Cashel Greville Ross experiences more of everything than most --- from the rapturous to the devastating, from surprising good luck to unexpected loss. Born in 1799, Cashel seeks his fortune across the turbulence of multiple continents, from County Cork to rural Massachusetts, from Waterloo to Zanzibar, embedded with the East Indian Army in Sri Lanka, sunning himself alongside the Romantic poets in Pisa. He travels the world as a soldier, a farmer, a felon, a writer, even a father. And he experiences all the vicissitudes of existence, including a once-in-a-lifetime love that will haunt the rest of his days. In the end, his great accomplishment is to discover who he truly is --- which is the romance of life itself, and the beating heart of THE ROMANTIC.

It’s summer 1968, and the world is reeling from war and assassinations, protests and riots. In a sunny British seaside town, a producer, a novelist and an actress are enduring their own more private crises on the set of a disaster-plagued movie. All are leading secret lives --- one is in the closet; another is an alcoholic; and the third is sleeping with her costar --- and as the shoot zigs and zags, these layers of secrets become increasingly more untenable. Pressures build inexorably...and that’s before the FBI and CIA get involved. Someone is going to crack. Or maybe they all will.

When he is hired as the personal piano tuner for a brilliant pianist, Brodie Moncur suddenly finds himself swept up into a life of luxury that he never could have imagined. But while accompanying his new employer on tours from Paris to St. Petersburg, Brodie falls madly in love with the Russian soprano Lika Blum: beautiful, worldly, seductive --- and forbidden. Though seemingly doomed from the start, Brodie’s passion for Lika only grows as their lives become increasingly more intertwined, more secretive and, finally, more dangerous.

When Amory Clay was born, her disappointed father gave her an androgynous name and announced the birth of a son. But this daughter was not one to let others define her; Amory became a woman who accepted no limits to what that could mean, and, from the time she picked up her first camera, one who would record her own version of events. Moving freely between London and New York, between photojournalism and fashion photography, and between the men who love her on complicated terms, Amory establishes her reputation as a risk taker and a passionate life traveler.

It's 1969 and, having just celebrated his 45th birthday, James Bond --- British special agent 007 --- is summoned to headquarters to receive an unusual assignment. Zanzarim, a troubled West African nation, is being ravaged by a bitter civil war, and M directs Bond to quash the rebels threatening the established regime.

Lysander Rief, a young English actor, becomes caught up in a feverish affair with a beautiful, enigmatic woman. When she goes to the police to press charges of rape, however, he is stunned. Only a carefully plotted escape saves him from trial. But the frenzied getaway sets off a chain of events that steadily dismantles Lysander's life as he knows it.

Any Human Heart is a moving, ambitious and richly conceived novel that embodies the heroics and follies of twentieth-century life.