Лучшие книги Уильяма Бойда

Уильям Бойд (р. 1952) - один из виднейших английских писателей. Его роман "Нутро любого человека" (Any Human Heart), в 2002 году номинированный на премию Букера, построен в форме личного дневника писателя Логана Маунтстюарта (фигура вымышленная). События длинной (1906-1991) жизни героя вплетаются в ткань истории: в романе фигурируют Вирджиния Вулф, Ивлин Во, Пикассо, Хемингуэй. Герой шапочно знаком практически со всеми значительными художниками XX века: раскланивается на улицах и беседует на вечеринках. Но это не исторический роман; знаковые фигуры - лишь фон или даже средство показать жизнь типичного европейского интеллектуала изнутри.

Руфь Гилмартин, молоденькая аспирантка Оксфордского университета, внезапно узнает, что ее мать, которую окружающие считают благообразной безобидной старушкой, совсем не та, за кого себя выдает... Один из лучших романов Уильяма Бойда, живого классика английской литературы.

Уильям Бойд - один из наиболее популярных и обласканных критикой современных британских авторов. Премии Уитбреда и Риса, номинация на "Букер", высшая премия "Лос-Анджелес таймс" в области литературы - таков неполный перечень заслуг этого самобытного автора. Роман "Броненосец" (Armadillo, 1998) причислен критиками к бриллиантам английской словесности, а сам Бойд назван живым классиком современной литературы.

"Браззавиль-Бич" - роман-притча, который только стилизуется под реальность. Сложные и оказывающиеся условными декорации, равно как и авантюрный сюжет, помогают раскрыть удивительно достоверные характеры героев.

Авторы исследуют основные принципы классификации человечества на расы и народы. Что объединяет и что разобщает жителей земли? Почему у голубоглазых родителей может родиться кареглазый ребенок? Всегда ли мутации приносят организму вред? Книга дает

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author…

It is 1939. Eva Delectorskaya is a beautiful 28-year-old Russian emigree living in Paris. As war breaks out she is recruited for the British Secret Service by Lucas Romer, a mysterious Englishman, and under his tutelage she learns to become the perfect spy, to mask her emotions and trust no one, including those she loves most. Since the war, Eva has carefully rebuilt her life as a typically English wife and mother. But once a spy, always a spy. Now she must complete one final assignment, and this time Eva can't do it alone: she needs her daughter's help.

An Ice-Cream War is William Boyd's sparkling debut novel on the grimly comic side of conflict, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'What do you think would happen if I shot an elephant in the balls?' 'I think it would hurt a great deal.' Millions die on the Western Front but in East Africa a quite different war is being waged - one with little point and which is so ignored that it will carry on after the Armistice because no one bothers to tell both sides to stop. As the conflict sweeps up natives and colonials, so those left at home and those fighting abroad find themselves unable to escape the tide of history bearing down…

Ein Klick, die Blende schließt – der Startschuss zu einem neuen Leben. Mit sieben hält Amory Clay ihre erste Kamera in Händen, eine Kodak Brownie Nummer 2, und mit ihr sind alle Weichen gestellt. Amory Clay, Fotografin, Reisende, Kriegsberichterstatterin. Statt als Gesellschaftsfotografin in London zu reüssieren, lässt Amory alles Vertraute hinter sich und beginnt 1931 ein Leben voller Unwägbarkeiten in Berlin. Ein Berlin der Nachtclubs, des Jazz, der Extravaganz und Freizügigkeit – und der ersten Anzeichen von Bedrohung und Willkür. Amory Clay, eine Frau, die ihrer Zeit weit voraus ist, die unerschrocken ihren Weg geht, ihre Lieben lebt, ihre Geschicke selbst in die Hand nimmt. Tief fühlt sich William Boyd in sie ein und versteht es glänzend, Fiktion und Geschichte miteinander zu verschränken: das ausschweifende Berlin der frühen dreißiger Jahre, New York, wo sie den Mann trifft, der alles verändert, Paris im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Nach »Ruhelos« hat Boyd erneut eine unvergessliche Heldin geschaffen, eine verwegene, verblüffend moderne Frau, einen Künstlerroman, der das Porträt einer ganzen Epoche zeichnet.

One May evening in London, as a result of a chance encounter and a split-second decision, a young climatologist called Adam Kindred loses everything - home, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, mobile phone - never to get them back.
Adam has no choice. The police and a ruthless hit man are after him. So he goes underground, joining the ranks of the disappeared that throng London's lowest levels as he struggles to understand how his life has unravelled so spectacularly. His journey of discovery will take him along the River Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End. On the way he will encounter aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists and a policewoman - and version after new version of himself.
William Boyd's electric follow-up to Costa Novel of the Year Restless is a heart-in-mouth conspiracy novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuarts - lived from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in 60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness.
Here, then, is the story of a life lived to the full - and a journey deep into a very human heart.

Winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award A turn-of-the-century love story, set in Manila, between an American woman and Filipino-Spanish mestizo by the popular storyteller William Boyd. It's a memorable tale, richly detailed. 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.

Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.
Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives: joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set across the nineteenth century.

'An elating read' Sunday Times

A producer. A novelist. An actress.

It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There are riots in Paris and the Vietnam War is out of control. While the world is reeling our three characters are involved in making a Swingin' Sixties movie in sunny Brighton.

All are leading secret lives. Elfrida is drowning her writer's block in vodka; Talbot, coping with the daily dysfunc

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, Brodie's love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man's life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers.
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A philandering art dealer tries to give up casual love affairs - seeking only passionate kisses as a substitute. A man recounts his personal history through the things he has stolen from others throughout his life. A couple chart the journey of their five year relationship backwards, from awkward reunion to lovelorn first encounter. And, at the heart of the book, a 24-year old young woman, Bethany Mellmoth, embarks on a year-long journey of wishful and tentative self-discovery.
The

When the paper industry moved into the South in the 1930s, it confronted a region in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. Entrenched poverty, stunted labor markets, vast stretches of cutover lands, and severe soil erosion prevailed across the southern states. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, pine trees had become the region's number one cash crop, and the South dominated national and international production of pulp and paper based on the intensive cultivation of timber.

In "The Slain Wood," William Boyd chronicles the dramatic growth of the pulp and paper industry in the American South during the twentieth century and the social and environmental changes that accompanied it. Drawing on extensive interviews and historical research, he tells the fascinating story of one of the region's most important but understudied industries.

"The Slain Wood "reveals how a thoroughly industrialized forest was created out of a degraded landscape, uncovers the ways in which firms tapped into informal labor markets and existing inequalities of race and class to fashion a system for delivering wood to the mills, investigates the challenges of managing large papermaking complexes, and details the ways in which mill managers and unions discriminated against black workers. It also shows how the industry's massive pollution loads significantly disrupted local environments and communities, leading to a long struggle to regulate and control that pollution.

Funny, moving & sharply observed, these stories are confirmation of Boyd's status as one of English fiction's finest writers. Here are 24 gripping tales told in bold, distinct voices from Brazil to Africa and from Nice to Hollywood.