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  • Published: 31 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241295977
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $26.00

Trio




From the bestselling author comes a transporting new novel about the secret lives of a film crew in Brighton, 1968

A producer. A novelist. An actress.

It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. While the world is reeling our trio is involved in making a rackety Swingin' Sixties British movie in sunny Brighton. All are leading secret lives. As the film is shot, with its usual drastic ups and downs, so does our trio's private, secret world begin to take over their public one. Pressures build inexorably - someone's going to crack. Or maybe they all will.

From one of Britain's best loved writers comes an exhilarating, tender novel that asks the vital questions: what makes life worth living? And what do you do if you find it isn't?

  • Published: 31 August 2021
  • ISBN: 9780241295977
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

William Boyd

William Boyd is the author of one work of non-fiction, three collections of short stories and thirteen novels, including the bestselling historical spy thriller Restless – winner of the Costa Novel of the Year – and Any Human Heart, in which the character of Ian Fleming features. Among his other awards are the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Prix Jean Monnet. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 2005, he was awarded the CBE.

Born in Ghana in 1952, William Boyd spent much of his early life in West Africa. He now divides his time between the south-west of France and Chelsea, where he lives a stone’s throw from James Bond’s London address.

Also by William Boyd

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Praise for Trio

The characters are wonderfully written and I loved escaping to the gossipy world of the film set

Good Housekeeping, Book of the Month

I am a huge fan of William Boyd and the tender way he writes about the flaws and frailties of his characters. Trio is his best novel in years

Red, The Best Books to Read this October

What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel? Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy

Sunday Telegraph

One of our best contemporary storytellers. . . Trio embraces comedy, tragedy and redemption. It succeeds impressively because of its dramatic, often sensational, revelations

Spectator

Reading William Boyd's Trio is like shrugging on a worn leather jacket on the first brisk morning of autumn: cosy but cool . . . He has enormous fun with the worlds - and egos - of page and screen

The Times

Boyd keeps the plot racing along, yet for all the twists, the real delight is in William Boyd's wry portrait of a bygone age . . . Boyd's usual sure touch is evident throughout this tender, gently comic work

Independent

An absorbing novel about lives spiralling out of control and the drastic measures required to right them

Economist

Enormous fun . . . Boyd's characters are vibrant, his prose elegant, comedy excellent: the result is a book that's compassionate and compelling

Tatler

Boyd's writing is as fluent as ever but it's the ideas pulsing beneath the surface that distinguish Trio

Financial Times

Trio is an intricate set of variations on the idea of alternative selves, well beyond the title's trio, unobtrusively elegant in its formal beauty

New Statesman, Books of the Year

Sending an affably satiric shimmer over the ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings and behind-the-scenes chicanery, William Boyd simultaneously explores deeper issues of duplicity and divided personality

Sunday Times, Best Fiction Books of the Year

A middle-aged film producer, a novelist with writer's block and a glamorous young actress come together to make a Swinging Sixties movie in this jaunty page-turner. But everyone is living a double life. Even names can't be taken on trust. Full of neat phrases and quirkily funny scenes, it's an elating read

The Times, Best Paperbacks of 2021