Vintage International Series

One winter morning Lorimer Black goes to keep a business appointment and finds a hanged man. This is just the start of what turns out to be a horrendous period for Lorimer as he realizes that he's being set up at work and cast adrift outside the office. This is a very funny novel with its dark side that shows a good man being boxed in and unable to see how to help himself.

The New Confessions

by William Boyd

Published 1 May 1988

The New Confessions is the outrageous, extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreaking autobiography of John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of the twentieth century.

`An often magnificent feat of story-telling and panoramic reconstruction ... John James Todd's reminiscences carry us through the ups and downs of a long and lively career that begins in genteel Edinburgh, devastatingly detours out to the Western Front, forks off, after a period of cosy family life in London, to the electric excitements of the Berlin film-world of the Twenties, then moves on to Hollywood ... to ordeal by McCarthyism and eventual escape to Europe' Peter Kemp, Observer.

A Good Man in Africa

by William Boyd

Published 29 January 1981

WINNER OF THE WHITBREAD FIRST NOVEL AWARD
WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD

'Uproariously funny' Observer
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Overweight, oversexed and over there . . .

Morgan Leafy is hardly the most respectable of Her Majesty's representatives in the West African state of Kinjanja. For starters, he probably shouldn't have involved himself in wholesale bribery. Nor was it a good career move to go chasing after his boss's daughter; especially when his doctor banned him from horizontal pursuits.

But life is about to change for young Morgan Leafy. Every betrayal and humiliation he has suffered at the hands of petty persecutors is suddenly put into perspective. For Morgan has a dead body on his hands - and somehow, some way he's going to have to get rid of it . . .

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'If a widening grin is the test of a novel's entertainment value . . . A Good Man in Africa romps home' Guardian

'Wickedly funny' The Times

'A delight' Washington Post

Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

Published 25 April 2002

"Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary". So says Logan Mountstuart, the hero of William Boyd's eighth novel. ANY HUMAN HEART tells the story of Mountstuart's long and rackety life, one which spans the twentieth century, in all its fantastic and humdrum, dangerous and tranquil, tragic and humourous aspects. ANY HUMAN HEART is an ambitious, all-encompassing novel. Through the intimate journals of Logan Mounstuart we travel from Uruguay to Oxford, on to Paris, the Bahamas, New York andWest Africa, and meet his three wives, his family, his friends and colleagues, his rivals, enemies and lovers, including notables such as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

Published 14 January 1997

"A perfect-pitch story of love and redemption" (The New York Times), Boyd's atmospheric new novel confirms his reputation as heir to the grand narrative traditions of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. In 1936 Los angeles, as her long-estranged father tells architect Kay Fischer the story behind her secret parentage, he plunges readers into a tale of grisly murders and an illicit passion that still obsseses him 30 years later.

An Ice-Cream War

by William Boyd

Published 13 September 1982

Set in the years 1914 to 1918, An Ice Cream War follows the fortunes of two English brothers who enlist and fight in German East Africa. Contrasting the vibrant chaos of East Africa with the quiet gentility of Edwardian England, the novel tracks the brothers' very different but equally tragic experiences in the war and the pressures and sorrows of those they leave at home.

Love Is Blind

by William Boyd

Published 20 September 2018

"From the Whitbread Award winning author of: A Good Man in Africa and the Costa Award winning Restless, a sweeping, electrifying new novel set at the end of the 19th century that follows the fortunes of a young Scottish musician embarking across Europe and into the tumultuous, impassioned story of his life. When Brodie Moncur is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist abruptly alters his path--and irrevocably changes his future as it ignites an obsessive love affair with the beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. From Paris to St. Petersburg and back to Edinburgh, Brodie cannot free himself of his love for Lika--nor of its increasingly dangerous consequences. A tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavor and the illusions it can create; of the possibilities that life offers and the cruel speed with which they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and a vivid tapestry of the change and turbulence at the dawn of a new century, Love is Blind is a masterly novel from one of the most widely admired and acclaimed fiction writers at work today."--

Fascination

by William Boyd

Published 7 October 2004

Fascination is master storyteller William Boyd's third volume of short stories

Described as "the finest storyteller of his generation", and following his acclaimed collections On the Yankee Station and The Destiny of Nathalie X, in Fascination Boyd shows his brilliance of the form as these stories range widely through time and space. In a dazzling array of styles and narratives we move from 1930s Germany to Los Angeles in the Second World War, from contemporary Oxford to 19th century Russia. Whether in London or Amsterdam. Eastbourne or a Normandy village these stories explore and expose the fraught, funny, absurd, poignant and lovelorn lives of their many and varied characters.

Fascination will be loved by fans of Any Human Heart, as well as readers of William Trevor, Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Hilary Mantel.

'The stories here are perfect . . . suffused with an understanding of love, desire and emotional incompetence' Guardian

'Perfectly formed snapshots of life at its most mystifying' Daily Mail

'Consistently entertaining' Literary Review

'Boyd achieves his best writing, observing tiny moments of love, lust and epiphany with extraordinary sensitivity' Spectator

On the Yankee Station

by William Boyd

Published 1 July 1984

Adolescent sex in a Scottish boys' public school ... Oddballs on the seedy side of America ... Murder in a quiet Devon cottage ... Comical, ironical or lacerating - wit is the keynote of these stories, which include two early adventures from the career of Morgan Leafy, glorious anti-hero of William Boyd's prize-winning novel `A Good Man in Africa’.

`His writing, with nods in the direction of Borges and Nabokov, combines violence, comedy and experiment … an impressively varied collection’ Time Out.

Stars and Bars

by William Boyd

Published 17 September 1984

All Henderson Dores dreams of is fitting in. But America, land of the loony millionaire and the subway poet, down-home Bible-basher and sharp-suited hood, of paralysing personal frankness and surreally fantasized facilities, is hard enough for an Englishman to fit in to. Henderson could never shed enough inhibitions to become just another weirdo. Or could he?

This hilarious fish-out-of-water comedy, which Boyd also adapted for screen for the 1980s film starring Daniel Day Lewis, was described in the Guardian as, `Splittingly shrewd and engaging … with an extra and uneasy little something fretting away at the ribald content’.