is one of my favourite authors. He achieves that combination of literary quality and plot-driven story that , in a Time Magazine story about , described as "[T]he highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate ... now hooking up, [and] you can almost see the future of literature coming." My favourite novel is Any Human Heart, the fictional biography of Logan Mountstuart who inhabits the arts, books and spy circles of the early twentieth century and who meets many of the big names associated with those worlds. also wrote the screenplay for the TV adaptation of Any Human Heart, which I also recommend.
His new novel, Waiting for Sunrise, is set in Vienna in 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy for a troubling ailment, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she presses rape charges, however, he is mystified. Only a carefully plotted escape with the help of two mysterious British diplomats saves him from trial.
The frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that dismantles Rief's life as he knows it. He returns to London hoping to banish from memory his traumatic ordeals abroad, but soon the men who helped coordinate his escape recruit him to carry out the murder of a complete stranger. His lover from Vienna shows up nonchalantly at a party, ready to resume their liaison, and before he knows where his new life has taken him, Rief soon finds himself on the trail of a traitor a man whose bizarre connection to his own family proves a cruel twist of fate.
Watch in May, when will be featured as our Author of the Month.
| Categories: New Releases, Literature, Book of the Day |
Logan Mountstuart's long life is both ordinary and extraordinary. A writer, a spy and later an art dealer, Logan mixes with the men and women who shaped the twentieth century. But he's al...
Every life is ordinary and extraordinary. Logan Mountstuart's - lived in every decade of the twentieth century - is a rich tapestry of both. Matthew Macfadyen (Pride and Prejudice), Jim Broadbent (...
