Bamboo

Description: Throughout his career as a novelist, William Boyd has never stopped writing non-fiction, providing a fascinating counterpoint to the world of his novels. "Bamboo" gathers together Boyd's writing on literature, art, the movie business, television, people he has met, places he has visited and autobiographical reflections on his African childhood and his years at boarding school. From Pablo Picasso to the allure of the British caff, from Charles Dickens to Catherine Deneuve, from mini-cabs to Brideshead Revisited, this collection proves an engrossing and revealing companion to the work of one of Britain's leading novelists.

Review: 'The reader is getting a substantial amount of Boyd for his or her money ... Perhaps his professionalism as a writer combines with his abiding interest in art to give Boyd the rare skill of translating visual idiom into intelligent prose' Independent 'Wonderful ... there are enormous pleasures to be had from Bamboo' Spectator 'Serious, provocative, intelligent, Boyd's writing is endlessly open to ideas' Daily Telegraph 'One of the best writers in English' Sunday Telegraph

Author Biography: William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana and was brought up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of A Good Man in Africa, which won the Whitbread Literary Award for the Best First Novel in 1981 and a Somerset Maugham Award in 1982; On the Yankee Station (1982), a collection of short stories; An Ice-Cream War, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize for 1982 and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Stars and Bars (1984); The New Confessions (1987); Brazzaville Beach, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1990 and for which William Boyd was awarded the McVitie's Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year; The Blue Afternoon, which won the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; The Destiny of Nathalie X, a further collection of short stories; Any Human Heart; and most recently Restless, which won the Best Novel category of the 2007 Costa Book Awards. William Boyd is married and lives in London.

William Boyd's bestselling last novel, Restless, has sold over 340,000 copies, was shortlisted for Richard & Judy's Book Club and won the Costa Best Novel Award 2007 The Dream Lover, Boyd's recently re-jacketed short story collection published in April 2008 and has already sold over 15,000 copies Boyd is also a successful scriptwriter and has written and directed a feature film, The Trench