When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind.
In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’. As in his earlier work, there’s still plenty of globe-trotting and journeying through the past, but his place within British writing has landed up closer to John le Carré and the higher end of Frederick Forsyth.
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