Books by William Boyd
William Boyd is the author of fourteen novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker prize;Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection.
“I love how this book weaves fact and fiction. You have the Lumumba plot as well as other real-life events that crop up. I love it when writers do that and Boyd does it really well. Boyd is a master storyteller. I’m not sure if this book would have worked so well with a less experienced writer, but the book really does work for me.” Read more...
“The New Confessions was the first hard-backed book I bought with my own money, and it showed me that serious-looking books could actually be fun and entertaining. Boyd’s humour is quite like my own, particularly on show in the scene in which a young man travels to London to declare his love for an older woman, only when he rings her doorbell in order to propose, he finds she’s with her husband, whereupon he panics, and tells her he is come to London to enlist. Cue four years in the army, and the battle of the Somme.” Read more...
The Funniest Historical Novels
Toby Clements, Journalist
“It’s about the white man in Africa again, but it is lighter. It’s not insensitive, it’s quite sensitive to African life, but it’s really a comedy.” Read more...
The best books on Being White in Africa
Justin Cartwright, Novelist
Interviews with William Boyd
William Boyd on Writers Who Inspired Him
The novelist William Boyd tells us about the authors, from Chekhov to Heller, who most influenced his own development as a writer – and reveals the secret to a well-crafted sex scene
Interviews where books by William Boyd were recommended
The best books on Being White in Africa, recommended by Justin Cartwright
The award-winning novelist thinks Africans want to know how it is that white men have got their hands on all the money. He picks five books on what it means and meant to be white in Africa
The Funniest Historical Novels, recommended by Toby Clements
Historical fiction, as a genre, is not known for its laugh-a-minute qualities. But that’s not to say there isn’t space for humour, when the events of the past have so often been surreal, ironic, or downright disastrous. Toby Clements, whose new novel A Good Deliverance takes the form of a 15th-century prison confession, recommends five of the funniest historical novels.
The Best Spy Novels of 2024, recommended by Shane Whaley
From a novel about the murder of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba to the latest John le Carré novel, from a Mossad agent in London to the hunt for a traitor at CIA HQ in Virginia, Shane Whaley, host of Spybrary—the podcast for lovers of spy books—talks us through his best spy novels of 2024.
