Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

[Tuesday evening book club]

This review was written by Erna Apostolellis, a member of the Tuesday Evening Book Club.

This is a spy thriller with a human story and starts in Vienna before the outbreak of WWI, late 1913 and ends in London two years later. The main character is an actor, Lysander Rief, who goes to Vienna to get a cure for a complaint preventing him from marrying his fiancé Blanche. He gets entangled with an artist but manages to escape back to London with some difficulty and a large debt hanging over his head. He enlists and spends time at an internment camp in England where the army makes use of his German language skills. He is soon transferred to another department for a more dangerous and interesting commission, and sent  on a mission to Geneva which he barely survives.

Nothing in this novel is as it seems, it is a fairly quick read with a fast moving plot. The author has the ability to immerse you into the world he has created.