Waiting for Sunrise [Hardcover]

It makes a change to have a spy thriller set in Vienna around the turn of the first world war and William Boyd gets to grips with this one very well. In fact, if you hadn't read the blurb, you might be thinking this was a rather lame love affair doomed to failure thanks to the up and coming horror of the war.

But Lysander Rief, there's a name and a half, up-and-coming actor is drawn into the spying game little by little and he turns out to be rather good at it. Whilst trying to sort out his psychological problems with a colleague of Freud in Vienna, he is asked to obtain the code in order to break secret messages emanating from the UK and finishing up where they shouldn't be! He does this with such aplomb that, despite a near death situation, he is then rehabilitated to London, his personal problems resolved and so the fun begins.

The author weaves an excellent spy chase from this point. Rief's earlier contacts catch up with him, he finds himself investigating a spy who may well be more closely connected that he would wish and those around him each appear to be the possible suspect. The ending is odd. To explain it gives away too much information but there we are. I enjoyed the book. The atmosphere in Austria and in London is excellently described especially given the fast approaching circumstances. The inclusion of a Zeppelin adds a little flavour to the mix and the storyline makes you turn the pages. Whether or not there is room for a follow-on remains to be seen but the main protagonist is a character who could be developed for future forays into the spying world, after all, who better than an actor to confuse the enemy.

It's always a delight when a new William Boyd novel hits the bookshops. Or in my case, Amazon. After so many satisfying encounters with this writer, I've built up such a lasting confidence in his elegant prose and polished storytelling that I know there's no real possibility of a dud or a disappointment. Just unalloyed pleasure and thought-provoking entertainment delivered by a writer at the top of his game - always to be relied upon to produce a gripping mix of literary tour de force and mass market page-turner. And this latest Boyd is no exception. Within just a few lines, and with no passport required, I was snatched up and swept off to Vienna, 1913, and put right there on the corner of Augustinerstrasse as Boyd's protagonist, the actor Lysander Rief, makes his hatless, fretting way right past me, close enough for me to reach out and touch him. And that was that... I was hooked, completely beguiled, following Rief from a psychiatrist's divan into a tempestuous and seductively described affair that ends with a daring and dramatic escape from Vienna to Trieste. And that's just the first hundred pages. Back in Blighty Rief's past catches up with him and he's recruited by British Intelligence, inveigled into a code-breaking spy game that provides twists and turns aplenty, the action breathless, shocking, and occasionally disturbing. From the wartime trenches of northern France to the shadowy spy-strewn streets of Geneva, and from London's Zeppelin-blitzed Whitehall and West End to Home Counties country houses and genteel south coast hostelries, Boyd controls the narrative with a sure and certain touch, his command of period and place as precise and pleasing as ever. If there are occasional echoes here of Crouchback and Ryder (wrong war, I know, but..), and of MacEwan, Faulks and Le Carré, these are never more than echoes - the voice, the tone, the language, the guiding hand unmistakeably and satisfyingly Boyd's at his storytelling best. Other reviewers have mentioned a disappointment with the book's ending - that it was too swift, too hurried, or too enigmatic. The only reason I was disappointed with the ending was because... well, because it was the end. Like every other Boyd book I've read, I could quite easily and happily have spent another hundred pages - even more - in the company of Lysander Rief, and in the world Boyd conjured up for me. I know I'm maybe giving the game away, but whatever will happen to him in the remaining years of the Great War? Will his acting career take off? Will he move from stage to screen? Will there be more assignments with British Intelligence? And what about Blanche and Hettie and Lothar? I only wish I could tell you...

This is a highly readable novel which will keep you turning pages into the night...The story focuses around the character of Lysander Rief, a young English actor who is drawn by events into the world of wartime spies. Opening in 1913, in Vienna, shortly before the outbreak of war, the story is driven along by the chance meeting, and subsequent tempestuous relationship, of Lysander, and a young English sculptress. Arrested for a crime he did not commit, Lysander finds the consequences taking over his life, taking him deeper and deeper into a chain of events in which nothing is quite what it seems.

As always with William Boyd, this is superbly crafted fiction, beautifully written, and compulsive reading

Superb - highly recommended