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‘Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary.’ So says Logan Mountstuart, the hero of William Boyd’s eighth novel, Any Human Heart.

Any Human Heart tells the story of Logan’s long and rackety life, which spans every decade of the twentieth century in all its fantastic and humdrum, dangerous and tranquil, tragic and humorous aspects. A novelist who comes to know both great acclaim and astonishing neglect, Logan relates his life through his intimate journals, as he travels from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Oxford in the 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to global conflict in unlikely war-zones as the Bahamas and Switzerland. The post-war years see Logan living and loving in New York, West Africa, London and France, meeting all manner of idiosyncratic characters: his three wives, his family, friends, enemies, rivals and lovers. Virginia Woolf, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ernest Hemingway, Ian Fleming and the Baader-Meinhof Gang are some of the notables who form his eclectic circle.

Any Human Heart is a long, ambitious, all-encompassing novel, charting all the comedy and tragedy, the weirdness and vulgarity, the melancholy and absurdity of existence. A book about the beguiling and baffling mystery of individual lives, it is – in the end – an expansive exploration of what it means to call yourself human.

‘Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary.’ So says Logan Mountstuart, the hero of William Boyd’s eighth novel, Any Human Heart.Any Human Heart tells the story of Logan’s long and rackety life, which spans every decade of the twentieth century in all its fantastic and humdrum, dangerous and tranquil, tragic and humorous aspects. A novelist who comes to know both great acclaim and astonishing neglect, Logan relates his life through his intimate journals, as he travels from Montevideo, Uruguay, to Oxford in the 1920s, from the Spanish Civil War to global conflict in unlikely war-zones as the Bahamas and Switzerland....  Read More