When Richard Deakin first asked me to read this book, I confessed to him that I was apprehensive;

I am not generally a fan of fictional versions of Byron’s life. In the event, I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it. Sometimes hilarious and sometimes moving, it has the great merit of sticking closely to the known facts whilst imagining what can only be imagined.

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After a beguiling magic realist opening which suggests what we all might experience on our deathbed – a conflict between different aspects of our character – the novel morphs into a vivid recreation of the life of the Poet Lord Byron. It’s a life which has long held a fascination for students of English literature, for biographers, for film makers and for writers of fiction. Not surprising, perhaps, as the Byron story is hard to beat.

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A ten-year-old boy from Aberdeen inherits an old English title and comes south with his mother to find his inheritance to be an ancient abbey – magnificent but crumbling and decayed. Writing poetry from an early age, he has a tempestuous adolescence, falls in love with both sexes, and at the age of twenty-one sets out on a grand tour of the Eastern Mediterranean. Two years later he returns with a poem which – when published – catapults him to instant fame.