Any Human Heart

Bestselling author William Boyd's most entertaining, sly, and compelling novel evokes the tumult, events, and iconic faces of our time as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart--writer, lover, and man of the world--through his intimate journals. The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book, then to Paris where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al., and to Spain, where he covers the civil war. During World War II, he is a naval intelligence agent embroiled in a murder scandal. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer, then on to West Africa, London, and, finally, to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity. This moving, ambitious, richly conceived novel summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.