This book, he realised, was going to be long, for the simple reason that, with epics, size matters. “Well, I had just read that book, as a matter of fact, so maybe – yes!” Boyd has written four birth-to-death novels, most memorably 2002’s Any Human Heart. When I suggest he was perhaps entering William Boyd’s territory, he chuckles.
“For two years, I’d been working on this sprawling novel that describes a life from birth to death,” he says, when we speak over video in late July, he at home in his native Limerick. But for his proposed fifth, he was trying something a little more ambitious.
As one of Ireland’s finest writers, his first four novels – and two short story collections – had been critically lauded, enjoyed bestseller status and won awards, Ryan the kind of writer who manages to pack the most vivid life into an economical 200 pages.
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