond book is a Bond book. M, Q Branch, Miss Moneypenny, some fast cars, some fast women, a little globe-trotting, a little fate of the world in the balance — then shake, don’t stir. But as with the various shifts in the Bond franchise, small changes can make big differences. Boyd’s Bond reveals himself to be reflective, at times even rueful, moved to fresh depths of moral awareness by thoughts of his past and observations about conflict and cruelty as his mission unfolds. Just after his 45th birthday — an evening marked by troubled memories of World War II, musings on mortality and an encounter with an alluring woman who sparks something primal in him — Bond is assigned to travel to Zanzarim.

Two tribes there are engaged in a civil war over “a vast, apparently limitless, subterranean ocean of oil.” A post-colonial nation, Zanzarim remains of intense interest to the Brits, who have sided with the official government, while the rebels have proven steadfast under the leadership of Brigadier Solomon Adeka, “the African Napoleon.” Bond’s mission is to travel across the rebel border in the guise of a French journalist, meet Adeka and neutralize him. Joined by the service’s station chief in Zanzarim — young, beautiful, Cambridge- and Harvard-educated — Bond is introduced to casual mercenaries, a disillusioned foreign press corps and a spirit of “frontier recklessness.” He then travels south into what he thinks of as “the real Africa.” A moment on the roadside finds Bond musing about man’s frail place in the natural world; a glimpse at the fate of children in the war-torn region seems some “surreal vision of hell” and leaves him feeling so powerless he wants to weep; encounters with one of the opposition’s officers prove increasingly brutal, even more so after Bond has supposedly worked his way into the man’s uneasy trust.

Even after the mission seems to have been accomplished, fresh betrayals and brutalities reveal themselves. Disillusioned and angry, Bond strikes out on his own — solo — for London, then Washington and deceptively placid Northern Virginia, to discover the truth and get revenge. It’s no small thing that Bond reads Graham Greene’s “ The Heart of the Matter ” on his flight to Africa, and it’s perhaps no surprise that each time he meets his quarry, the general proves something less than promised and then terrible to behold. Horror upon horror reveals itself along the way, and ultimately Bond finds some darkness in his own heart — a burst of savagery, even sadism, that may startle even hard-core Bond fans. As much as Boyd is channeling Fleming here, “Solo” also includes faint echoes of Joseph Conrad, whose stories of adventure, intrigue and espionage are deeply infused with a sense of moral inquiry and consequence.

Each of the books in this new series has been distinctive and enjoyable in its own way, but “Solo” strikes me as perhaps the boldest departure — still demonstrably a Bond novel but also a Boyd one, with richer and deeper concerns coursing right alongside the Flemingesque flourishes that should keep fans satisfied, as well. A professor at George Mason University, Taylor frequently reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post. SOLO A life in writing: William Boyd | Books | The Guardian A life in ... A life in writing William Boyd: Imagination and intuition often bring you incredibly close to the reality, whether it's something middle class or the life of a prostitute on a sink estate Friday 11 September 2009 19.01 EDT First published on Friday 11 September 2009 19.01 EDT Share on Messenger Close When William Boyd decided that he wanted to be a writer, at the age of 19 or so, he had, he says, a fairly shadowy notion of what a writer's life might be like. The ambition descended on him in Nice, where he studied for a year between school and university and "started writing these little vignettes and mini-stories.

I started to fantasise, in the way you do at that age, about my future life, and I wanted to be a novelist. But I didn't know anybody who had anything remotely to do with the world of literature, didn't know any writers or publishers or agents. The fantasy of being, as Chekhov said, a free artist was coloured by novels I'd read or movies I'd seen. That was where I got my information from. So it was a sort of parodic version: get up from the typewriter, stretch, mix yourself a drink, step out on to your balcony and look at the sea. That was the life for me ..." Boyd tells this story with an emphasis on the hard work that lay ahead of him, as well his callowness then. By this stage of his career, though, it has to be said that his early daydreams seem almost laughably modest in comparison to the life he actually leads. Born to Scottish parents in Ghana in 1952, Boyd is a successful writer in the way that earlier generations - Somerset Maugham's, say, or Graham Greene's - popularly imagined such a figure.

A saleable and prize-winning novelist, with a large readership in France as well as the English-speaking world, he's also in demand as an art critic, journalist and screenwriter, in which capacity his credits include Chaplin (1992), numerous adaptations of his own and others' novels, and a war movie, The Trench (1999), which he also directed. He knows both Sean Connery and JMG Le Clézio, and divides his time between France and a large townhouse in Chelsea. His French house is sometimes described as a "château"; in reality, he says, it's a farmhouse with a couple of barns, though it does have a working vineyard. Ordinary Thunderstorms, the book he's currently promoting, is an innocent-man-on-the-run thriller set in London. It's his 10th novel, and while the reviews so far have been mixed ("two good, one mediocre, one crap"), he talks about it with unruffled professionalism. He got the germ of the idea for it, he says, from reading in an article that the river police haul 50 to 60 bodies out of the Thames each year.

"I thought, that old London is still there. Dickens wouldn't be surprised; he'd probably say, 'Is that all?' And I thought, there's a novel to be written with the river at its centre, a sort of - not wanting to sound pompous - neo-Dickensian, multilayered novel, looking at every level of society, from the aristocratic to the lowest of the low, and somehow using a journey down the river as a way of holding all that together." He gave several of the characters Elizabethan names, "partly to get at this idea of the old London buried beneath the one we know today". One of the book's more memorable inventions is a street prostitute known as Mhouse, who lives on a tough estate in Rotherhithe and feeds her son on mashed bananas, rum and diazepam. How did he research these passages? "Well, I've been all over London with my eyes open, and talked to a few people. But I've discovered that imagination and intuition often bring you incredibly close to the reality, whether it's something middle class or the daily life of a prostitute on a sink estate.

If you've looked closely, and read a certain amount, then your imagination is a more direct route to a truth than interviewing 20 working girls." Researching a novel calls for "a magpie instinct for facts that do a lot of work. There's a great bit in Ulysses where Bloom goes into a pub and orders a glass of claret and a gorgonzola sandwich. Suddenly pubs in Dublin at the beginning of the 20th century come alive for you in a way that the price of a pint of Guinness wouldn't deliver." Although it's plainly a novel of multiethnic London, the characters' ethnicities are only ever hinted at. "I thought," Boyd explains, "that it would be interesting to remove that from the novel's equation and let the reader supply it. I don't think I specify anyone's ethnicity at all. Of course, I have an idea about Mhouse's hybrid make-up, but some readers think she's black, some think she's eastern European. It's interesting to test the reader's prejudices, or shrewdness, or familiarity with the lower levels of London society. And it's a reflection of what I think London is like.

New York is a great melting pot, but London is king of the heap now. I don't think anywhere comes close to the multiracial, multicultural mix that we have here. You might, in the course of one stroll down the King's Road, encounter a dozen or 15 different nationalities without it really mattering. So removing that easy labelling of people seemed to me to make the novel closer to the way we experience the city." Does this also relate to the book's made-up slang ("mim" for crime victim, "monkey" for crack), and its suppression of topical detail in general? "Yes, I'm sort of against that in my more contemporary fiction. It goes back even to my first novel, A Good Man in Africa, which is set in the late 60s, but you can't really tell; there's only a passing reference to Vietnam. It was published 28 years ago and it's still selling, still in print. So it's partly an attempt not to contribute to the book's own ageing.

I quite like the fact that you could pick up Ordinary Thunderstorms in 10 years' time without reading about Gordon Brown, or who won the FA Cup, or what everyone's listening to on their iPods. Sometimes I invent a brand name or a type of shop just to get away from the demon of specificity, as I once called it ... I don't want that built-in obsolescence that you get from referring knowingly to, you know, the ninth series of Big Brother." Characteristically, too, he doesn't completely resolve his thriller plot. "Life isn't neat and tidy in that way ... There's a sense in all my novels that nothing is certain." He often brings his central characters up against figures with "a very definite view of the human condition" - either someone who might be right (he mentions the Scottish doctor in A Good Man in Africa), or someone "who has a completely skewed idea of what makes the world go round but is utterly confident in it. That can be vaguely enviable: if people believe devoutly in their God, then life on earth is completely comprehensible.

But for those of us who are devout atheists, it's a different matter altogether." Was he ever, so to speak, abused about these matters before he was disabused? "I don't think so. It's not as if I was lost and then found myself. It's just a process of growing up. Certain things happened early on my life that wised me up - made me see what was fundamentally important and what you could shrug off." Boyd is referring principally to the death of his father, Alexander, which took place when the writer was in his early 20s. "When you experience bereavement at a youngish age," he says, "you suddenly realise that life is unjust and unfair, that bad things will happen, and you have to take that on board." Alexander disapproved of his son's choice of career, and when he died "there was no sense in which I was proving him wrong". Worse, "my wife's mother died at almost the same time of a horrible, lingering cancer. It was a bad year, we lost as it were half our family in a month, and that's the sort of thing that shakes you up.

People experience these tragedies all the time, there's nothing special about it, you're not a Job figure. But in the context of an individual life these events take on a certain significance." People's attitudes to life's uncertainties are also, he thinks, a matter of temperament. As the way he discusses his bad year indicates, his own isn't self-pitying. It's easy to imagine his early life - a colonial upbringing with decolonisation in full swing, followed by boarding schools in Scotland - producing a somewhat alienated figure, but Boyd doesn't present himself as a sensitive intellectual bruised by his post-imperial personal history. His parents, who came from Fife's professional middle classes, moved to west Africa in the postwar years in part because his father had served there in the war, specialising in tropical medicine, and in part because "life was good there for a young married couple - big house, big job, servants, golf courses. And sunny." Both Ghana and Nigeria, where the family moved later, were, he says, "totally integrated societies. There was no settler class and no racial tension. It wasn't like Kenya and certainly not South Africa.

But it was a privileged colonial upbringing." He was sent to prep school in Scotland, and then to Gordonstoun, the Scottish public school with a Spartan reputation - "three-month stretches," as he puts it, "in the curious society that is the single-sex boarding school." Did he feel like an outsider? "I had a slight feeling of that, but I always had a successful career at my school in the sense that I was 'good at games' and got all my A-levels, so I didn't feel alien in any way. People would say, 'Where's your home?' And I'd say, 'Ibadan' - not somewhere in Scotland; sometimes I'd unreflectingly call myself a west African. In Africa I was obviously part of the colonial elite, white in a black African country, and I didn't feel particularly at home in the UK either. This may be all to the good for the embryonic novelist, looking on all the time.

But there was no angst involved, I wasn't fretful about it, and it's more the wisdom of hindsight when I look back and think: yes, it was strange." His late adolescence coincided with the Biafran war in Nigeria, later the subject of an unpublished Boyd novel. (It was called Against the Day and strongly influenced by Graham Greene.) The family home was "far from the fighting, but it was everywhere manifest. You'd switch on the television and see the most horrendous images of federal troops going into Biafran villages with machetes." Politically, he was "unthinkingly pro-federal, anti-Biafra. And everything I've read about it since makes me think that it was an act of madness on the Biafran side to try [to] secede." At the same time, "it was appalling. There were hundreds of thousands of children dying of starvation, and a very powerful army slowly crushing the lifeblood out of this small secessionist state, all done with massive, absurd, surreal inefficiency." One night, the Boyds got stopped at a roadblock. "There were shouts, torches, levelled guns, and these guys were very drunk, they'd been drinking all day.

Maybe, again, it's hindsight, but I suddenly saw that precariousness, the thin ice we're all walking on." He wasn't a precocious reader at that stage in his life. At Gordonstoun he wanted to be a painter, but knew his father would see art school as beyond the pale. English literature, however, was just about acceptable, and by the time he left Glasgow University, the writerly ambitions he'd conceived in Nice were "very firmly set". Seeing academia as a way to pay the rent (his father could also "see that it was vaguely a career, with a pension"), he ended up in Oxford, "teaching English as a foreign language, trying to write a thesis, teaching at St Hilda's and writing a TV column for the New Statesman - I don't know how I managed to keep all those balls in the air". His models were "people like Greene, Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway. Kingsley Amis was another presence in my reading in those days. I was never drawn to magic realism or fantasy or surrealism or postmodern experimentation.

I read a lot of Beryl Bainbridge, but the realist novel was what really appealed to me." Boyd's first three published books - two novels and a story collection - came out within 18 months in 1981-82, landing him the Whitbread first novel award and a shortlisting for the Booker. In 1983 he appeared in Granta's first "Best of Young British Novelists" list; he vaguely knew some of the other figures on it, having inherited Julian Barnes's slot at the New Statesman, "but I couldn't claim that we were chums; we didn't hang out together". There have been many prizes since then, and his prowess as a storyteller is much admired, though he's seen in some quarters as an ultra-distinguished, talented and honourable upper-middlebrow writer. He is gracious, however, when it comes to the question of condescending notices, saying that "posterity is not our business" and being stoical about reviews. "Usually I get two or three nice ones, a great middling mass, and two or three stinkers.

Nobody likes being slagged off, but - again, it's a temperamental thing - I don't, like some writers I know, go into two-week sulks or rant and rage and brood and bring it up three years later." "I can hardly get all precious about it," he adds, "because I'm in the business myself. Some of the reviews I wrote in my 20s are savage, so I can't complain if I get a kicking from time to time." (He particularly regrets being "a bit sneeringly dismissive" about Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark, which he now considers "a fantastic novel".) All the same, he makes it clear that there are other yardsticks than ephemeral critical esteem. For example, Any Human Heart (2002) "didn't get particularly good reviews, yet I've never had so many letters about a novel.

It's selling fantastically well seven years on, and we're about to turn it into six hours of telly for Channel 4, so something about that novel gets to readers." All his novels are also in print, "and they're in print in America, in France and Spain and Germany, so - how do you keep that show on the road? If there's anything that's going to keep me awake at night, it's that." Looking back, he marvels at the "enormous reserves of energy" that he had when starting out. "Now I can write for about three hours before the brain begins to say 'Stop, stop!'" Even so, he has numerous projects underway, and has even written himself another script to direct: "a low-budget thriller called Stone Free, another ensemble piece, a few girls in it this time . . . The problem is finding that nine-month gap when nothing else is going on. I might be free at the beginning of 2011, but the actors, the money or the stage might not. It was fun to make The Trench - we had all these young actors who are now incredibly famous, and the ensemble was good.

There were no movie stars; there were plenty of egos around but they weren't inflated egos ... Who knows, one of these days it may all come together. But it is a lingering ambition." "The heat, that summer of '26 in Berlin, was immense. It slammed down out of a hazy sky the colour of Aram's suit, heavy as glass. One was glad of the city's wide streets then. At least in the broad avenues and boulevards the air could stir. It must have been some kind of public holiday that afternoon as I motored back with Aram, because the pavements seemed strangely deserted and the big shops in Leipziger Strasse were closed and dark. I remember hearing the sounds of half a dozen bands as we drove through the Tiergarten. I never learned what was going on." I can't really explain why this paragraph from my novel The New Confessions (1987) haunts me - in fact, I could probably choose something similar from all 10 novels I have written. But The New Confessions was my fourth novel and the first in which I had tried out the first person singular.

I think I relish it both because I feel the confidence implicit in the voice I was inhabiting and also because I sense in these few lines that my imagination is working at full capacity. I feel I am in Berlin in 1926 (and I know I have the details exactly right) and somehow I have managed to capture the subjective, contingent, imperfect view of life (John James Todd doesn't know why the bands are playing) that is the one we all have to live with. Boyd on Boyd "The heat, that summer of '26 in Berlin, was immense. It slammed down out of a hazy sky the colour of Aram's suit, heavy as glass. One was glad of the city's wide streets then. At least in the broad avenues and boulevards the air could stir. It must have been some kind of public holiday that afternoon as I motored back with Aram, because the pavements seemed strangely deserted and the big shops in Leipziger Strasse were closed and dark. I remember hearing the sounds of half a dozen bands as we drove through the Tiergarten.

I never learned what was going on." From The New Confessions, (published by Penguin) I can't really explain why this paragraph from my novel The New Confessions (1987) haunts me – in fact, I could probably choose something similar from all 10 novels I have written. But The New Confessions was my fourth novel and the first in which I had tried out the first person singular. I think I relish it both because I feel the confidence implicit in the voice I was inhabiting and also because I sense in these few lines that my imagination is working at full capacity. I feel I am in Berlin in 1926 (and I know I have the details exactly right) and somehow I have managed to capture the subjective, contingent, imperfect view of life (John James Todd doesn't know why the bands are playing) that is the one we all have to live with. A Good Man in Africa: Amazon.it: William Boyd: Libri in altre lingue Libri in altre lingue Passa al retro Passa al fronte Ascolta Riproduzione in corso... In pausa Stai ascoltando un campione dell'edizione audio udibile.

A Good Man in Africa (Inglese) Copertina flessibile – 25 mar 1982 di Copertina flessibile, 25 mar 1982 — Chi ha acquistato questo articolo ha acquistato anche Pagina 1 di 1 Pagina iniziale Pagina 1 di 1 Questa funzione di acquisto consentirÃ di continuare a caricare gli articoli. Per accedere agli articoli non presenti su questo nastro trasportatore, utilizza il tasto di scelta rapida relativo alle intestazioni per accedere all'intestazione precedente o successiva. Descrizione prodotto Recensione "This is a wildly funny novel, rich in witty prose and raucous incidents . . . without qualification, a delight." -The Washington Post "Entertaining and successful . . . a champion storyteller. His prose style is intelligent, vigorous and pleasant." -The New York Times Book Review "Comic realism echoing Evelyn Waugh . . . nimbly plotted, gracefully written . . . Boyd had endowed British fiction with a welcome depth and liveliness." -New York Newsday "A gutsy writer . .

. William Boyd is good company to keep." -Time L'autore William Boyd was born in Ghana in 1952. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is the author of a number of acclaimed and hugely popular novels and three volumes of short stories, and the recipient of many prizes, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. He is married and lives in London Non Ã¨ necessario possedere un dispositivo Kindle. Scarica una delle app Kindle gratuite per iniziare a leggere i libri Kindle sul tuo smartphone, tablet e computer. Apple Per scaricare una app gratuita, inserisci il numero di cellulare. oppure Non hai un Kindle? Scopri Kindle , oppure scarica l'applicazione di lettura Kindle GRATUITA.

Dettagli prodotto Editore: Penguin; 1st Penguin Edition edizione (25 marzo 1982) Lingua: Inglese n.541970 in Libri in altre lingue > Per lingua > Inglese Garanzia e recesso: Se vuoi restituire un prodotto entro 30 giorni dal ricevimento perchÃ© hai cambiato idea, consulta la nostra pagina d'aiuto sul Diritto di Recesso . Se hai ricevuto un prodotto difettoso o danneggiato consulta la nostra pagina d'aiuto sulla Garanzia Legale . Per informazioni specifiche sugli acquisti effettuati su Marketplace consulta… Maggiori informazioni la nostra pagina d'aiuto su Resi e rimborsi per articoli Marketplace . Desideri aggiornare le informazioni del prodotto o lasciare dei feedback sulle immagini ?

Consegne illimitate in 1 giorno Iscriviti ad Amazon Prime: consegne in 1 giorno senza costi aggiuntivi, accesso anticipato alle Offerte Lampo di Amazon.it e agli eventi di Amazon BuyVIP e spazio di archiviazione per le foto illimitato Non ci sono ancora recensioni di clienti su Amazon.it 5 stelle 5.0 su 5 stelle Brillliant Mr. Boyd 31 maggio 2014 Di Annie - Pubblicato su Amazon.com Formato: Copertina flessibile Acquisto verificato Such a wonderful portrayal of the British colonists in West Africa. I think this book should be listed as a classic and be on the recommended lists for schools. This is the second book I have read by Boyd and I have to say I think he is quite brilliant. His characters are so vivid they bounce off the pages. The mark of a great writer ,in my humble opinion, is to be able to tell a story of relatively ordinary day to day happenings and turn it into a "can't wait to get back to it" event.

This book will not appeal to those who like paced action as indicated by some of the reviews, but if you enjoy (and understand) subtle British humour, wonderful characters and top class writing I urge you to buy this delightful book. It is very funny in parts and I DID laugh out loud many times. Goodness.....poor old Morgan Leafy; he can't take a trick 'as the saying goes.'A very amusing book that I WILL recommend to anyone who enjoys fine literature. 1 di 1 persone hanno trovato utile la seguente recensione 5.0 su 5 stelle A Good Book About a Good (But Flawed) Man in Africa 28 marzo 2014 Di pencilpoints - Pubblicato su Amazon.com Formato: Formato Kindle Acquisto verificato I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in West Africa at the same time this novel was published, and this novel captures the feel, language (Pidgin English) and that always odd interface between the hosts country and the expatriate community. That Boyd achieves this while making me laugh out loud in an empty room was all the more enjoyable. Poor Morgan Leafy!

He has a lot on his plate, and none of it palatable! The book opens with Leafy mired in problems and then, in the second part, retraces how that came to be. The book flows well and I found several of the scenes, such as Santa in the bath tub, wonderfully humorous. I've only read one other Boyd novel, but plan to read as many of his works as I can in the coming year. 1 di 1 persone hanno trovato utile la seguente recensione 4.0 su 5 stelle i enjoyed the book very much and ordered an other one ... 6 dicembre 2014 Di george goanna - Pubblicato su Amazon.com Formato: Formato Kindle Acquisto verificato having lived in colonial time as well as post colonial time in africa i appreciate the truthfull social aspect of the novel. the humoristic way of the teller made me smile many times.

i enjoyed the book very much and ordered an other one from boyd 5.0 su 5 stelle (THIS FINE BOOK), TO ARRIVE ON 16 novembre 2014 Di EE - Pubblicato su Amazon.com Formato: Copertina rigida Acquisto verificato MY total APPRECiATION FOR 1. READING MY REQUEST TO RUSH THIS BOOK FOR MY SON'S BIRTHDAY, AND. 2. SENDING IT, (THIS FINE BOOK), TO ARRIVE ON!!!! HIS BIRTHDAY WAS A REAL COUP AND DESERVE UTTER, TOTAL, AND STILL MORE THANKS FROM ME. GRATEFULLY WITH BEST REGARDS FROM Eleanor Earle (eearle1055@gmail.com)

Question: In which modern-day African country was the author William Boyd born?
Answer: GHANA