Awards
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction
Synopses & Reviews
"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. 384 pp. Author tour.
Review
"Boyd organizes his teeming material with enviable clarity. He creates a place or a state of mind in a sentence. What might seem the merely conventional passion of Carriscant and Delphine is made urgent as much through comedy asdesperation....The Blue Afternoon beguilingly balances the elements of love story, murder mystery, political thriller and historical romance. The contest between progress and barbarism, between muffled Realpolitik and allegedly private concerns, is set up in such a way (this is Kay's narrative role) as to return the reader from the general to the particular, to the peremptory intrusion of mere happenstance and grim conspiracy of which the book is made." Sean O'Brien, The Times Literary Supplement
About the Author
William Boyds first novel, A Good Man in Africa, won a Whitbread Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award; his second, An Ice-Cream War, was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and The Blue Afternoon won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction. Boyd lives in London.