Book description
What is the devastating effect on your life when, through no fault of
your own, you lose everything - home, family, friends, job,
reputation, passport, money, credit cards, mobile phone - and you can
never get them back? This is what happens to a young man called Adam
Kindred, one May evening in Chelsea, London, when a freakish series of
malign accidents and a split-second decision turns his life upside
down for ever.
The police are searching for him. There is
a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone
and anonymous in the huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to
go but down - underground. He decides to join that vast army of the
disappeared and the missing that throng the lowest level of London's
population as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and
struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so
spectacularly. His quest will take him all along the River Thames,
from affluent Chelsea to the sink estates of the East End, and on the
way he encounters all manner of London's denizens - aristocrats,
prostitutes, priests and policewomen amongst them - and version after
new version of himself.
William Boyd's electric follow-up
to Costa Novel of the Year Restless is a heart-in-mouth
conspiracy novel about the fragility of social identity, the scandal
of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy
underbelly of every city.
 Fast moving, densely plotted, beautifully observed and probably one
of the best things Boyd has done' William Boyd is the author of nine
novels, including
A Good Man in Africa
, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award;
An
Ice-Cream War
, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker
Prize;
Brazzaville Beach
, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and
Restless
, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year.
