William Boyd at his best. Grips you from the outset. You really invest in the characters and the weaving of different tales through the life of the central character is brilliantly done. My favourite Boyd book to date.

An amazing story. Got a bit sticky after about 1/4 in and I almost gave up but glad I didn't as once it got going again I couldn't stop reading and didn't want it to finish.

Boyd is an excellent storyteller and I was immediately drawn in to this novel, which follows the life of Cashel Greville Ross, a fictional character born in 1799. The protagonist’s adventures take him from Ireland to Oxford, then to the battle of Waterloo, then to India, and to encounters with real historical figures such as Lord Byron and the Shelleys, as well as other countless compelling situations. Each time Cashel hopes that the next episode in his life will be more fortuitous, that life will be fairer and that he will finally find his true self – he could be speaking for so many of us! I really loved this book. Nowadays I'm finding it harder to come across a novel that I'd much rather be reading than viewing on a screen and this is certainly one of them. Other characters in the novel had real vitality in the way they were portrayed and my imagination was fired by Cashel’s many adventures. Highly recommended.

What a great treat this is. It’s like a warm bath or a box of your favourite chocolates, the kind of book you can just pick up and wallow in, becoming totally immersed in the world of the protagonist while you enjoy every twist and turn. Cleverly combining fact and fiction, The Romantic tells the story of Cashel Greville Ross and a lifetime of love, loss, and adventure. Cashel lives an almost impossibly rich and varied life. As the illegitimate son of a governess and landed gentleman he finds himself fighting in the Battle of Waterloo, an officer in the East India Trading Company, a tourist in Italy befriending Byron, Percy Shelley, and Mary Shelly, having a love affair with an Italian noblewoman, becoming a bestselling author, a victim of a rogue printer ending up in debtor’s prison, a farmer, an ice trader ( who knew ice as once exported across continents?!) a brewer in New England, an explorer in search of the source of the Nile, and a ‘dodgy’ consul based in Trieste. Boyd picks you up and whirls you through each stage of Cashel’s incredible life, weaving together fact and fiction and brilliantly capturing the feel of the varied settings in the book as well as his protagonist’s dilemmas and emotions. By coincidence, the book I read before this was Ian McKewan’s Lessons, another story of one man’s life across generations against a background of real historical events. But where ‘Lessons’ felt fairly slow and joyless – a series of disappointments and betrayals with very little happiness in between, The Romantic is fast-paced and full of warmth, wit, and fun. It’s a hugely entertaining romp across continents taking in key events from the C19th while sharing an epic and intimate story of one man’s life. With thanks to Net Galley and the publishers for a free ARC in return for an honest review

There's no doubt Boyd is a master story-teller - but he distinguishes himself from others by being an excellent writer to boot. "The Romantic" is written in a style he has employed previously, being a whole-life biography, apparently gathered from historical source material, giving him the scope to use a variety of historical backdrops, while his protagonist, Cashel Greville Ross, is pulled in many different directions, both emotionally and geographically. The "source material" is fictional, but very convincing, in similar vein to Boyd's famous 1990s hoax biography of an "underrated" pop artist. In this story, however, we are transported through 19th century Europe, India, and the Americas, as Cashel's, adventures appear to be driven entirely by apparently random external events rather than by his own choosing. This calls to mind previous comparisons with some of Evelyn Waugh's heroes, but in this case perhaps more like Amis' "Lucky Jim", where despite equal shares of good and bad luck, he manages to deal with success as well as reversals of fortune, coming out, if not actually "on top", perhaps better than he might have expected. Although Cashel is swayed by his passions for several women - and one in particular haunts him to the end - I would not entirely describe him a romantic in that way. He is a romantic in that he seizes on each unlikely opportunity that life offers with total commitment, where other men might take a "once bitten twice shy" approach. The resulting exploits are indeed romantic, covering the Battle of Waterloo, sojourns in Italy with the "romantic" poets (Shelley and Byron), a safari to find the source of the Nile, and, perhaps less romantically, an enforced period in a debtors prison in London. Here we have a wonderful story, splendidly written, and illustrating why he has been described by some as the finest storyteller of his generation.