Boyd is a great storyteller. I did find the story slightly long-winded, but brilliantly intricate and well-written. A truly unmissable story completely enthralling.

The story centres on a young Scotsman from a rural village with a large family of siblings that are dominated by a tyrannical father. He becomes an expert piano Tuner and escapes from his roots to enter into the world of concert pianists, concert halls and rich patrons. When he is hired as a tuner to a world class concert pianist he meets a beautiful Russian opera singer who lives Ménage a Trios with the pianist and is brother manager. There after follows a tragic love story that ends with the hero dying of consumption alone on a distant island in the Indian Ocean. It has all the elements of an Italian opera remonstrant of La Travolta. A most engaging story about obsessive love.

An epic, character driven novel which takes the reader all around the world with Brodie Moncur a Scottish piano tuner. Brodie meets Lika and his life is turned upside down with love, bordering on obsession. The novel explores the unmeasurable lengths that humans will go to for love, even at their own expense. It was fascinating and at times frustrating as Brodie was so blinded by love.
Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Brilliant read
An epic story with all the ingredients of love lies deception and revenge all mixed together.
William Boyd is a great story teller and this book certainly does not disappoint.

Really was gripped by this book and it stayed with me a long time after it ended. Boyd is a fantastic author and this book is as good as his best ( although a little overlong)
Read and enjoy

William Boyd is a consistently fine writer and this latest offering does not disappoint. It charts the travels and adventures of a turn of the century Scottish piano tuner. Sent to work in Paris he meets and is subsequently employed by a famous concert pianist.who he accompanies to St. Petersburg. The love referred to in the title blossoms there but leads to complications. As in previous Boyd books there is the occasional flash of unexpected violence. Subsequent travels to France and Italy follow but eventually he travels to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands (off Burma) where he works as an ethnographic researcher and his studies of the rituals and beliefs of the Nicobar Islanders presages the how the novel will end.

Another five star novel from one of my favourite authors. Such depth in his characters, a fine plot, fascinating detail and beautiful writing meant this was a joy to read from start to finish. I would highly recommend it to anyone.

If his author’s biography is correct, William Boyd is a world-class, near-universally revered author who has been long listed for the Man Booker Prize and awarded a CBE for his contributions to literature by the Queen.
I saw no trace of that here.
Maybe his identity has been stolen. Maybe this book was ghost-written. Maybe he has lost the spark that made him the author he once was.
I have honestly no idea. All I do know is, that if Love is Blind was lifted up as the pinnacle of literature, I would be one of the first to take to the picket line.
It’s just - if this is to be considered love, romance, obsession (whether that be with music or with another human being), then all of the colour needs to fade from this world and we must only be left with lifeless shades of grey.
Or rather, lifeless shades of pianos and boobs. Boobs and pianos. And neither were titillating, intriguing, sensual or erotic. In Love is Blind, there was no love or passion for anything, no matter how much the author tried to conjure up. It was utterly empty, flat, meaningless. Too obsessed with the details of the world at the end of the Victorian age, to be interested in portraying life within it.

Really like William Boyd so was looking forward to this. Wasn’t disappointed. Ask for it for Christmas as it’s a 5/5!

This was quick to read but has stayed with me after I finished it, would really recommend. Boyd's characters are beautiful and I love his descriptive language.

A welcome return to form by William Boyd after a few recent missteps. A very enjoyable, if slightly old fashioned - in a good way, saga with an engaging hero and an engrossing storyline. A very satisfying read!

I was sent a copy of Love is Blind by William Boyd to read and review by NetGalley.
An Atmospheric love story with a real sense of time and place. The author conjures up quite vivid scenes with his descriptive and evocative prose. One of the things I loved was the way he used a lot of archaic words that were true to the era, making it so much more authentic. Definitely a book to get lost in.

I always know that a William Boyd novel will make me forget that there is an author. He creates characters that are so believable in all their emotions, actions and flaws that I forget that they did not actually exist in the real world!

This novel crosses multiple countries and has a good enough dose of adventure to avoid being a simple mushy love story.

The level of detail that Boyd goes into makes the world he has created all the more believable and helps contribute to the plot overall. I have read some reviews of this novel which criticise the detail he goes into over the cigarettes Brodie smokes but it is actually a pretty important detail!

A lot of the novel is quite bleak (miserable settings which Brodie tries to flee from) but this emphasises Brodie's need for something other in his life. I am not a huge fan of this era of history so that is the only thing that made me hesitate over giving it five stars.

I'm a big fan of William Boyd and was looking forward to reading his latest. Its structure is similar to Any Human Heart and The New Confessions in that it follows the life of its main character. For some reason I was never fully engaged with the characters and didn't find the love story with Lika convincing nor the two baddies - the Kilbarrons. I got the feeling that Boyd was 'going through the motions. Parts of it I liked very much however. Whoever would have thought that piano tuning could be so interesting, for example. I think it deserves to be given a chance, but not one of Boyd's best.

William Boyd is a superb novelist and it always surprises me that he doesn't get the recognition he deserves. I have read several of his novels now and they are all excellent. Love is Blind is no exception. Set at the beginning of the 20th century it is has as always a wide ranging sweep. Focusing at first on the love between two young people but widening out to something much more. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

William Boyd is a prolific author and has received worldwide acclaim for his novels, but Love Is Blind is the first book I’ve read by him. It’s an historical fiction which spans the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It was the combination of a love story, the protagonist’s travel experiences in multiple countries and the certain knowledge I had that the author would have researched these places from a historical perspective that drew me to his novel and indeed the story captures the zeitgeist of the period.
It tells the fortunes of a young Scot, Brodie Moncur, who is living with his family in Edinburgh in 1894 and working as a piano tuner for Channon & Co. By virtue of his sound business ideas, he is given the opportunity to become Assistant Manager of the Paris showroom. He seizes this as the great opportunity of a lifetime, but also as a chance to escape his despotic father, who for some reason hates and despises him.
In Paris he encounters the enigmatic Lika Blum, a Russian singer, and immediately falls under her spell and so begins an intense love affair. Brodie’s profession and heart lead him to St Petersburg, Geneva, Vienna, Trieste and the Andaman Islands, where he thinks he is conducting a liaison of sophisticated subterfuge.
But the complications of real life kick in and William Boyd tells a tender tale of injustice, betrayal, revenge, ill-health and the fickleness of personal happiness.
Many thanks to Netgalley, Penguin Books (UK) and William Boyd for the opportunity to read and review Love is Blind.

I do enjoy this author and, although this was different to his spy and intrigue novels, I nonetheless really enjoyed it. He is so good at delving into someone's character, warts and all - apart from Lika of course, but that was the point - as she tells him herself, he wont' see her faults. I always thought there was something he was missing and that she wasn't particularly trustworthy, but again I suppose that is the point. I thought the end went on a bit and the ending itself was a bit contrived.

This is a slow burner, but an engrossing one. Brodie Moncur is a young piano tuner in Edinburgh at the very end of the nineteenth century, and the story of his passionate love for a singer is played out against a rich and detailed historical backdrop. Boyd's historical research is never less than meticulous, and is occasionally worn a little too heavily; but for the most part it's a joy to know one is in safe and careful narrative hands. Brodie is an appealing protagonist: ambitious, emotional, extremely short-sighted and not just literally so. The story begins in very close focus, with Brodie peering into the mechanism of a piano, and manages to retain that sense of close focus even when it widens out dramatically to sweep across Europe. A lovely read

Striking the right note

A talented Scottish piano tuner finds himself in Paris at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. There he meets an Irish virtuoso pianist, his Russian mistress and the pianist’s thuggish brother/manager. The plot turns on the relationships which develop, which include adultery, murder, musical plagiarism and revenge.

In many ways a typical novel by William Boyd, Love is Blind entertains, holds the reader’s interest, but does not mark itself off as one of the author’s best. Real people from the period dip in and out of the narrative, the doomed love affair unpacks a few surprises, and there is a pervading melancholy atmosphere hanging over the whole story.

It's another cracking read from William Boyd. If you're familiar with his work, the quality of the research and the prose will be no surprise. If you're not, I'd suggest it's about time you changed your ways.