The Blue Afternoon

From the author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach comes an ambitious and seductive novel--part suspense, part romance, all grand storytelling. Told in flashbacks, the story travels from 1930's Hollywood to the exotic, violent world of the Philippines in 1902, telling a tale of medicine, the murder of American soldiers, and the creation of a magical flying machine.

"A perfect-pitch story of love and redemption" (The New York Times), Boyd's atmospheric new novel confirms his reputation as heir to the grand narrative traditions of Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham. In 1936 Los angeles, as her long-estranged father tells architect Kay Fischer the story behind her secret parentage, he plunges readers into a tale of grisly murders and an illicit passion that still obsseses him 30 years later. 384 pp. Author tour.

Publishers Weekly

Boyd's new novel should carry a label advising readers that an intriguing narrative is initially obscured beneath a plot device that almost ruins the whole thing: in 1936, Los Angeles architect Kay Fisher is approached by elderly Salvadore Carriscant, who tells her he's her father and whisks her off on an improbable journey to Lisbon. Despite that unconvincing framing section, a fascinating love story-cum-murder mystery occupies the heart of the narrative, which flashes back to 1902 Manila. There, the young Carriscant, a brilliant surgeon, falls in love with Daphne Sieverance, the wife of an American colonel whose troops are stationed in the Philippines to quell a bloody insurrection. When two American soldiers are murdered by someone who eviscerates their internal organs, Carriscant helps the chief of the constabulary, the improbably named Paton Bobby, to locate the killer, whom Carriscant suspects but cannot accuse. In this middle section of the novel Boyd suspensefully orchestrates some diabolically clever events, including a fatal air crash, a scene reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet and a shocking climax that will send readers reeling. With the same sure hand that has distinguished the settings of his previous books (A Good Man in Africa; Brazzaville Beach, etc.), he evokes the steamy, fetid atmosphere of old Manila and the class distinctions of the time. He also provides genuinely interesting background detail about medical practice during the days when aseptic surgery was still considered quackery, and about the pioneering years of aeronautics. Much of this novel is as magical as an ``eloquent blue afternoon,'' when the atmosphere is luminescent with magical light. It's too bad that Boyd encased his engrossing central tale in its unwieldy carapace. (Feb.)

William Boyd’s first novel, A Good Man in Africa, won a Whitbread Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award; his second, An Ice-Cream War, was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and The Blue Afternoon won the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction. Boyd lives in London.