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Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012, 1408828456, 9781408828458, 368 pages. THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERVienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor, sits in the waiting room of the city's preeminent psychiatrist as he anxiously ponders the particularly intimate nature of his neurosis. When the enigmatic, intensely beautiful Hettie Bull walks in, Lysander is immediately drawn to her, unaware of how destructive the consequences of their subsequent affair will be. One year later, home in London, Lysander finds himself entangled in the dangerous web of wartime intelligence - a world of sex, scandal and spies that is slowly, steadily, permeating every corner of his life.... DOWNLOAD HERE The gatherer , Owen Brookes, 1982, Fiction, 264 pages. Escape Velocity , Mark Walden, Apr 19, 2011, Juvenile Fiction, 352 pages. Now in paperback, a riveting installment in an action-packed series. Students and staff at H.I.V.E.вЂ―the Higher Institute of Villainous EducationвЂ―are horrified to discover .... Waiting for sunrise , HimДЃб№ѓЕ›u JoЕ›Д«, Sep 1, 1993, Language Arts & Disciplines, 121 pages. Stars and Bars A Novel, William Boyd, Oct 12, 2011, Fiction, 336 pages. Sharply observed and brilliantly plotted, Stars and Bars is an uproarious portrait of culture clash deep in the heart of the American South, by one of contemporary literature’s .... On the Yankee Station Stories, William Boyd, Jan 26, 2011, Fiction, 224 pages. Wiliam Boyd, winner of the Whitbread and Somerset Maugham Awards, introduces unlikely heroes desperate to redeem their unsatisfying lives. From California poolsides to the .... The Last Bachelor , Diana Whitney, Jul 1, 1992, Fiction, 188 pages. A story of romance and cosmic attraction.. Songs my mother taught me , Audrey Callahan Thomas, 1973, , 200 pages. Audrey Thomas's classic coming-of-age novel about madness, loneliness, despair and escape, now republished with a new introduction.. The New Confessions A Novel, William Boyd, Mar 30, 2011, Fiction, 480 pages. In this extraordinary novel, William Boyd presents the autobiography of John James Todd, whose uncanny and exhilarating life as one of the most unappreciated geniuses of the .... Waiting for Sunrise , Eva Marie Everson, 2012, Fiction, 390 pages. Struggling with painful memories and the pressures of daily life, Patsy escapes to the scenic Florida Gulf Coast in search of healing only to confront unanticipated aspects of .... An almost perfect gent a novel, Horace Kendall Kelland, Jun 1, 1999, Fiction, 306 pages. In the rich traditions of James and Trollope, this novel follows the escapades of young Timothy Whittaker, who is haunted by the brutal Christmas Eve murder/suicide that left .... Nature Lessons A Novel, Lynette Brasfield, May 1, 2003, Fiction, 275 pages. Returning to South Africa to help her ailing mother, forty-year-old Kate Jensen struggles to understand her bizarre and difficult family situation and her inability to sustain .... Voices in the Garden , Dirk Bogarde, Oct 28, 2011, Fiction, 352 pages. Set in cosmopolitan London, in one of the last great villas of the twenties on Cap Ferrat, as well as in the home of a German family within the shadow of the Wall, Voices in .... Blue Afternoon , William Boyd, Boyd, Jan 31, 2012, Fiction, 324 pages. His name is Salvador Carriscant and thus begins Kay Fischer's journey into the past of this beguiling and seductive older man who claims to be her father. A young architect .... Freud and Jung in the David Cronenberg film A Dangerous Method; the 150th anniversary of Klimt; and (God help us) the first world war as depicted in Downton Abbey: all that has been missing in this orgy of period nostalgia was a new Viennese eve-of-war novel. In Waiting for Sunrise, William Boyd has come up with it. Still, the discontinuities can puzzle. It is with some surprise that we witness our well-born, somewhat effete young actor hero mutate into an ingenious and ruthless spy hunter, but then the author has a cunning excuse. This and every other extravagant turn of events in the book can be justified in terms of the theory of "parallelism", dreamed up by the Viennese analyst our hero travels to Austria to consult (not Freud, though in a nod back to Boyd's Any Human Heart, the great man puts in an appearance, in order to disapprove of the theory). Based on Bergson's la fonction fabulatrice – the capacity for make-believe that lends colour and meaning to our existence – the idea is that to make life livable the individual puts flesh on the gaunt bones of an alien and indifferent world by dint of his or her imaginative powers. In what in the end turns into a sophisticated whodunnit, the author freely deploys his own fonction fabulatrice here. The problem of conjuring a Viennese backdrop – if you don't, the critics will get you for it; if you do, it'll have to be avant-garde artists and opera and prewar decadence, served in a rich sauce of sexual neurosis – is resolved by the latter method. Boyd would appear to know his Vienna well and in the insistent clutter of description – clothes, drinks, meals, interiors, street scenes, nothing escapes – there is a faint echo of Joseph Roth in The Radetzky March, the great eve-of-disaster Austrian novel in which the accumulation of period detail helps create an atmosphere so stifling the thunder has to strike. The transitions from sexual intrigue to family drama to trench warfare and finally a slightly dated fin de siècle Holmesian espionage romp maintain the momentum. It would have made more sense if the entire plot had taken place in Vienna, instead of shifting to London, but that would have deprived us of Boyd's successful fabulation of the Whitehall military-bureaucratic machine and espionage establishment, in which "C", its newly created boss, has a walk-on part. Before long, we sense that Boyd is not entirely master of his material, in the sense that the meandering plot seems to have taken charge of the author, rather than vice versa. Stylistically, this shows in a couple of indolent anachronisms (did we say "up for it" in 1914? We didn't in 1970) and an occasional insouciance in the writing – "Once again I wonder what machinations have been going on behind the scenes" – though perhaps we are meant to read this as spoof Sherlock Holmes. The whole thing can be seen as manufactured, but then it is done by a craftsman's hands and with polish. I was about to add "and after all, contrivance is part of the genre", but then I'm not quite sure what the genre here is. Is there some message I'm missing? I doubt it, but much it matters. Here and there, we encounter weighty insinuations appropriate to the times, such as the notion that an underground "river of sex" flows through Vienna (and – who would have thought it? – London too), but the best way to read the book is to avoid over-analysis and turn the page. On a more homely level, amid the violence, skulduggery and frantic sex, Boyd has a knack for inserting amiable human touches, such as the hero's warm relations with his gay uncle. What are we to make of it all? Not too much or too little. It would be mean-spirited to focus on structural or stylistic defects to the exclusion of the enjoyments of a story of no great depth or pretensions but good on atmospherics, and which, after a slowish start, will deliver the requisite satisfactions to all generations of readers. Vienna. 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the nature of his problem when an extraordinary woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, haze...more Vienna. 1913. It is a fine day in August when Lysander Rief, a young English actor, walks through the city to his first appointment with the eminent psychiatrist, Dr. Bensimon. Sitting in the waiting room he is anxiously pondering the nature of his problem when an extraordinary woman enters. She is clearly in distress, but Lysander is immediately drawn to her strange, hazel eyes and her unusual, intense beauty. Later the same day they meet again, and a more composed Hettie Bull introduces herself as an artist and sculptor, and invites Lysander to a party hosted by her lover, the famous painter Udo Hoff. Compelled to attend and unable to resist her electric charm, they begin a passionate love affair. Life in Vienna becomes tinged with the frisson of excitement for Lysander. He meets Sigmund Freud in a café, begins to write a journal, enjoys secret trysts with Hettie and appears to have been cured. London, 1914. War is stirring, and events in Vienna have caught up with Lysander. Unable to live an ordinary life, he is plunged into the dangerous theatre of wartime intelligence – a world of sex, scandal and spies, where lines of truth and deception blur with every waking day. Lysander must now discover the key to a secret code which is threatening Britain’s safety, and use all his skills to keep the murky world of suspicion and betrayal from invading every corner of his life. Moving from Vienna to London’s west end, the battlefields of France and hotel rooms in Geneva, Waiting for Sunrise is a feverish and mesmerising journey into the human psyche, a beautifully observed portrait of wartime Europe, a plot-twisting thriller and a literary tour de force from the bestselling author of Any Human Heart, Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms.(less) Oh dear, all a bit disappointing in the end.

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