Trio

Description

From one of Britain's best-loved writers, the story of three people living secret lives in the tumultuous summer of 1968 A producer. A novelist. An actress. It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. While the world is reeling our trio is involved in making a rackety Swingin' Sixties British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. As the film is shot, with its usual drastic ups and downs, so does our trio's private, secret world begin to take over their public one. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will. From one of Britain's bestselling writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel that asks the vital questions- what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't?

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels, including Any Human Heart and Trio, and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France.

A middle-aged film producer, a novelist with writer's block and a glamorous young actress come together to make a Swinging Sixties movie in this jaunty page-turner. But everyone is living a double life. Even names can't be taken on trust. Full of neat phrases and quirkily funny scenes, it's an elating read * The Times, Best Paperbacks of 2021 * What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel? Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy * Sunday Telegraph * An absorbing novel about lives spiralling out of control and the drastic measures required to right them * Economist * The characters are wonderfully written and I loved escaping to the gossipy world of the film set * Good Housekeeping, Book of the Month * Boyd keeps the plot racing along, yet for all the twists, the real delight is in William Boyd's wry portrait of a bygone age . . . Boyd's usual sure touch is evident throughout this tender, gently comic work * Independent * One of our best contemporary storytellers. . . Trio embraces comedy, tragedy and redemption. It succeeds impressively because of its dramatic, often sensational, revelations * Spectator * I am a huge fan of William Boyd and the tender way he writes about the flaws and frailties of his characters. Trio is his best novel in years * Red, The Best Books to Read this October * Reading William Boyd's Trio is like shrugging on a worn leather jacket on the first brisk morning of autumn: cosy but cool . . . He has enormous fun with the worlds - and egos - of page and screen * The Times * Enormous fun . . . Boyd's characters are vibrant, his prose elegant, comedy excellent: the result is a book that's compassionate and compelling * Tatler * Boyd's writing is as fluent as ever but it's the ideas pulsing beneath the surface that distinguish Trio * Financial Times * Trio is an intricate set of variations on the idea of alternative selves, well beyond the title's trio, unobtrusively elegant in its formal beauty * New Statesman, Books of the Year * Sending an affably satiric shimmer over the ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings and behind-the-scenes chicanery, William Boyd simultaneously explores deeper issues of duplicity and divided personality * Sunday Times, Best Fiction Books of the Year *