In summer 1968, as a Swinging Sixties film encounters repeated catastrophes while being made in Brighton, England, the producer, novelist, and star actress associated with the production keep quiet about their secret lives. But something's gotta spill, and soon the FBI and CIA get involved. From the winner of Whitbread, Somerset Maugham, and John Llewellyn Rhys honors.

Set in the summer of 1968, Boyd's novel concerns three characters: Anny Viklund, an up-and-coming American actress with a pill habit and a checkered past who is in England filming a movie; Elfrida Wing, a once-successful novelist, dubbed "the new Virginia Woolf" by the press, who assuages a decade long writer's block with a secret alcohol habit and is floundering through a failing marriage with Reggie, the film's director; and Talbot Kidd, the film's producer and repressed homosexual hesitantly coming to terms with his true nature. The narrative proceeds in a wryly comic vein with Anny falling for costar Troy, Elfrida potentially overcoming her writer's block with a novel about Virginia Woolf's last day, and Talbot meeting an attractive young scaffolder repairing his house—until Anny's former husband, Cornell Weekes, a wanted terrorist, reenters her life and the story takes a darker turn. Anny implicates herself by giving him money, and the situation soon devolves into chaos, on the set and otherwise. VERDICT With finely delineated characters and a deft comic touch, Costa Prize winner Boyd (Restless) precisely skewers the absurdity of the movie business while sending his trio of characters toward a not uniformly pleasant reckoning with truer versions of themselves.—Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA