A young boy adrift in a boat on a placid river; a grizzled old man sorting through piles, boxes and books. Which is truly Logan Mountstuart — and how did the boy become the man? Old Logan opens a journal dated 1926, and we are transported into the past as Logan, a young man studying literature at Oxford and aspiring to become a great novelist, vows to lose his virginity. He woos Land Fothergill, an equally ambitious "undergraduette" and part time labor-party activist, and fantasizes about Tess, a local girl who is sleeping with Logan's close friend and main competitor, Peter Scabius. When Logan graduates, he consoles his dying father by promising to work in the dreary family business. But instead he joins his other university friend Ben in Paris, where a chance meeting with Ernest Hemingway reignites his dreams of writing. And so begins a life of passion pursued, from first love to true love, escaping a suffocating earldom with his wife Lottie, reporting from the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, and reveling in domestic bliss with Freya in Battersea.
His dying father had counseled him to "enjoy good luck when it comes your way. It's all luck in the end." Logan has hurt and been hurt, seen much of the world, become a father himself, and still, he is so young. But will his good luck hold out?
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