Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay

by William Boyd

THE TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

Amory Clay’s first memory is of her father doing a handstand – but it is his absences that she chiefly remembers. Her Uncle Greville, a photographer, gives her both the affection she needs and a camera, which unleashes a passion that irrevocably shapes her future. She begins an apprenticeship with him in London, photographing socialites for magazines. But Amory is hungry for more and her search for life, love and artistic expression will take her to the demi-monde of 1920s Berlin, New York in the 1930s, the Blackshirt riots in London, and France during the Second World War, where she becomes one of the first women war photographers.

In this enthralling story of a life fully lived, William Boyd has created a sweeping panorama of the twentieth century, told through the camera lens of one unforgettable woman.

• ISBN10: 1408867990
• ISBN13: 9781408867990
• Publish Date: 5 May 2016 (first published 27 August 2015)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 464
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

William Boyd is another author that is often recommended to me but that I can't warm to. Not that I dislike his books. On the contrary, I'm often intrigued by his themes and by his writing. I just don't seem to be able to derive any satisfaction out of reading them.

Sweet Caress is a prime example of this dilemma:
The story follows the life of Amory Clay, a woman who in her youth defies the advice of her parents and sets out to become a photographer. Soon thrown into the throng of the roaring twenties and early thirties, she lives a life that is similar to some of the real life individuals that I love to read about.

And that is just it - I love reading biographies and stories involving the real personalities, and I just can't get my head around why I would want to read a fictional account that involves characters that are somehow based on but are not - not even fictional versions of - the actual individuals of the time.

Why include fictional characters that resemble Anita Berber and Marianne Breslauer, when they could actually be included as characters? I mean, I get that disguising real people as fictional characters is useful, even necessary, to offend contemporaries of the author, but this is hardly the case here.
After that I lost interest and skim read to the end.

This is just another case where I'd prefer a non-fiction book about the era to a literary attempt at historical fiction.