Product Description

What is the devastating effect on your life when, through no fault of your own, you lose everything - home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, money, credit cards, mobile phone - and you can never get them back? This is what happens to a young man called Adam Kindred, one May evening in Chelsea, London, when a freakish series of malign accidents and a split-second decision turns his life upside down for ever. The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in the huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down - underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing that throng the lowest level of London's population as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. His quest will take him all along the River Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End, and on the way he encounters all manner of London's denizens - aristocrats, prostitutes, priests and policewomen amongst them - 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 scandal of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #173 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
`A storm of a story... London has never looked so threatening' --Daily Mirror

`A thriller of hide and seek among London's low life. Think John Buchan meets John le Carre' -- Tatler

`Highly entertaining and characteristically expert' --Daily Telegraph

`He braids a taut plot with musings on identity and corruption, offering lingeringly atmospheric glimpses of London's many hidden selves' -- Daily Mail

`A mini exploration of the nature of modern citizenship combined with a picaresque tour of the various strata of modern metropolitan life' --Guardian

About the Author
William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year.

Customer Reviews

A scorcher!
I'm not what you'd call a longterm fan of Boyd - in fact, I've only ever read Restless, his last novel, which I thought was great - but I saw him on BBC 4 talking to Mark Lawson over the weekend and was immediately moved to buy this, the new one. And the fact that I've already finished it says it all! It's such a joy to read a thriller (and this really is an out-and-out thriller) that's written by someone who actually knows how to write.

The premise, of an innocent man on the run from an unknown adversary, is hardly new, but is incredibly compelling. And his evocation of London's underbelly is so real you almost smell the stench. It also includes a wonderful cast of characters: policemen and crooks, sinister scientists, lowlifes and and prostituets and a hugely real and believeable hero (a rare thing in a good thriller) in the shape of Adam Kindred.

The story has some extraordinary ingredients - as though Charles Dickens, John Buchan and John Le Carré decided to get together and pool their talents - and is so well constructed and propels the characters along as such a zip, that it arguably betters Restless for sheer fizz and verve alone.

In short: good, high-quality reading pleasure of a sort I've not experienced in a long time!

A cracking read!
If you're wanting a cracking read this Autumn then look no further than this book. It's a perfectly paced and plotted thriller which is guaranteed to have you turning the pages right from the start. It follows young climatologist Adam Kindred whose life is suddenly turned upside down when he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up being the only suspect in a murder. This leads to him going on the run and living off-grid and feral with London's homeless whilst not only the police but the psychopathic real killer try to track him down. It's definitely edge of your seat stuff but it also delivers on many other levels thanks to William Boyd's incredible talent. There's the fragility of our day to day security and identity, something which also resonated in another of his books Any Human Heart. Then there's the idea of the paths we tread and do not tread and where each of these lead and inter-connect with those of others. Above all there is the image of the unreal city that is London and at its heart the Thames which carries away some of its filth whilst retaining sufficient amounts to provide a record or memory of the inter-connecting histories which have taken place within this vast metropolis. Think Dickens, Hogarth, Peter Ackroyd and a dose of Martin Amis's Keith Talent and you start to get a flavour. But then add the pace and simple pzazz that is William Boyd's own and you're halfway there. I couldn't recommend it more highly!

Lacks Boyd's usual subtlety
I have enjoyed reading trashier thrillers than this because they haven't tried to be profound or realistic but I haven't read a better written thriller.

To my mind Boyd has written some of the best modern fiction you could hope to read. I thought Restless couldn't be included amongst his best work but it wasn't far off, Ordinary Thunderstorms is, unfortunately, further off still.

Boyd has a great talent for writing subtlety about difficult subjects and grand issues. He frequently writes about war, suicide and the notion of personal transformation- whether that be by summoning up the courage to change (e.g. Stars and Bars, Restless) and/or through the protagonist running away or escaping (e.g. Any Human Heart, The Blue Afternoon). The actual topic matters aren't that new for Boyd in Ordinary Thunderstorms, the way he is forced to approach them is.

Boyd writes in a way that is non-dramatic, in terms that I feel resonate and never feel unrealistic. In almost all of his books he manages to say something profound simply by using his observational skills. It is one of the most difficult things to do in witting and I think Boyd is one of the best modern writers at achieving it.

I think the challenge of writing this book for Boyd was trying to fuse his gift for creating a fiction which seems so real with the plot-line of an out-and-out thriller. Not impossible, and Boyd would be the man to do it. And he does it in many parts, the CEO struggling with his relationship to his gay son, the immigrant prostitute, there are some great characters and great storytelling. But maybe it is precisely because Boyd is so good at making a realistic world that when the inevitable plot-twists have to come, they feel even cheesier, they break the world he has created. The ending of the book too, while not unusual in terms of Boyd's previous novels, doesn't work because this book is a thriller, it isn't acceptable to simply leave us in the world because it doesn't feel real enough for us to enjoy staying there. That moment of contemplation I've felt at the end his other books is replaced will scepticism.

If this was the first Boyd book you have read and you enjoyed it (I too enjoyed this one) please read another of his books.