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Sign up todayAny Human Heart
Narrator
Simon Vance
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Length
15 hours 58 minutes
Language
English
Bestselling author William Boyd—the novelist who has been called a “master storyteller” (Chicago Tribune) and “a gutsy writer who is good company to keep” (Time)—here gives us his most entertaining, sly, and compelling novel to date. The novel evokes the tumult, events, and iconic faces of our time as it tells the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, and man of the world—through his intimate journals. It is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic, and humorous aspects.
The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay, then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book, then on to Paris where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al., and to Spain, where he covers the civil war. During World War II, we see him as an agent for naval intelligence, becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to New York as an art dealer in the world of 1950s abstract expressionism, then on to West Africa, to London where he has a run-in with the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and, finally, to France where, in his old age, he acquires a measure of hard-won serenity. This is a moving, ambitious, and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.
William Boyd, Scottish novelist and screenwriter, was born in Accra, Ghana, and attended university in Nice, Glasgow, and Oxford. He is the author of ten novels and a number of screenplays and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. He lives with his wife in London.
Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.
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Reviews
“Boyd does such a nimble job of ventriloquism in the book’s opening sections that we find ourselves forgetting that Mountstuart is a fictional character.”
“Such an antic plot should not succeed, and yet disbelief remains suspended, thanks to Boyd’s skill in producing a novel that successfully mimics a diary in all its human pettiness. He allows Mountstuart’s voice to age like port.”
“A pleasure front to back, and a fond tip of the bowler hat to the upper-class fiction spawned by a long-gone world.”
“Boyd has an exceptional ability to tell a really compelling story, in dense imaginative detail, about characters with complex, and convincing, emotional lives…I’ve already read this book twice and probably shall again. Of how many novels can that be said?”
“Its pleasures are endless…Supremely entertaining.”
“A novel of deep humanity and insight.”
“One of the most skillful and appealing writers at work today.”
“A wonderful character—and a wonderful book…Boyd persuades you that you’ve read the confidences of a real, flawed, marginal character battered by every malice and caprice of twentieth-century history.”
“Entertaining and moving…Can be read with sheer pleasure not only for the delicacy of its emotions but for the truth of its perceptions. Like saying goodbye to a good friend, it’s hard to see this brilliant novel come to an end.”
“The sort of rare novel that redeems the essential purpose of prose fiction…A high celebration of the plain fun of a life lived with relentless appetite and reasonable grace.”
“Some nine years after its original publication, Boyd’s classic novel finds its way to audio, with Simon Vance narrating the lifetime of diary entries that tell the story of shambling hero and Englishman Logan Mountstuart. Spanning many decades, the book follows Mountstuart as he navigates boarding school, the 1929 Wall Street crash, WWII, and a very long life—all while meeting a host of famous artists and writers along the way. Vance narrates at a brisk clip, almost faster than the prose demands—but by doing so, he captures the essential Mountstuart: a man unsure about the meaning of a life that is speeding along. And for Boyd’s comic, overstuffed, heartbreaking gem of a novel, this is just right.”
“Surely one of the most beguiling books of this season.”
“Lavishly imagined…This is a masterfully drawn historical novel, utterly convincing in its depiction of events…Brimming with vitality, pathos, and psychological intimacy. Enthusiastically recommended.”
“A remarkable achievement.”
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