The Romantic (William Boyd)
About this novel The Guardian wrote: picaresque, moving and big-hearted, this book is Boyd at his best.
Yes, picaresque, sentimental, the adventures of a romantic man who clung to the image of the woman he fell in love with at a young age, and kept in his heart for the rest of his life. And when he meets her as an old man and regrets having lost almost all the life, she tells him: We have to accept the lives we live, and not imagine the lives we could have lived.
Cachel Ross, soldier, writer, farmer, lover, ambassador, many lives in one.