Product Description

The New Confessions is the outrageous, extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreaking autobiography of John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of the twentieth century. ‘An often magnificent feat of story-telling and panoramic reconstruction … John James Todd’s reminiscences carry us through the ups and downs of a long and lively career that begins in genteel Edinburgh, devastatingly detours out to the Western Front, forks off, after a period of cosy family life in London, to the electric excitements of the Berlin film-world of the Twenties, then moves on to Hollywood … to ordeal by McCarthyism and eventual escape to Europe’ Peter Kemp, Observer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #24243 in Books
• Published on: 1999-02-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

About the Author
William Boyd was born in Ghana in 1952. He was brought up there and in Nigeria. He was educated at the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Oxford. He is the author of a number of acclaimed and hugely popular novels and three volumes of short stories, and the recipient of many prizes, including the Whitbread First Novel Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. He is married and lives in London

Customer Reviews

How to mess up your life in 500 pages.............
I struggle with some of Boyd's writing - but find the two quasi-autobiographical novels (Any Human Heart and The New Confession) truly outstanding.
They both take you on a rampage across the 20th Century - but whilst based on a similar premise are utterly different.
In this case the lead character is fascinating, flawed and disturbingly like many people you know in his ability to make the wrong decision at each moment of truth.
I am impressed with Boyd's ability to design fictitious lives in such detail - it really makes you feel as if he is a biographer who has researched his subject for years.
Impossible to put down. Truly excellent.

Beyond compare - breathtakingly written, and superbly paced
The strength of Boyd's imagery is so strong, that it leaves a very deep imprint on the readers mind.

You feel like John James Todd takes you on a journey through the 20th Century - from the horror and darkness of the First World War trenches, to the glamour and grime of Hollywood. The storytelling is superbly paced and peaked - a rollercoaster ride of emotions. But this is only taking the book at face value. The New Confessions is actually a book of a film within a book - with a highly accomplished mirroring of Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Confessions. Boyd has not only succeeded in updating the characters and action from one of the most highly regarded pieces of literature of all time, he has in many ways surpassed it.

I cannot recommend this highly enough - it is not an overstatement to call reading this book a life changing experience. You will not want it to end and will go back again, time and again.

another triumph
The New Confessions has similarities to Any Human Heart, encompassing as it does a man's life from boyhood through to old age. The main difference is that while Any Human Heart unfolded contemporaneously in the form of a journal or diary, The New Confessions is written retrospectively - an old man looking back on his life, remembering the highs and lows.

The story is as gripping as any of Boyd's novels, largely due to Boyd's immense talent in imbuing the ordinary with rivetting, magnetic fascination. The ordures of public school initiation, the fierceness of first love (or crush), the passions, terrors, obsessions and regrets of any life, are magnified and captured with breath-catching aplomb. Boyd is one of the few writers - Updike, Ishiguro and McEwan also spring to mind- who can make the reader giggle uncontrollably one minute and in the next reel from some gut-wrenchingly vivid drama.
The New Confessions follows John James Todd from his childhood in Edinburgh, under the care of his austere surgeon father and his sharp-witted and idiosyncratic nanny Oonagh , through schooldays and friendship with the mathematical child prodigy Hamish Malahide, to adulthood with all its attendant thwarted dreams, shocking traumas and rich relationships. John James may be selfish and self-centred - SPOILER: not only is he serially unfaithful to his long-suffering wife Sonia, but he has the cheek to hire a private investigator to see if she herself is being unfaithful; not only does he repeatedly chastise his older brother Thompson in his autobiography for being uncaring, but he manipulates Thompson into arranging a bank loan on which he subsequently defaults, and makes a pass at Thompson's wife; not only does he fail to ask others about their problems or lives but he witters endlessly about his own talent; not only does he cruelly note all physical flaws in his wife and brother but he deludedly comments to himself on his own good looks. Yet despite these glaring faults, John James is also funny, articulate, intelligent and a compelling character to read about. He is passionate about his career, his friends and his one true love. And Boyd's novel transports you in a hypnotised daze through all these beautifully drawn characters and events and manages to be sharp, witty, touching, devastating and gorgeously written at the same time. Another classic from one of our top five living British authors.