Love is Blind by William Boyd (Viking, $37)

Award-winning literary writer William Boyd has a marvellous crossover ability to write a jolly good yarn, creating believable, engaging characters and vibrant scenes with a realism seldom seen. In Love is Blind, his 15th novel (his most well-known was Any Human Heart), Boyd has created another winner that is compelling and often funny, despite its increasingly lovelorn protagonist.

Brodie Moncur, an ordinary sort of Scotsman with an ordinary

ability to play the piano, employs his only distinguishing talent – perfect pitch – to be a piano tuner for fictional Edinburgh pianomaker Channon’s.

Life in Edinburgh is dull for Brodie, and his vitriolic bullying father provides no light relief. Given the chance to escape to Paris to tune pianos at Channon’s Paris shop, he happily packs his bags and goes to make his way in the world.

Brodie helps build the Paris showroom into a spectacular success – even though the accounts don’t reflect this – largely by contracting famous pianist John Kilbarron (‘‘the Irish Liszt’’) to play a Channon at all his concerts.

Using his prodigious expertise in adapting the piano to assist Kilbarron’s ailing hand, Brodie makes himself invaluable and becomes firm friends with the pianist and his manager-brother Malachi. But then he meets Kilbarron’s lover, Lika Blum, a Russian opera singer of mediocre talent but sublime beauty, and Brodie is stricken. She seems to reciprocate. And from that moment, his life is focused on when he can next be alone with her, and how to fool Kilbarron that the two are just friends.

True love, however, is not supposed to run smooth, especially not in novels, and Lika is duty bound to stay with Kilbarron and his brother, who seems to have some strange hold over her, leaving Brodie alone most of the time, and deliriously unhappy. He knows he should be enjoying himself in the great cities of Europe – we follow him to St Petersburg, Paris, Biarritz, Geneva, Nice – but unless he can fulfil his obsession of having Lika in his arms, the restaurant

meals, the wine, the beautiful palaces and homes he visits are nothing to him.

Perhaps it is Brodie’s restraint as a character that makes him a little dull, perhaps it’s the pedestrian way his sex scenes are described, perhaps it’s his irrational passion for Lika, but it’s tempting to want to give him a good shake-up now and then and tell him to get a life.

When Lika shows Brodie a pistol early on, it’s clearly a harbinger, and sure enough he manages to put it to good use. The ensuing pursuit of the two lovers from tsarist Russia to the south of France, to Paris, Edinburgh and

back to France by the increasingly demonic Malachi provides a picaresque turn-of-century travelogue that increases in tension as the enraged brother gets closer and closer.

To save them, Lika leaves Brodie and disappears. It’s her Malachi is after, she says. Brodie will be safe without her. Safe, perhaps, but lost. He spins a globe and randomly pins the Andaman Islands as his retreat, where the warmth and healthy air will hopefully improve his increasingly deteriorating consumption and where Lika may come to him at last. It’s Boyd’s skill to keep us on tenterhooks to the end. – Felicity Price

William Boyd has a marvellous ability to write a jolly good yarn.