Overview
A rollicking novel with a dark undertow, set around three unforgettable individuals and a doomed movie set--from the award-winning, best-selling author of Any Human Heart A producer. A novelist. An actress. It's summer 1968--a time of war and assassinations, protests and riots. While the world is reeling, our trio is involved in making a disaster-plagued, Swingin' Sixties British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. As the movie shoot zigs and zags, these layers of secrets become increasingly more untenable. Pressures build inexorably. The FBI and CIA get involved. Someone is going to crack--or maybe they all will. From one of Britain's best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel--by turns hilarious and heartbreaking--that asks the vital questions: What makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't?
William Boyd is a writer who was born in Ghana on March 7, 1952. He was educated at Gordonstoun school; and then the University of Nice, France, the University of Glasgow, and finally Jesus College, Oxford. Between 1980 and 1983 he was a lecturer in English at St Hilda's College, Oxford, and it was while he was there that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. Boyd was selected in 1983 as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Novelists" in a promotion run by Granta magazine and the Book Marketing Council. His novels include: A Good Man in Africa, for which he won the Whitbread Book award and Somerset Maugham Award in 1981; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was nominated for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1982; Brazzaville Beach, published in 1991, and Any Human Heart, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2002. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Boyd published Waiting for Sunrise: A Novel in early 2012. In 2015 his title, Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Clay, Amory made the new Zealand Best Seller List.
Professional Reviews
"An elating read."
-- Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times
"Boyd's sublime gift for characterisation is given full flow in this pacy, utter treat of a novel."
-- Marianne Jones, Telegraph
"Boyd keeps the plot racing along, yet for all the twists, the real delight is in his wry portrait of a bygone age . . . Boyd's usual sure touch is evident throughout this tender, gently comic work."
-- Martin Chilton, Independent
"A lavishly plotted page-turner which oozes '60s cool."
-- Metro
"Reading William Boyd's Trio is like shrugging on a favourite worn leather jacket on the first brisk morning of autumn: cosy but cool."
-- Laura Freeman, The Times
"What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd? Boyd, one of Britain's best-loved writers, is known for intelligent and elegant character-driven books. Trio is cast from the same mould--with added larkiness . . . Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy."
-- Francesca Carington, Sunday Telegraph
"Entertainingly vivid . . . William Boyd is one of our best contemporary storytellers . . . Trio embraces comedy, tragedy, and redemption. It succeeds impressively because of its dramatic, often sensational, revelations."
-- Brian Martin, The Spectator
"Boyd has written comic novels, thrillers, thoughtful character studies, and fiction that ponders the 20th century's great turning points. Now, with Trio, he combines all the above into a feast of storytelling crammed with delicious plots and subplots . . . Like the old pro he is, Boyd handles it with total aplomb, somehow keeping the pace both brisk and unhurried, as he heads towards a conclusion that binds the various threads together in a wholly satisfying way."
-- James Walton, Reader's Digest
"Boyd evokes the porn, prescription drugs, and private investigators of the age with grace, an ingenious structure, and characters who surprise us almost as much as they surprise themselves."
-- Tom Payne, Mail on Sunday
"The characters are wonderfully written and I loved escaping to the gossipy world of the film set."
-- Good Housekeeping (Book of the Month)
"A diverting read that's by turns raucous, charming, and eccentric."
-- GQ
"A novel as charming as it is satisfying, a pleasure to read . . . The whole thing purrs along with such effortlessness that you are barely aware of the engine working underneath. There is much attention to period detail, a lovely portrait of the '60s British film world, and Boyd's characters live breathe, and bruise vividly . . . And it confirms, once again, that Boyd, long a consummate storyteller, still has it."
-- Nick Duerden, iNews
"The gentle, witty story includes genuinely heartbreaking moments and brilliantly captures the spirit of an era when change was in the air."
-- Deirdre O'Brien, Sunday Mirror
"Engrossing . . . An intelligent, entertaining, and layered read."
-- The Arts Desk
"Absorbing . . . The story is made up of a series of dramas that can be read as separate if intertwined tales or as components in a satisfying whole. In Trio, in other words, three is never a crowd."
-- The Economist
