A Good Man in Africa

Product Information

Today's crossword puzzle clue is a general knowledge one: Author of 16 novels including A Good Man in Africa, Any Human Heart, Restless and Trio. Boyd never makes the mistake of trying to turn Todd into a heavyweight philosopher, never belabors his role as a representative man. He is gracious, however, when it comes to the question of condescending notices, saying that "posterity is not our business" and being stoical about reviews. 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. Moving from Vienna to London’s west end, the battlefields of France and hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller and a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.

There he falls into a tempestuous relationship with a fellow patient, the neurotic sculptress Hettie Bull, who after some months accuses him of rape. You might, in the course of one stroll down the King's Road, encounter a dozen or 15 different nationalities without it really mattering.The African scenes are intercut with episodes set in Kent, in the south of England, telling the parallel stories of two brothers, Gabriel and Felix Cobb, whose lives change irreparably as they are drawn, one after the other, into the war. 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.

Hallewell Publications is a small publishing house based in Argyll which concentrates largely on a single project: a popular series of walking guides which covers Scotland and selected areas of England. The course of this thriller is perhaps hindered by the number of digressions and subplots, and its pace is often as leisurely as the River Thames around which much of the action unfolds. After he finds himself being blackmailed, diagnosed with a venereal disease, attempting bribery, and confounded with a dead body, Morgan realizes that very little is going according to plan. Not enough to warrant reading the book, however, unless you happen to like the type (Graham Greene does it much better, so stop there if your time is limited).I was literally in hysterics for an entire 20 page chapter - my husband was looking at me in awe as I have not laughed that long or hard in ages, and as he says, "I am a hard audience. In this novel, the story of the heyday and decline of silent movies and B-westerns underlines the idea that art forms, like people, have their own biographies. He and his wife have a house in Chelsea, West London but spend most of the year at their chateau in Bergerac in south west France, where Boyd produces award-winning wines. Waiting for Sunrise displays some familiar Boyd preoccupations, including the ekphrastic description of invented works of art and references to the early days of cinema, and the novel demonstrates his enduring interest in recreating specific historical and cultural milieux: initially Vienna immediately before the First World War (there is a cameo appearance by Sigmund Freud) and subsequently wartime London, with brief sorties to the trenches of the Western Front and to Geneva. Caught between a boss who uses him to take care of any and all unpleasant and humiliating tasks he can come up with and a megalomaniac local politician who threatens to reveal his most compromising secrets, not to mention the amorous attentions of the politician's wife, and a nice dose of ghonorrea passed on to him by his local girlfriend, Leafy's trials and tribulations truly make for a comical read as he tries to extricate himself from a mess that just keeps getting more complicated and unpleasant with every move he makes.