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The Romantic

William Boyd

$22.99

Paperback

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English
Penguin
18 July 2023
From one of Britain's best-loved and bestselling writers comes an intimate yet panoramic novel set in the 19th century

Born in 1799, Cashel Greville Ross experiences myriad lives- joyous and devastating, years of luck and unexpected loss. Moving from County Cork to London, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, Cashel seeks his fortune across continents in war and in peace. He faces a terrible moral choice in a village in Sri Lanka as part of the East Indian Army. He enters the world of the Romantic Poets in Pisa. In Ravenna he meets a woman who will live in his heart for the rest of his days. As he travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, a father, a lover, he experiences all the vicissitudes of life and, through the accelerating turbulence of the nineteenth century, he discovers who he truly is. This is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.

By:  
Imprint:   Penguin
Country of Publication:   United Kingdom
Dimensions:   Height: 196mm,  Width: 130mm,  Spine: 42mm
Weight:   340g
ISBN:   9780241994078
ISBN 10:   0241994071
Pages:   480
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories. He is married and divides his time between London and south-west France. His most recent novel, Trio, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Reviews for The Romantic

Boyd is as magically readable as ever, and, as always with his whole life novels, there is an invigorating air of spontaneity * Telegraph * The Romantic is certainly a crowd-pleaser, an old-fashioned bildungsroman that kicks off in the early 1800s and follows the hero, Cashel Greville Ross, through a long and peripatectic life . . . Boyd knows how to time the hights and lows, how to blend triumphs and tragedies, personal and historical . . . genuinely poignant and wise * Sunday Times * Breakneck pace seems to be a function of Boyd's exceptional imaginative facility, which sees him just as irresistibly drawn to new ideas as his hero is . . . there's something irresistible about that energy . . . if a whole-life novel is intended to represent the span of a unique existence, then The Romantic gets it right * FT * William Boyd's new novel is one of his best * Scotsman * If it's true escapism you're after, William Boyd can always be relied upon to transport the reader from reality and his next offering, The Romantic, another epic that follows Cashel Greville Ross from 19th-century Country Cork to Zanzibar via Oxford and Sri Lanka, offers a wonderful literary getaway as the nights draw in * Vogue, A Most Promising Page-Turner of the Season * A globe-trotting adventure through the 19th century * i, Best Books for Autumn * Boyd's pile-up of set piece escapades offers a huge amount of fun * Daily Mail * There's a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that * Scotsman * A huge amount of fun * Daily Mail (Ireland) * One of our best contemporary storytellers * Spectator * There is a cornucopia of fine things here . . . The Romantic, always enjoyable, ranks with two of his best: The New Confessions and Any Human Heart. Both were intelligent and engrossing, novels you lived with. Both told a fine story very well. The Romantic does just that * Scotsman * William Boyd taps into the classic novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man's century-spanning life * Spectator * What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel? Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy * Sunday Telegraph on Trio * Reading William Boyd's Trio is like shrugging on a worn leather jacket on the first brisk morning of autumn: cosy but cool . . . He has enormous fun with the worlds - and egos - of page and screen * The Times on Trio *


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