William Boyd

William Boyd, one of Britain’s best-loved writers, visits us in Bath this Autumn to talk about his new novel The Romantic, an intimate yet panoramic story set across the nineteenth century.

Boyd was born in 1952 in Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. He is the author of sixteen highly acclaimed, bestselling novels and five collections of stories, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year.

Soldier. Farmer. Felon. Writer. Father. Lover.
One man, many lives.

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. We do hope you’ll join us for a chance to listen to a brilliant literary figure talk about his work. 

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‘There are few reading pleasures as great as giving in to a William Boyd novel’ ~ Sunday Times

‘Simply the best realistic storyteller of his generation’ ~ Sebastian Faulks