Ordinary Thunderstorms »

WILLIAM BOYD is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy Book Club pick.

A thrilling, plot-twisting novel from the author of Restless, a national bestseller and winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award.

It is May in Chelsea, London. The glittering river is unusually high on an otherwise ordinary afternoon. Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, ambles along the Embankment, admiring the view. He is pleasantly surprised to come across a little Italian bistro down a leafy side street. During his meal he strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterwards. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents through which Adam will lose everything - home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, mobile phone - never to get them back.

A heart-in-mouth conspiracy novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of the everyday city.

The New York Times - Terrence Rafferty

[Boyd's] a novelist of a kind that's fairly unfamiliar in this country, less rare in Britain: a debonair, versatile, casually philosophical literary entertainer—clever and thoughtful, but not so dauntingly brilliant that you suspect him of being, as Jeeves would say, "fundamentally unsound." Ordinary Thunderstorms is, like all his books, ambitious in an offhand, almost insolent manner, bringing home once again Boyd's favorite ideas about identity and the tribulations of the beleaguered self while also smuggling in a good deal of information about pharmacology, the Thames, homelessness in modern London, the formation of clouds, the internal politics of Blackwater-like private security companies and the peculiar charm of cult religions…He's all over the map, as his hero is, but the novel somehow manages to establish its own, unmistakable identity. And no matter how digressive Boyd sometimes seems to be, you can't accuse him of being evasive or of being untrue to himself. It's just that he's a writer with a lot of selves to be true to.