Waiting For Sunrise - Softcover

“It’s ages since I read a novel that offers such breathlessly readable narrative enjoyment, such page-by-page storytelling confidence and solidity. Boyd has a positive genius for pace and description.” (The Independent)

“Always a smooth and expert storyteller, Boyd effortlessly combines historical detail with a sexy, galloping narrative that proves irresistible.” (People (4 stars))

“Boyd retrofits a genre full of familiar devices and character types with finer textures and deeper psychology than it typically boasts. . . . Waiting for Sunrise manages to conjure an atmosphere of genuine disorientation that most spy novels gesture toward and few, if any, attain.” (Laura Miller, Salon)

“Boyd is a born story teller whose clear, taut prose never gets in the way of his characters and their unpredictable fates.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Thoroughly entertaining. . . . Waiting for Sunrise has the pace of a spy thriller, with code-cracking and double-crossing aplenty.” (The New Yorker)

“Sex, psychiatry and Vienna on the eve of World War I - those are promising ingredients for a novel. And William Boyd makes the most of them. . . . Boyd’s narrative moves briskly, and his local color is deftly done.” (The Seattle Times)

“As ever with Boyd there is an effortlessness to the prose and a piercing acuity to the period detail and evocation of place, along with thrilling set pieces. . . .[This book] proves that rarest of beasts: a tantalizingly experimental work that is also an immensely satisfying page-turner.” (The Telegraph)

“This is the sort of novel you finish, then begin again to revisit your favourite bits. . . . More than anything Waiting for Sunrise is a gleeful celebration of storytelling -- sly, clever, frequently hilarious, always involving. . . . This is the literary event of the year.” (The Times (UK))

“A page-turner. . . . A thinking person’s thriller.” (Good Housekeeping)

“Waiting for Sunrise retains a consistent intrigue and a splendidly intricate plot. . . . The denouement plays out with characteristic suspense and masterful design. . . . [Boyd has] a truly remarkable imagination.” (The Huffington Post)

Vienna, 1913. Lysander Rief, a young English actor in town seeking psychotherapy for a troubling ailment, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she presses rape charges, however, he is mystified. Only a carefully plotted escape—with the help of two mysterious British diplomats—saves him from trial.

The frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that dismantles Rief ’s life. He returns to London, hoping to banish from memory his traumatic ordeals abroad, but soon the men who helped coordinate his escape recruit him to carry out the murder of a complete stranger. His lover from Vienna arrives nonchalantly at a party, ready to resume their liaison, and before he can stop to consider where these events are leading, Rief finds himself on the trail of a traitor—a man whose bizarre connection to his own family proves a cruel twist of fate. Waiting for Sunrise is more than a page-turning thriller—it’s a riveting investigation of the limits of loyalty, the power of deception and the unpredictable events that can change the course of a person’s life.