ANDREW FFRENCH takes a peek at our latest book of the month, Any Human Heart by William Boyd, now a tv series on Channel 4.

In 2002, a review copy of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart landed on my desk with a satisfying thump.

The electric blue dustjacket stood out but I didn’t realise what an outstanding novel I would be reading until I embarked on a 500-page journey with Logan Mountstuart, the story’s central character.

I had read and thoroughly enjoyed one of William Boyd’s previous novels, The New Confessions, on a trip to Tuscany a few years earlier and had been a fan ever since.

That book also tells the story of one man’s life, but the narrative remains largely in the third person.

What makes Any Human Heart particularly memorable is that the story is told in the form of a diary, a journal of Logan Mountstuart, so that many of his thoughts are shared with the reader.

Mr Mountstuart turns out to be a very reliable narrator, even admitting he is in the wrong on many occasions, which made me warm to him more than if he failed to acknowledge any of his weaknesses.

Boyd, pictured, ensures that Mountstuart travels through the upper ranks of society because that means he can pepper the novel with interesting icons from the 20th century along the way.

On one page Mountstuart is bumping into Hemingway and the next Virginia Woolf – it’s part of what makes the novel fun, although it is sometimes hard to believe that he runs into so many famous faces.

We travel with Logan, or LMS as he likes to call himself in the diaries, as he endures his schooldays, enjoys undergraduate life at Jesus College, Oxford, and then travels to Paris, and Spain for the Spanish Civil War.

The intimate journals start at something of a snail’s pace. We learn how LMS tricks his way into the rugby first XV at school, but injury stops his sporting career before it has a chance to get started.

Then there is his sneaky affair with Tess, the girl in a country cottage on the outskirts of Oxford.

She is married to his best friend Peter Scabius but that doesn’t stop Mountstuart going to bed with her, and he shows precious few regrets afterwards.

These everyday incidents don’t sound particularly exciting when they are re-told, but Boyd includes them in the diaries to demonstrate LMS’s journey from boy to man.

The author carefully creates an authentic journal of a young man living in Oxford in the 1920s, right down to the footnotes mentioning Maurice Bowra and other contemporaries.

And before you know it, you have suspended your disbelief and are devouring every word of the journal, and the footnotes too, as if Mountstuart really had lived his extraordinary life.

And what a life it is...

After the Spanish Civil War and unusual postings in the Bahamas and Switzerland in World War Two, Mountstuart lives in New York, West Africa, London and France.

He marries three times, becomes a father, and along the way manages, most fortuitously, to meet the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, James Joyce, Ian Fleming and the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

Because Mountstuart also lives such a long life, from 1906 until 1991, Boyd is able to chart many of the landmarks of the 20th century.

Even though you know at the outset that you are picking up the journal of a man long since dead, it’s still very sad when Mountstuart dies.

The novel struck such a chord with readers when it was first published that many wrote to Boyd to say how much they enjoyed the diary and how much they missed Mountstuart.

The author has written other memorable novels, including his debut A Good Man in Africa, the comic triumph Stars and Bars and the spy thriller Restless, but it is likely that Any Human Heart will be the story he is best remembered for.