William Boyd · 2022 · global

William Boyd's whole-life novel, presented as the rediscovered autobiography of Cashel Greville Ross, born in County Cork in 1799 and dead in Trieste in 1882. Soldier, felon, farmer, writer, lover, explorer: he is wounded at Waterloo at sixteen, cashiered in Ceylon for refusing to massacre a village, drinks with Byron and the Shelleys at Pisa, loses his heart at Ravenna, farms in America, goes bankrupt into a London debtors' prison, and races Burton and Speke for the source of the Nile. One man threaded through the whole of the nineteenth century.

1. 1
   County Cork

   Born in 1799 in irregular circumstances and raised at Stillwell Court by a woman he believes to be his aunt. The first of his many lives, and the only one he does not choose.

2. 2
   Oxford

   Moved to England as a boy by the father he does not yet know he has, and given the education that will let him write all the rest of this down.

3. 3
   Waterloo

   June 1815. He runs away to the army, trudges into Belgium with his regiment to intercept Napoleon, and is shot at sixteen - not quite in the buttocks, a little lower. He will spend the rest of his life wearily conceding that being a Waterloo man is a cliche, and privately maintaining it ought to have been called the battle of Nivelles.

4. 4
   Kandy

   Ceylon, with the army of the East India Company. Ordered to help exterminate a village of rebels, he refuses, and is cashiered for it - the first time his conscience costs him a life he had built.

5. 5
   Pisa

   Spring 1822. He falls in with Mary Shelley, who introduces him to her husband and to Byron, and for one season he is inside the Romantic movement looking out. Then Shelley drowns in the Gulf of Spezia, and Cashel stands on the sand while they burn him.

6. 6
   Ravenna

   Where he meets the woman who will live in his heart for the remaining sixty years of his life, and does not get to keep her. Everything after this is, in one way or another, about her.

7. 7
   Boston

   America, and a farm, and a serious attempt at being an ordinary man in a new country.

8. 8
   London

   Bankrupt, and into a debtors' prison. The felon among his many lives.

9. 9
   Zanzibar

   The island where the African expeditions begin, and where he sets out to do the one thing the century most wants done.

10. 10
    Lake Tanganyika

    Inland along the caravan road, racing Richard Burton and John Speke for the headwaters of the Nile. The last great thing he attempts, and it is not his name that ends up in the books.

11. 11
    Zanzibar

    Back down the long road to the coast, older, and out of Africa for good.

12. 12
    Venice

    In hiding, under another name. His name and his nationality have both proved as mutable as everything else about him.

13. 13
    Trieste

    The last life: a minor diplomat, consul in a city on the edge of an empire, dying in 1882 with his papers in a box - the papers Boyd claims to have found, and out of which all of this is supposedly taken.