Fascination: Stories

One of the most beguiling storytellers on either side of the Atlantic delivers a luminous new collection whose 14 stories are a series of variations on the theme of love-and its shady cousin lust. A film director’s journal becomes an unintended chronicle of his deepening and ruinous obsession with a leading lady ( Notebook No. 9 ). While flying business class, a well-behaved English architect feels the chill onset of an otherworldly visitation that will shatter his family and career ( A Haunting ). An unhappy young boy, neglected by both his father and adulterous mother, finds an unexpected friend in an elderly painter ( Varengeville ). Wise, unsettling, humane, and endlessly surprising, Fascination lives up to its title on every page, while confirming William Boyd’s stature as a writer of incandescent talent.