The Blue Afternoon: William Boyd

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Annaliese is remorseful over her coldness towards her husband and effects a reconciliation by sleeping with him again.

The Blue Afternoon on Apple Books ‎The Blue Afternoon on Apple Books

In 2015 his title, Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Clay, Amory made the new Zealand Best Seller List. The United States Navy, under Admiral George Dewey, defeated the Spanish squadron in the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898. Carriscant is hauled before Cruz and Wieland for a dressing down and a fight ensues between the three men whose enmity has now spilled over.

The back blurb made me expect a story about a woman being reunited with a father she never knew, in 1936 L. She's swayed by some mystique, however, and agrees to go with Salvador Carriscant (the putative father) on a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico to pin down some facts. Restless, the tale of a young woman who discovers that her mother had been recruited as a spy during World War II, was published in 2006 and won the Novel Award in the 2006 Costa Book Awards. Because it's Boyd, I overlooked the convenience of it as a mechanism for telling Cariscant's story but I just couldn't get into it at all. I think this is rather harsh and is wholly plausible give the turmoil in Kays life as her ex husband taps her for money, her ex business partner tries to dismantle her architectural practice and she struggles to deal with the angst over the death of her little baby.

The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd - Blogger Reading group: The Blue Afternoon by William Boyd - Blogger

He has an almost unparalleled skill for narrative, for sucking the reader in to any story he chose to tell. This is a mystery, and I am not a mystery reader, but I picked it up simply because I was pretty darn sure I would not be disappointed.Eventually he shows Fischer a picture from a magazine, featuring a woman photographed watching a tennis match in Lisbon. It opens in Hollywood of the 1930s, where the narrator - a young woman, an architect - is approached by an elderly man who claims to be her father. For years and years I have heard how the British were inventors of concentration camps in the Anglo-Boer War, but in this book I discovered that the Americans used them too in the contemporary Philippino-American War, and that the American atrocities in the Philippines matched those of the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen in the Second World War. I read this on the strength of having been impressed with another of the author’s novels, but unfortunately this one didn’t work out for me.

Great afternoon tea - The Blue Boar Restaurant - Tripadvisor Great afternoon tea - The Blue Boar Restaurant - Tripadvisor

The reason why this sudden visit happened, sudden cause it happened after 36 years, is that he tells her that he wants her help. Back in the car Carriscant shows her a photo of a public prizegiving, cut from a ten-year-old Portuguese newspaper he says he happened to find. Kay Fischer is a young, ambitious architect who is shadowed by a mysterious stranger claiming to be her father. Was it, after all, Carriscant's anaesthetist, whom Paton Bobby originally suspected since he was from a rebel Filipino family (but who had died in the maiden flight of the aeroplane he had built)? However, he does show her an old photograph taken at the Aishlie Tennis Cup, and says that he needs to find the woman in it – the wife of an embassy official - who is now living in Lisbon, Portugal and states that he would like her to go with him to try to locate her.Panteleon understands the situation and lends the couple his ‘nipa’ barn in the afternoons for their assignments.

Blue Afternoon - Wikipedia Blue Afternoon - Wikipedia

This novel recreates a corner of Manila in 1902 - the hospital corner, in fact, for its hero, Salvador Carriscant, is the most forward-looking surgeon in town. Kay's first-person narrative is by no means an interior monologue: she addresses the reader as an objective stranger to whom she needs to give an account of her history and the circumstances of her life, yet we are also party to the details of her sexual encounters in a way that would be more appropriate to an internal monologue.Carriscant provides various snippets of information before changing the subject when she asks follow-up questions.