BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts hello,
I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks book and luxury they'd want to take with them
if they were cast away to a desert island.
And for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
I hope you enjoy listening.
My castaway this week is the writer William Boyd.
He's the award winning author of 18 novels,
5 short story collections and numerous screenplays which have made him one of Britain's most successful writers.
He's made the genre of whole life novels pretty much his own,
writing four of these cradle to grave narratives,
including Any Human Heart, which became a BAFTA winning television series.
Perhaps he was always destined to become a writer.
Growing up in the 1960s,
between the family home in West Africa where his father worked as a doctor and his Scottish boarding school,
he developed what he's called the curious eye of the permanent visitor.
His critically acclaimed breakthrough,
A Good man in Africa drew on the world of his childhood in Ghana and Nigeria.
His books combine broad historical sweeps with the intricacies of everyday life and interrogate what he calls the vast indifference of the universe.
The role of luck, good and bad, also intrigues him,