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

Holding back: Boyd’s novel is full of melodrama but there’s little tension in the telling. Photo: Getty Image

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".