Love is Blind

Description

A fabulous new novel set at the end of the nineteenth century from one of Britain's most beloved novelists. Love is Blind is William Boyd's sweeping, heart-stopping new novel - set at the end of the 19th century, it follows the fortunes of Brodie Moncur, a young Scottish musician, about to embark on the story of his life. 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 19th century becomes the 20th. 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 20th century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers.

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa, won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. His other novels include An Ice Cream War, Armadillo, Any Human Heart, Restless and Sweet Caress. His latest book is the short-story collection The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth. He is married and divides his time between London and south west France.

Boyd on form is the ultimate in immersive fiction, and Love is Blind is Boyd at the top of his game . . . magnificent * Sunday Times * Boyd is back on a form few of his contemporaries can match. This fine, touching and clever book is the best thing he's written since [Any Human Heart] and deserves similar adulation * Observer * The book begins and continues at a cracking pace - or perhaps a cinematic stride - with scenes, scenarios, set-pieces and minor characters aplenty, all of which and all of whom might easily detain another writer for an entire book . . . He makes it look easy: he's a pro * New Statesman * Boyd's talents as a rollicking storytelling [are] full on display in this historical blockbuster * Metro * A deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination * Guardian * He has probably written more classic books than any of his contemporaries * Daily Telegraph * Boyd is a brilliant novelist * Observer * William Boyd is arguably one of Britain's finest living writers * Sunday Express *