The Romantic
A novel
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4.5 • 24 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the award-winning, internationally best-selling author, a beguiling romp of a novel, at once intimate and panoramic, about the adventures and misadventures of a nineteenth-century everyman
"Picaresque, big-hearted and moving, this is Boyd at the top of his game." —The Guardian
One man, many lives . . . Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most, from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is—which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of The Romantic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cast as a true story "discovered" by Boyd (Any Human Heart), this raucous picaresque chronicles an Englishman's search for fulfilment and his encounters with prominent historical figures. Cashel Greville Ross is raised by an aunt, his parents having drowned shortly after his birth in 1799. He joins the British army as a young man, serves as a drummer at Waterloo, and travels the globe in search of his fortune. In Pisa, he meets Mary Shelley, who introduces him to her poet husband, Percy, and the couple's good friend Lord Byron. In Africa, he races Richard Francis Burton and John Speke to locate the headwaters of the Nile. After he's almost court-martialed for disobeying orders in Ceylon, Cashel does a stint in debtor's prison in England, founds a brewery in America, and becomes an accidental smuggler of Greek antiquities in Trieste. He also falls in love with numerous beautiful women, among them a countess in Ravenna and a free-spirited Bostonian. Whether in describing military life on the far-flung frontiers of the British empire, detailing the financial perils of 19th-century publishing, or backgrounding Cashel's adventure as Nicaraguan consul to Trieste, this inventively charts the highs and lows of a life extravagantly lived. Once again, Boyd holds the reader spellbound.
