November-December Book 2025, Any Human Heart
Talk About Books meets every third Wednesday of the month at the Guilford Free Library. Current meeting time is 5:30. This discussion is scheduled for December 17th to provide extra reading time for this 498 page book. In William Boyd's Any Human Heart, the fictional writer, Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, was born in 1906, and died of a heart attack on October 5, 1991, aged 85. From his early childhood in Montevideo, son of an English corned beef executive and his Uraguayan secretary, through his years at a Norfolk public school and Oxford, Mountstuart traces his haphazard development as a writer. Early and easy success is succeeded by a long half-century of mediocrity, disappointments and setbacks, both personal and professional, leading him to multiple failed marriages, internment, alcoholism, and abject poverty. Mountstuart's sorry tale is also the story of a British way of life in inexorable decline, as his journey takes in the Bloomsbury set, the General Str...