Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1814, Francis Jeffrey began his review of Wordsworth’s The Excursion with a provocative denunciation of romanticism: “This will never do,” he complained. His wife is editor-at-large of Harper's Bazaar magazine, and they currently spend about thirty to forty days a year in the US. In the soldiering phase of his life, after being rendered “unconscious through loss of blood” on a battlefield, Cashel wakes in a strange bed with his head full of a storyteller’s concerns: posterity, naming and narrative.

The life of Cashel spanning 80 years in the 19th Century tales in both real and fictional drama, woven together expertly. Boyd knows how to time the hights and lows, how to blend triumphs and tragedies, personal and historical .There is more of Thackeray and Trollope here, something of Meredith’s splendid Adventures of Harry Richmond, even of the mostly forgotten and always underrated Ouida. Described by one reviewer as ‘Around the World in 80 Years’, Cashel’s adventures take him across the globe to places as varied as Oxford, Venice, Zanzibar and Madras. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. There is, naturally, an all-consuming love affair, along with a suitably colourful supporting cast of rogues, swindlers, villains and even the odd honest man.

Set in the 19th century, the novel follows the roller-coaster fortunes of a man as he tries to negotiate the random stages, adventures and vicissitudes of his life.

I had a kind of test drive for that novel when I used anonymous photographs of real people in my art hoax, Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928-1960, a biography of this nonexistent painter, where I got people like [David] Bowie to join the conspiracy. Being the biography of Cashel Greville Ross, born in Ireland in 1799, buried in Venice over eighty years later, a picaresque, episodic narrative, reminiscent of Barry Lyndon or one of those Victorian novels originally serialised in a magazine. The Romantic is a long novel, but I read most of it in one weekend because it was so gripping I couldn’t bear to put it down.

My mid-20s were steeped in Romantic poetry because I spent eight years at Oxford not finishing a PhD on Shelley.

The character of Cashel Greville Ross shares some qualities with Henry Paget Flashman (to make matters worse). Later there is a retread of the famous scene in Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), in which the protagonist misses, to ironic effect, the real action at the battle of Waterloo. Love is Blind is a tale of dizzying passion and brutal revenge; of artistic endeavour and the illusions it creates; of all the possibilities that life can offer, and how cruelly they can be snatched away. William Boyd, 70, is the author of 26 books, including Any Human Heart (2002) – adapted for television in 2010 with three actors playing the lead role of Logan Mountstuart – and Restless, the Costa novel of the year in 2006. Our hero is Cashel Greville Ross, born in Co Cork in 1799, whose life spans swooping geographical leaps and great historical transformations.

You can polish your prose until it gleams, but a story that has readers wanting to know what happens next … that’s something you discard at your peril. You thought the road ahead was obvious and well marked but more often than not the destination you had so clearly in mind would never be reached.

Admittedly it is a fair criticism that you do eventually come to expect the inevitable outcome of his endeavours.