Introduction

One May evening in London, Adam Kindred, a young climatologist in town for a job interview, is feeling good about the future as he sits down for a meal at a little Italian bistro. He strikes up a conversation with a solitary diner at the next table, who leaves soon afterward. With horrifying speed, this chance encounter leads to a series of malign accidents, through which Adam loses everything?home, family, friends, job, reputation, passport, credit cards, cell phone?never to get them back.

The police are searching for him. There is a reward for his capture. A hired killer is stalking him. He is alone and anonymous in a huge, pitiless modern city. Adam has nowhere to go but down?underground. He decides to join that vast army of the disappeared and the missing who throng London's lowest levels as he tries to figure out what to do with his life and struggles to understand the forces that have made it unravel so spectacularly. Adam's quest will take him all along the river Thames, from affluent Chelsea to the gritty East End, and on the way he will encounter all manner of London's denizens?aristocrats, prostitutes, evangelists, and policewomen?and version after new version of himself.

Ordinary Thunderstorms, William Boyd's electric follow-up to his award-winning Restless, is a profound and gripping novel about the fragility of social identity, the corruption at the heart of big business, and the secrets that lie hidden in the filthy underbelly of every city.

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: In his surprising new novel (think The Fugitive meets Nobody's Fool), William Boyd explores how one chance occurrence can evolve rapidly into a life-leveling storm. Climatologist Adam Kindred is trying to establish a new life in London (far from his failed marriage and ruined career in the US) when he inadvertently stumbles upon a botched murder and becomes the chief suspect. Boyd manages to breathe new life into the wrong-man tale, weaving together vivid back-stories of intriguing characters, from the hired killer desperate to clean up his mess, to the ruthless executives out for profit, to the hardscrabble individuals Kindred meets while on the run. Ordinary Thunderstorms is anything but ordinary--an ambitious, engaging thriller that also raises questions about identity, religion, and social responsibility. --Daphne Durham

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