A Day's Ride: A Life's Romance

Algernon Sydney Potts is the apothecary's son who dreams of being a hero. Stuck studying medicine at Trinity College Dublin while his father plots a respectable future behind the counter, young Potts feels the unfair weight of ordinary destiny pressing down on him. His fellow students mock him; his father demands compliance; his life stretches ahead, predictable and unbearable. Then he hires a gentle cream-colored horse named Blondel and sets off into the Irish countryside, convinced that somewhere out there, romance and adventure await. What follows is a comic portrait of grand ambition meeting modest reality, as Potts discovers that the road to glory is rather less glorious than the novels led him to believe. Charles James Lever, the Irishman who entertained a generation with his rollicking tales, gives us a hero whose dreams are as big as his circumstances are small. For anyone who has ever stared at the horizon and wondered what lies beyond the life that was chosen for them.