The year 1968 was one of global turmoil, a terrible hangover after the revelries of the ‘summer of love’ the previous year. The ongoing war in Vietnam, the riots in Paris and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy – all of these rumble in the background of William Boyd’s sixteenth novel, Trio. But its three main characters, temporarily living in Brighton during that troubled year, have many other things on their minds. American actress Anny Viklund is shooting a film called Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon, the producer of which, Talbot Kydd, is increasingly beleaguered. Elfrida Wing, the wife of the film’s director, is a novelist who hasn’t written anything for ten years.

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