In his most exhilarating novel yet, William Boyd transports you to the vibrant streets of sixties London, as an accidental spy is drawn into the shadows of espionage and obsession . . .
'William Boyd once again brings to the spy novel his particular storytelling genius. The result is brilliant fun' MICK HERRON
'Wonderfully ambiguous with notions of twisted reality and uncertain memory' ANN CLEEVES
'A wonderfully intricate novel of espionage and elegant skulduggery' JOHN BANVILLE
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An accidental spy. A web of betrayals. A mystery that will take you around the world . . .
'Just as a cello's voice is divided across four strings, each with its own colour and character, this is a journey in four parts, in search of four players and their instruments...'
In Cello, Kate Kennedy weaves together the lives of four remarkable cellists who suffered various forms of persecution, injury and misfortune. The Hungarian Jewish cellist and composer Pal Hermann managed to keep one step ahead of the Gestapo for much of the Second World War but was eventually captured and murdered. Lise Cristiani, the first female professional cello soloist, undertook an epic - and ultimately fatal - concert…
This is an account of the author's creation of a new garden interspersed with some very pertinent comments about the social and historical aspects of land and gardens which opened my eyes to some elements which I had never connected with the image of the garden as an earthly paradise.
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege…
The story of the well known cellist Beatrice Harrison who played the cello in her garden and the nightingale responded which formed the first BBC outside broadcast in 1924 . This book was reissued for the centenary
