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William Boyd – Waiting for Sunrise
William Boyd keeps producing engaging, literate fiction, peopled with believable characters who have interesting stories. I was first aware of him in the early eighties, when I enjoyed his debut novel A Good Man in Africa. This blackly humorous tale of diplomatic disaster in a fictional African republic led to comparisons with Evelyn Waugh, and…
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Shiny New Books
Shiny New Books 8 is now out. As usual, it features an eclectic range of book reviews both fiction and non-fiction, including my take on the fourth Paul Dark espionage novel. There’s also my guide to the fiction of Manchester. But don’t let that put you off – there’s lots of stuff here to whet…
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Jeremy Duns: The Moscow Option
The third volume in Jeremy Duns’s terrific Paul Dark series takes our troubled agent back to the beginning of his career, to meet his nemesis in a scenario where the world is in danger from a possible nuclear war. I would strongly urge you to read the first two volumes if you haven’t done already…
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Jeremy Duns: Song of Treason
Not that long into this second instalment of the Paul Dark saga, I found myself reading an obscure article from the online archive of the Catholic newspaper The Tablet. I had been moved to check something in Duns’s text, because it sounded rather unlikely. Had there really been a small explosion in St Peter’s, Rome…