The New Confessions

"The New Confessions was the first hard-backed book I bought with my own money, and it showed me that serious-looking books could actually be fun and entertaining. “I never ‘tell’ a joke, but I’m always alert for ironies; unexpected outcomes; unmet expectations” Boyd’s humour is quite like my own, particularly on show in the scene in which a young man travels to London to declare his love for an older woman, only when he rings her doorbell in order to propose, he finds she’s with her husband, whereupon he panics, and tells her he is come to London to enlist. Cue four years in the army, and the battle of the Somme."