Sweet Caress

Sweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay is a novel by William Boyd, published by Bloomsbury in 2015. A fictional autobiography supposedly written by a woman, Amory Clay, born in 1908, it includes extracts from her diary, written on a Hebridean island in 1977, with flashbacks from her career as a photographer in London, Scotland, France, Germany, the United States, Mexico and Vietnam. The book also includes more than 70 photographs, collected by Boyd, most of which are attributed to her.

Boyd describes it as a "whole life novel" in that it tells the story of the book's main character "from cradle to grave", a technique he also employed in The New Confessions (1987), Any Human Heart (2002) and later The Romantic (2024).

The book is dedicated to Boyd's wife, Susan.