Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway worked as a journalist before serving as an ambulance driver in Italy during the First World War. In the 1920s he became part of the expatriate literary community in Paris, publishing The Sun Also Rises and establishing the economical prose style that became closely associated with his name.

His later writing drew on war reporting, bullfighting, hunting, fishing and travel, and included A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea . He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

William Boyd’s Any Human Heart brings Ernest Hemingway into Logan Mountstuart’s literary and expatriate world, where real writers and artists repeatedly cross the fictional diarist’s long twentieth-century life. Hemingway appears as part of the interwar culture of ambition, celebrity and rivalry that Mountstuart encounters before the narrative carries him on through war, espionage and the changing post-war literary scene.