num_pages: 498
description: The author of Armadillo , The Blue Afternoon and Brazzaville Beach —the novelist who has been called a “master storyteller” ( Chicago Tribune ) and “a gutsy writer who is good company to keep” ( Time )—now gives us his most entertaining, sly and compelling novel to date, a novel that 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.Here 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.A moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that summons up the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.
language: English
title: Any Human Heart
titlecomplete: Any Human Heart
characters: Peter Scabius, Logan Mountstuart
genres: Fiction, Classics, Contemporary, British Literature, Historical, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Literature, Novels
ratings_count: 21170
places: New York City, New York, Spain, England, Nigeria, London, England, France, Oxford University, Oxford, England, Paris, Bahamas
awards: awardedAt: 1009872000000
name: Booker Prize
category: Longlist, awardedAt: 1041408000000
name: Prix Jean-Monnet de littérature européenne du département de Charente, awardedAt: 1230796800000
name: LovelyBooks Leserpreis
category: Allgemeine Literatur, awardedAt: 1072944000000
name: Dublin Literary Award
publisher: Alfred A. Knopf