8 Books by William Boyd
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Overview: William Boyd, CBE is a British novelist and screenwriter resident in London. Although his novels have been short-listed for major prizes, he has never had the same publicity as his contemporaries. Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. Any Human Heart, written in the form of the journals of a fictitious twentieth century British writer, was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. On 11 April 2012 it was announced that Boyd would write the next James Bond novel.
Genre: General Fiction/Classics
A Good Man in Africa (1981)
In the small African republic of Kinjanja, British diplomat Morgan Leafy bumbles heavily through his job. His love of women, his fondness for drink, and his loathing for the country prove formidable obstacles on his road to any kind of success. But when he becomes an operative in Operation Kingpin and is charged with monitoring the front runner in Kinjanja’s national elections, Morgan senses an opportunity to achieve real professional recognition and, more importantly, reassignment.
After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan.
On the Yankee Station and Other Stories (1981)
Wiliam Boyd, winner of the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards, introduces unlikely heroes desperate to redeem their unsatisfying lives.
From California poolsides to the battlegrounds of Vietnam, here is a world populated by weary souls who turn to fantasy as their sole escape from life’s inequities. Stranded in an African hotel during a coup, an oafish Englishman impresses a young stewardess with stories of an enchanted life completely at odds with his sordid existence in "The Coup." In the title story, an arrogant, sadistic American pilot in Vietnam underestimaets the power of revenge when he relentlessly persecutes a member of his maintenance crew. With droll humor and rare compassion, Boyd’s enthralling stories remind us of his stature as one of contemporary fiction’s finest storytellers.
An Ice-Cream War: A Novel (1982)
1914. In a hotel room in German East Africa, American farmer Walter Smith dreams of Theodore Roosevelt. As he sleeps, a railway passenger swats at flies, regretting her decision to return to the Dark Continent–and to her husband. On a faraway English riverbank, a jealous Felix Cobb watches his brother swim, and curses his sister-in-law-to-be. And in the background of the world’s daily chatter: rumors of an Anglo-German conflict, the likes of which no one has ever seen.
In An Ice-Cream War, William Boyd brilliantly evokes the private dramas of a generation upswept by the winds of war. After his German neighbor burns his crops–with an apology and a smile–Walter Smith takes up arms on behalf of Great Britain. And when Felix’s brother marches off to defend British East Africa, he pursues, against his better judgment, a forbidden love affair. As the sons of the world match wits and weapons on a continent thousands of miles from home, desperation makes bedfellows of enemies and traitors of friends and family. By turns comic and quietly wise, An Ice-Cream War deftly renders lives capsized by violence, chance, and the irrepressible human capacity for love.
Stars and Bars (1984)
Sharply observed and brilliantly plotted, Stars and Bars is an uproarious portrait of culture clash deep in the heart of the American South, by one of contemporary literature’s most imaginative novelists.
A recent transfer to Manhattan has inspired art assessor Henderson Dores to shed his British reserve and aspire to the impulsive and breezy nature of Americans. But when Loomis Gage, an eccentric millionaire, invites him to appraise his small collection of Impressionist paintings, Dores’s plans quite literally go south. Stranded at a remote mansion in the Georgia countryside, Dores is received by the bizarre Gage family with Anglophobic slurs, nausea-inducing food, ludicrous death threats, and a menacing face off with competing art dealers. By the time he manages to sneak back to New York City–sporting only a cardboard box–Henderson Dores realizes he is fast on the way to becoming a naturalized citizen.
The Blue Afternoon (1993)
Los Angeles, 1936. Kay Fischer, a young, ambitious architect, is shadowed by Salvador Carriscant, an enigmatic stranger claiming to be her father. Within weeks of their first meeting, Kay will join him for an extraordinary journey into the old man’s past, initially in search of a murderer, but finally in celebration of a glorious, undying love. The winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award.
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960 (1998)
This book presents the paintings and tragic biography of a supposed New York-based 1950s abstract expressionist painter named Nat Tate, who actually never existed and was, along with his paintings, a creation of Boyd’s. When the book was initially published, it was not revealed that it was a work of fiction, and some were duped by the hoax; it was launched at a lavish party, with excerpts read by David Bowie (who was in on the joke), and a number of prominent members of the art world claimed to remember the artist. It caused quite a stir once the truth was revealed.
The name "Nat Tate" is derived from the names of the two leading British art galleries: the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery.
Nat Tate also appears in Any Human Heart (below), with a wry footnote to the 1998 book.
Any Human Heart (2002)
William Boyd’s masterful novel is written as a lifelong series of journals kept by Mountstuart, a writer whose life (1906–1991) spanned the defining episodes of the twentieth century, crossed several continents and included a convoluted sequence of relationships and literary endeavours. Boyd uses the diary form to explore 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.
Fascination: Stories (2004)
One of the most beguiling storytellers on either side of the Atlantic delivers a luminous new collection whose 14 stories are a series of variations on the theme of love–and its shady cousin lust. A film director’s journal becomes an unintended chronicle of his deepening and ruinous obsession with a leading lady (“Notebook No. 9”). While flying business class, a well-behaved English architect feels the chill onset of an otherworldly visitation that will shatter his family and career (“A Haunting”). An unhappy young boy, neglected by both his father and adulterous mother, finds an unexpected friend in an elderly painter (“Varengeville”). Wise, unsettling, humane, and endlessly surprising, Fascination lives up to its title on every page, while confirming William Boyd’s stature as a writer of incandescent talent.
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