It is no accident that William Boyd names his key character “Lysander” – the name of the iconic lover of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the victim of misapplied magic.

Lysander Rief is a British actor of some renown on the world stage of life, as the rumblings of World War I become more and more pronounced. We meet him in Vienna where he is “taking the talking cure” with a disciple of Sigmund Freud’s as a result of a personal problem. While in his psychotherapist’s antechamber, he meets up with two others who will ultimately have a profound effect on his life. He falls under a magical love spell of sorts with the woman, Hettie (think: Hermia from the Shakespeare play). And, as Shakespeare’s own Lysander famously said, “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

As in the play, Lysander will be forced to literally and figuratively enter a forest, a place of confusion, passion, heartache. And he will ultimately realize that “We’re all acting, aren’t we? Almost all the time—each and every one of us.”

All of this is ensconced within a gripping espionage story as Rief, back in London during war time, is thrust into the world of underground intelligence, where his superiors are eager to use him to flesh out a traitor who is undermining the war efforts. Rief will be forced to rely on his improvisational acting skills to reveal that traitor’s identity. He will not know whom to trust and who will betray him. Gradually, he begins to inhabit a world “where it’s hard to make things out clearly, hard to tell exactly what is what and who is whom.”

If all this sounds intriguing – it is. I am not typically a fan of the espionage story, but this one had me compulsively turning pages. The characterizations are well fleshed-out, the sense of place is finely-drawn, and the depiction of what is real and what can be trusted is palpable. From the antechambers of Vienna to the battlegrounds of London to the elusive streets of Geneva, this book captured my attention and kept me reading on as more and more is revealed. It is the first book I’ve read by William Boyd and it will not be the last.