Love is Blind by William Boyd - Tale of love on the run from Paris to India fails to sparkle
Fiction Love is Blind William Boyd Viking, hardback, 384 pages, €27.05
A young Scottish piano-tuner falls in love with a Russian opera singer in fin de siècle Paris. Brodie Moncur is in the city to manage the new continental showroom of the firm for which he works. There he employs a piano virtuoso called John Kilbarron, popularly known as the "Irish Liszt", to show off the merits of the instrument. Kilbarron is having an on-off relationship with the aforementioned diva, Lydia Blum, and she and Brodie soon start a passionate affair.
Brodie is so besotted with his Russian mistress, who goes by the diminutive Lika, that, on their second meeting, he felt "as if his innards were molten - as if he might melt in a puddle of sizzling magma on the floor".
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