Even though he’s wearing his glasses, she’s standing “at the very limits of both the lenses in his Franklin spectacles”, as if he can’t quite get a purchase on who she is; as if she is, somehow, unknowable. His own three-part adaptation of his novel Armadillo was screened on BBC 1 in 2001 as was his adaptation of his novel Restless (2012). He develops an obsessive love for a Russian singer and this is both the driver of the book’s events and the main subject of William Boyd’s interest. When, on the promenade at Nice, he meets a tall Russian doctor with a pointy beard who is suffering from tuberculosis, he has no idea who he is.

Boyd's prose is no more than workmanlike in this book which manages to be both bogged down in detail (why do we need to know precisely which brand of cigarettes each character smokes? It’s a gently humorous moment, as if Boyd is drawing our attention to the tricks of his narrative trade – to his renowned storytelling knack of keeping us turning the pages to see what happens next.So we shouldn’t perhaps be too surprised that the Lika here in his new novel – also a blonde, buxom, would-be opera singer – is very like the Lika there. My sincere thanks to Penguin Books UK and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. In the past he’s given us, for example, the fictive autobiography of John James Todd in The New Confessions; the fake journal of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart; and the invented life of the artist Nat Tate, in the hoax biography of the same name. This novel takes place during the late 19th Century and the early 20th Century so piano tuning was an extremely important job and Brodie was known as the best piano tuner in Europe. Brodie falls hopelessly in love with Kilbarron's Russian mistress, Lika Blum, an aspiring opera soprano, and becomes a man obsessed.

He is also the author of a collection of screenplays and a memoir of his schooldays, School Ties (1985); three collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie 'X' (1995) and Fascination (2004). He works for the Channon Piano Company at their Edinburgh showroom and we follow him through the ups and down of his working life, track his physical health, meet his large family and travel as far and wide as France, Switzerland, Russia and the little known Andaman Islands (in the Bay of Bengal if you're wondering). Brodie is swiftly drawn into Kilbarron’s orbit, which includes his mistress, the beautiful would-be opera singer, Lydia “Lika” Blum, and his sinister, cheroot-smoking brother, Malachi. Opening in the late nineteenth century and moving through to the early years of the twentieth century, Love is Blind is a touching novel that follows the life events of a young man from Scotland, who finds fortune and love in his travels across the globe.Yet there is also a sense of mischief and playfulness imbued into its narrative that takes the form of several elaborate homages to other books and stories.