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Trio by William Boyd
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Trio

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Narrator Hannah Arterton

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Length 10 hours 43 minutes
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

A producer. A novelist. An actress.

It is summer in 1968, the year of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. There are riots in Paris and the Vietnam War is out of control. While the world is reeling our three characters are involved in making a Swingin' Sixties movie in sunny Brighton.

All are leading secret lives. Elfrida is drowning her writer's block in vodka; Talbot, coping with the daily dysfuntion of making a film, is hiding something in a secret apartment; and the glamorous Anny is wondering why the CIA is suddenly so interested in her.

But the show must go on and, as it does, the trio's private worlds begin to take over their public ones. 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?
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PRAISE FOR WILLIAM BOYD

'The ultimate in immersive fiction . . . magnificent' Sunday Times

'A finely judged performance: a deft and resonant alchemy of fact and fiction, of literary myth and imagination' Guardian on Love is Blind

'William Boyd has probably written more classic books than any of his contemporaries' Daily Telegraph

'Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation' Sebastian Faulks

© William Boyd 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France. His most recent novel, Trio, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

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Reviews

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 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

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

The characters are wonderfully written and I loved escaping to the gossipy world of the film set 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 One of our best contemporary storytellers. . . Trio embraces comedy, tragedy and redemption. It succeeds impressively because of its dramatic, often sensational, revelations 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 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 Enormous fun . . . Boyd's characters are vibrant, his prose elegant, comedy excellent: the result is a book that's compassionate and compelling Boyd's writing is as fluent as ever but it's the ideas pulsing beneath the surface that distinguish Trio 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 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 Expand reviews
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