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: #209 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!

meh - disappointing. A good enough thriller but I expected more from him
William Boyd is one of my favourite authors & I was looking forward to this, but unfortunately was disssapointed.

It is a perfectly good thriller, and nothing wrong with it. If I had bought this at an airport bookstore in "I need a book" desperation with no expectations, then I would have been pleasantly surprised.

The action rolls along, the characters are well written with some nice quirks, it is all believable enough, and the descriptions of the underside of London are excellent and creepily real.

And yet, and yet...

It just didn't do it for me. Somehow it never quite gets there. The characters are credible, but lack that depth of "New Confessions" or "Blue Afternoon". The plot is pacy enough but lacks the heart-in-mouth tension or unforeseen twists of "Restless". The hero is believable but I didn't care about him with the intensity I usually feel (eg for Logan Montstuart).

Boyd's writing often has an artifice or trickiness to it that sometimes makes me think of a Creative Writing class signment. "Write a novel about a life spanning the whole 20th century with an element of pathos. Have your hero on the fringes of artistic greatness, live in two different iconic cities, namedrop some friends. Include love & loss and end on a down note". And two of the class entries are "New Confessions" & "Any Human Heart".... (That sounds damning: it isn't. Both are amongst my two all time favourite books, both 5 star & wholly recommended).

In that vein, Ordinary Thunderstorrms plot is "Recreate the 39 Steps 100 years Later. Our hero meets someone who the baddies stab, leaving hero in the frame. He has to lie low, undercover, while police hunt him for the murder and he reveals the plot, stops the baddies and wins the day".

It is all enjoyable enough, and I'd never say "Don't read it" of a Boyd novel. But I'd expected more & am a bit dissappointed.