The Romantic

Name: The Romantic
Rating: 4.25 (17215 reviews)

by William Boyd

First published 2022

Amazon

4.3(17,215)

Cashel Greville Ross is born in Ireland in 1799 and spends the nineteenth century repeatedly becoming someone new. As a young soldier he reaches the battlefield of Waterloo, then serves overseas before encounters with writers and travellers draw him into a wider European world. Love, debt, family secrets and restless ambition keep pushing him away from any settled career.

Cashel’s later lives take him through Italy, the eastern Mediterranean and Africa, where he joins the era’s expanding culture of exploration before eventually accepting diplomatic work in Trieste. Along the way he crosses paths with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley and witnesses the political and technological transformations of his century. The novel uses one invented life to connect war, Romanticism, empire, travel and the long search for a place to belong.