William Boyd · 2002 · global

William Boyd's 2002 novel, written as the intimate journals of Logan Mountstuart, 1906 to 1991. Writer, art dealer, naval intelligence officer and eventually a pensioner eating dog food in London, he crosses most of the twentieth century sideways - Uruguay to Oxford, Paris to Spain, the Bahamas to Nigeria - and is present at a great deal without ever quite arriving.

1. 1
   Montevideo

   Born in 1906 to a Uruguayan mother and a Scottish father managing a corned beef company. The family sells up and sails for England in 1914, arriving a week before the war - the sort of timing Logan keeps for eighty years.

2. 2
   Birmingham

   An English boyhood in the Midlands and a minor public school, where he meets Peter Scabius and Ben Leeping, the two friends who will still be in the journals sixty years later, both more successful than he is.

3. 3
   Oxford

   Jesus College, an indifferent degree, Evelyn Waugh at a party, and a first book that does well enough to convince him he is a writer - which he spends the rest of the century intermittently failing to be.

4. 4
   Paris

   The twenties as a young author abroad: Hemingway, Joyce and Picasso encountered in bars and studios, and Boyd's central joke running quietly underneath - Logan is always in the room and never quite in the photograph.

5. 5
   Barcelona

   Spain during the civil war as a correspondent, which is where the century stops being a backdrop and starts taking things off him - the first of several losses the journal records in a very few flat words.

6. 6
   Nassau

   Naval intelligence in the Bahamas under the Duke of Windsor, recruited by Ian Fleming - and a wartime posting that turns from farce to something much worse, and costs him years of his life afterwards.

7. 7
   New York

   The fifties as an art dealer, selling Abstract Expressionists to people with more money than eye - and being told by an American, in a bar, that he is a loser, a word he decides means something different in Europe.

8. 8
   Ibadan

   A lectureship in Nigeria in the sixties, and then Biafra - a middle-aged Englishman teaching literature in a country coming apart, and reporting it in the same tone he used for the parties in Paris.

9. 9
   London

   Old, broke and living on dog food in a Pimlico flat, he falls in with a group of young leftists almost by accident - the last of the century's movements to pass through a life that has been a series of them.

10. 10
    The Dordogne

    He retires to a village in south-west France, keeps chickens and a dog, and dies of a heart attack in 1991 at eighty-five - the journals stopping mid-thought, as they have done after every other chapter of his life.