Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd
Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd
2 Rating(s)
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Ordinary Thunderstorms
A Novel

Author: William Boyd

Narrator: Gideon Emery

Unabridged: 12 hr 4 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 02/23/2010

Categories: Fiction


Synopsis

One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything—home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone—never to get them back. 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 a 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 who throng London’s lowest levels 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. Adam's quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London's denizens—aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen—and version after new version of himself.Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd's electric follow-up to his award-winning Restless, is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.

About William Boyd

William Boyd is also the author of 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 War Prize and short-listed for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; Ordinary Thunderstorms; and Waiting for Sunrise, among other books. He lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kemper on August 01, 2010

Stop me if you‘ve heard this one before. An innocent person discovers someone who has just been murdered, and then they stupidly pick up the weapon, end up covered in blood and then they’re accused of the crime. That scene has played out so many times in pop entertainment that I think anyone with mo......more

Goodreads review by Mark on February 12, 2020

Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd started off really well for me but ended up being a little disappointing. It started off as a 4 star effort, as the main character - Adam (alias John) - got himself into a real pickle by no fault of his own. He then made a series of decisions that were kind of......more

Goodreads review by John on August 06, 2021

Readers who pick up Ordinary Thunderstorms, having not read William Boyd before, expecting a high octane chase thriller through the tough streets of London maybe disappointed. For me, William Boyds intention is to amuse as well as thrill reading like one of Graham Greenes 'entertainments' with a Dic......more

Goodreads review by Sandi on July 22, 2010

Ordinary Thunderstorms is an extremely flawed novel. It's ostensibly a mystery, but it never completely solves that mystery. The protagonist makes a series of very odd choices that don't strike me as being believable. The ending is kind of a non-ending with a lot of loose threads, yet it's clearly n......more