Brodie, a young man born into a 'respectable' household in the Scottish countryside, will escape from Victorian rigid, fake morality to Russian emotional torment. The exotic places he visits are ultimately irrelevant to the true scope of his life, a scope that remains hidden to him for most of the journey. He wasn't of course, but I became so immersed in the lives of Logan Mountstuart and John James Todd that I really found it hard to accept I was reading a piece if fiction. Nevertheless, Boyd’s drama builds powerfully towards its ending, when at last Brodie arrives in the Bay of Bengal, and where he unwittingly mouths (in German) some of Chekhov’s own words. This was followed by LONGING, in 2013, on the main stage at Hampstead Theatre, an adaptation of two short stories by Anton Chekhov.

We follow Brodie from 1888, when he is eighteen, to 1906, in his mid-thirties, and from Edinburgh to Paris to Geneva to Nice to St. You look a bit Russian,” she says when Brodie grows a beard; Scotland, she tells him, when they arrive there in an attempt to shake off Malachi Kilbarron, reminds her of Russia, “the mood, the landscape, the poverty”.Born in Ghana and spending his early life in Nigeria, William Boyd is known around the world for his prize winning books. Heart wrenching, sentimental and moving, William Boyd’s 2018 release presents a tragic portrait of the challenges of love. In an attempt to finally win Lika’s heart and claim her as his own, Brodie’s faces an uphill battle to achieve his happy ever after.

This ultimately sets the tone for the last third of the book which becomes a paranoia- laden thriller. But then that’s always been the tension at the heart of Boyd’s work: that he gives us life’s game of snakes and ladders in the form of carefully plotted, self-consciously structured novels. Whilst in Paris, Brodie becomes involved with a famous, virtuoso pianist, John Kilbarron, his lovely young partner Lika Blum (a Russian opera singer) and his malevolent brother Malachi . It is inevitable that the towering success of Any Human Heart will define the rest of his career – and many might miss the quirky, low-key comedy of his earlier novels – but this fine, touching and clever book is the best thing he’s written since and deserves similar adulation.On the surface, it’s a rousing good yarn – a book that is, among other things, a novel about the fine art of piano tuning (Brodie Moncur, the protagonist, practices that profession), about love, passion, and revenge, and about how fateful encounters can change the trajectory of one’s life. When he was offered a college lecturership, which would mean spending more time teaching, he was forced to choose between teaching and writing. I find myself with a yearning too, to read some more from Boyd, who was already on my list of favorite authors, and some Chekhov, of whom there are numerous references throughout this story. First, because it charts the inner life of Logan Mountstuart, as he bounces between careers as novelist, wartime spy, gallery owner, lecturer and impoverished pensioner, more convincingly than you would ever expect through using the (surprisingly rare) literary form of the intimate journal. Moving from Paris to St Petersburg to Edinburgh and back again, Brodie’s love for Lika and its dangerous consequences pursue him around Europe and beyond, during an era of overwhelming change as the nineteenth century becomes the twentieth.

William Boyd’s layered and intricate novel begins close to its end point, with a brief prologue in the form of a 1906 letter from a British penal colony in the Bay of Bengal. She's also the mistress of John Kilbarron, the first famous pianist to accept Brodie Moncur's sponsoring contract.Rapture” might mean simply the ecstasy of passion that its protagonist, the young Scottish piano tuner Moncur, finds himself in when he falls madly in love with the Russian opera singer Lika Blum, but it also has the eschatological association of the end of days, a time when true believers in Christ will rise up to heaven and join him once more.

Its rowan- and yew-dotted cemetery was crowded with ancient graves, former parishioners, the late, good folk of the Liethen Valley.

Boyd, a self-confessed “Chekhov obsessive”, doesn’t tell us that Chekhov, like Brodie, had a passionate relationship with a blondwould-be opera singer whose name happened to be Lika. In the Andaman Islands, Brodie finds some peace and some perspective, as he embarks on an etnographic study of the aboriginal tribes from the islands.