The New Confessions

The New Confessions is a wickedly funny novel by bestselling author William Boyd 'Brilliant ... a Citizen Kane of a novel' Daily Telegraph 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. The New Confessions will be loved by fans of An Ice-cream War and Any Human Heart, as well as readers of Ben Macintyre, Sebastian Faulks, Nick Hornby and Hilary Mantel. WILLIAM BOYD has received world-wide acclaim for his novels.They are: A Good Man in Africa (1981, winner of the Whitbread Award and theSomerset Maugham Prize) An Ice Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 BookerPrize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), TheNew Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prizeand the James Tait Black Memorial Prize) The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner ofthe 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times BookAward for Fiction, 1995), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner ofthe Prix Jean Monnet). He is also the author of a collection of screenplays and amemoir of his schooldays, School Ties (1985); and three collections of shortstories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) andFascination (2004). He also wrote the speculative memoir of his schooldays,School Ties (1985); three collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station(1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) and Fascination (2004). He alsowrote the speculative memoir Nat Tate: an American Artist -- the publication ofwhich, in the spring of 1998, caused something of a stir on both sides of theAtlantic. A collection of his non-fiction writings, 1978-2004, entitled Bamboo,was published in October 2005. His ninth novel, Restless, was published inSeptember 2006 (Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006) and his tenth novel,Ordinary Thunderstorms, published September 2009. His most recent novel isWaiting For Sunrise which published in February 2011.

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 are 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 Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009). Some thirteen 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.