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His new novel, The Romantic, is an epic romp of a tale encompassing our hero’s inadvertent adventures and countless bad decisions. We wince as he makes them, and applaud him when he doesn’t. We accompany our man all over the globe, from his home in Ireland, as the son of a governess; as a soldier at Waterloo to an itinerant tourist Italy; as an officer in the Kandyan Wars in south Asia (look up the Kandyan Wars for a quick peek at some shocking British military maneuvers) ; as an explorer set to map the Nile in Africa; and to Massachusetts as a farmer. He befriends Lord Byron and Percy Byshe Shelley along the way, and his yearning for the love of his life runs through the novel.
Boyd’s The Romantic is so many things– a love story, a saga about a rebellious and indignant young man whom we grow to adore, and of course an elegy to the Romantics –with some scandalous details about Shelley and Byron thrown in for context.
Who knows an author’s work better than anyone? The editor. Diana Tejerina Miller knows how to turn out great novels. She is a Vice President, Executive Editor at Alfred A. Knopf, joining the company in 2003. Among the books she has published are Leila Mottley’s bestselling debut novel, Nightcrawling; Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize–winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North; Joanna Quinn’s bestselling debut novel, The Whalebone Theatre; and Esi Edugyan’s Giller Prize–winning novel, Washington Black.
