The Blue Afternoon: A Novel

William Boyd

Knopf, 1995 - Fiction - 367 pages

The author of A Good Man in Africa and Brazzaville Beach now gives us his most ambitious and seductive novel to date - part suspense, part romance, all grand storytelling. It is told in flashback. It opens in Hollywood of the 1930's, where the narrator - a young woman, an architect - is approached by an elderly man who claims to be her father. He persuades her to accompany him to Lisbon in search of the woman who was the great lost love of his life. And on the journey he tells the story of what happened to him decades before when he was a surgeon in war-torn Manila. It is a story of intrigue played out against the exotic, violent background of the Philippines in 1902; a story of medicine; of the murder of American soldiers; of the magical creation of a flying machine. It is the story of a sinister web of conspiracy spun by the old guard at Manila's great hospital as the young surgeon stands alone against intransigence and corruption. And at the heart of the book, marvelously told: the grand passion that draws him into an unknown world of infinite danger.

About the author

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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Blue Afternoon: A Novel; A Borzoi book
• Author: William Boyd
• Edition: reprint
• Publisher: Knopf, 1995
• Original from: the University of California
• Digitized: May 24, 2008
• ISBN: 0679432957, 9780679432951
• Length: 367 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General