Start with Any human heart. The obvious alternative is A good man in Africa, his first novel, which won the Whitbread First Novel award and is genuinely funny — but it is a comic novel by a young writer, and it does not prepare you for what Boyd became. Any human heart is the fullest version of his signature form: the intimate journals of Logan Mountstuart, born 1906, dead 1991, whose life runs through Oxford, Paris, the Spanish Civil War, naval intelligence, the New York art world and a bleak old age in France. It is the book most of his readers name first, and it is the one that explains the shape of everything else.
Before you open it, though, there is something worth knowing, because it changes how the book reads and it is not signposted on the cover.
Several of these novels are counterfeit
Boyd's recurring trick is the fake document. Any human heart is presented as a real man's journals, edited and annotated by someone else, with footnotes explaining who the minor figures were and an index at the back. Logan Mountstuart never existed. Everyone he meets — Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Picasso, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor — did. The seams are invisible on purpose, and readers regularly finish it convinced they have read a memoir.
The new confessions does the same for a fictional filmmaker, John James Todd, whose lifelong obsession is filming Rousseau's Confessions and whose career is destroyed by the Hollywood blacklist. Sweet caress is the memoir of an invented war photographer, Amory Clay, and it is illustrated throughout with real found photographs presented as hers — anonymous images bought from junk shops and archives, recaptioned into a life.
He also once did it outside a novel entirely. Nat Tate: An American Artist, published in 1998 and not in our catalogue, is a short biography of an American abstract expressionist who never existed, launched at a New York party where David Bowie read from it aloud, and it took the art world a while to notice. None of this is a spoiler; it is the method, and reading these books without knowing it just means being fooled rather than being in on it.
The whole-life novels, in order of quality
Read Any human heart first, then The new confessions, then Sweet caress. All three cover a single invented life from one end to the other, all three are long, and they get progressively less surprising as you go, simply because you have seen the machinery. If you only ever read one, it should be the first.
The Africa novels
Boyd was born in Ghana and raised largely in West Africa, and the early work goes there directly. A good man in Africa is broad comedy about a hapless British diplomat in a fictional West African state, and it is the lightest thing here. An ice-cream war, shortlisted for the Booker in 1982, is much better: the almost forgotten East African campaign of the First World War, in which the fighting continued for days after the armistice because nobody had told the men in the bush.
Brazzaville Beach is the strongest of the three and the strangest. A primatologist studying chimpanzees observes them beginning to kill each other, her findings threaten her director's career, and a civil war closes in around the research station. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and is the Boyd novel most likely to stay with you.
The thrillers
Restless is the entry point and the best of them: a woman in 1976 learns that her mother was a Second World War intelligence agent, and the two timelines run against each other. It won the Costa Novel Award in 2006. Later spy novels including Solo, the authorised James Bond continuation, and Gabriel's Moon are not in our catalogue. These are the most straightforwardly enjoyable books he writes and the least ambitious.
Where to stop
Three books cover him properly: Any human heart for the form, Brazzaville Beach for the ideas, Restless for the plotting. Go further only if one of those three made you want more of that particular Boyd, because he is really three writers sharing a name.
Follow the full ordered path here: William Boyd Reading Order: Where to Start with His Novels.
