Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd: review Vienna, 1913. English actor and amateur poet, Lysander Rief, has a problem. An episode in his teens involving outdoor masturbation, his mother and a lie about the involvement of a worker on the estate has left him with a condition his psychoanalyst Dr Bensimon identifies as "anorgasmia." Lysander is engaged. However, at Bensimon's rooms he meets a troubled sculptress, Hettie Bull, and an affair ensues which frees him of his problem. Events soon take a turn for the worse when he is falsely accused of rape by Hettie, now pregnant with his child, after which he is confined first to prison and then to the British Embassy where, in return for allowing him to escape, British officials tacitly secure his future services. The action moves to London at the outbreak of the First World War, and begins to occupy the familiar territory of mystery and espionage we recognise from Boyd's recent novels Restless and Ordinary Thunderstorms: an intricately plotted world of spies, lies and the double-cross. Sent to Switzerland, Lysander inadvertently electrocutes to death the person he has been tasked with bribing and is almost killed himself on his return. Back in England, Lysander is put to work in the War Office to expose a mole. There he finds his own life implicated in a web of deceit and intrigue that will have further tragic consequences. In this compellingly experimental work Boyd employs a style more collage than broad canvas; there's a freeing up of perspective as the novel moves through modes of narration: the first person of Lysander's "Autobiographical Investigations," long passages of dialogue alongside an omniscient narrator who oversees other sections. As ever with Boyd there is an effortlessness to the prose and a piercing acuity to the period detail and evocation of place, along with thrilling set pieces, such as the Zeppelin raid on London at the novel's denouement. Several times, and in various states of distress, we find Lysander "waiting for sunrise." The phrase subtly encourages us to view the book as a bildungsroman, a coming of age story about an individual's self-enlightenment, as much as a sui generis thriller. Waiting for Sunrise proves that rarest of beasts: a tantalizingly experimental work that is also an immensely satisfying page-turner. Waiting for Sunrise William Boyd Bloomsbury, £18.99, 368pp