Love is Blind (The Rapture of Brodie Moncur) by William Boyd #BookReview

Brodie Moncur stood in the main window of Channon & Co. and looked out at the hurrying pedestrians, the cabs, carriages and labouring drays of George Street. It was raining ......

So begins the story of Brodie Moncur. Set at the end of the nineteenth century, William Boyd's heart stopping new novel follows the fortunes of Brodie, a young Scottish musician about to embark on the story of his life.

When Brodie is offered a job in Paris, he seizes the chance to flee Edinburgh and his tyrannical clergyman father, and begin a wildly different new chapter in his life. In Paris, a fateful encounter with a famous pianist irrevocably changes his future - and sparks an obsessive love affair with a beautiful Russian soprano, Lika Blum. As Brodie moves from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, his love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. At once an intimate portrait of one man'e life and an expansive exploration of the beginning of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a masterly new novel from one of Britain's best loved storytellers.

I always feel incredibly optimistic when the first book that I read in any given year is a good one. It always suggests to me that I have a worthwhile reading year ahead and having just read this book I am anticipating an excellent year.

Mr Boyd has written a well structured and character driven novel. His sense of time and place is excellently portrayed through sound research and a wonderful writing style. He not only depicts the period of the setting through the minutiae of Brodie's life but also through the wider issues prevalent at the time.

Geographically, the book is wide ranging and the reader is able to accompany Brodie on his travels. Along the way, we are introduced to a plethora of characters but this never felt confusing.  I have read books in the past, written by lesser authors and have found this same scenario difficult to follow. However, with this book I always felt firm in the knowledge of where we were and who we were meeting and the author handles this with skill.

I felt completely immersed in Brodie's world and could not wait to get back to reading it each day. It is a story of music, love, obsession and the chaos which these can create. This is a memorable book which I would encourage you to read for yourself.

Have you already read this book? Have you read anything else by William Boyd? I would love to hear your thoughts on his writing.

ISBN: 978 0241295939

Publisher: Viking

About the Author:

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of fifteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south west France.