The New Confessions - Softcover

Boyd, William

4.09

3,230 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140106995 ISBN 13: 9780140106992

Publisher: Penguin, 1988

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The New Confessions is the outrageous, extraordinary, hilarious and heartbreaking autobiography of John James Todd, a Scotsman born in 1899 and one of the great self-appointed (and failed) geniuses of the twentieth century.

‘An often magnificent feat of story-telling and panoramic reconstruction ... John James Todd’s reminiscences carry us through the ups and downs of a long and lively career that begins in genteel Edinburgh, devastatingly detours out to the Western Front, forks off, after a period of cosy family life in London, to the electric excitements of the Berlin film-world of the Twenties, then moves on to Hollywood ... to ordeal by McCarthyism and eventual escape to Europe’ Peter Kemp, Observer.

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Review:

"An entertaining and darkly comic novel, a novel given weight and ballast by the pressure of recent history." --"The New York Times"
"Here is the rarest of books, the sort you want to read again--even before you've finished it the first time. . . . Boyd gives us a magnificent experience." --"People"
"Boyd has created an important and complex character in a vividly evoked series of settings. . . . He has written a subtle and provocative history of our time." --"Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"Entertaining and intellectually engaging." --"Time"

"An entertaining and darkly comic novel, a novel given weight and ballast by the pressure of recent history." --The New York Times
"Here is the rarest of books, the sort you want to read again--even before you've finished it the first time. . . . Boyd gives us a magnificent experience." --People
"Boyd has created an important and complex character in a vividly evoked series of settings. . . . He has written a subtle and provocative history of our time." --Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Entertaining and intellectually engaging." --Time

About the Author:

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and grew up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. His other novels include An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Armadillo (1998), Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet) and Restless (2006, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award). His latest novel is Sweet Caress (2015). Some seventeen of his screenplays have been filmed, including The Trench (1999), which he also directed, and he is also the author of four collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008). He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.

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