Born in a Yorkshire slum in 1955 and abandoned at three years old, the seventh child of a family that could feed none of them, Harry Slade escaped a bleak reality at seventeen with nothing but fear, a dangerous intelligence, and a teacher’s promise: that if he could concentrate his feral energy like a magnifying glass in sunlight he could burn through anything in his way.

He believed it. Out of the soot and the fists, Slade built businesses across three continents, made and lost fortunes, dined with the famous, and raised a second life in Monaco, Tuscany and Brazil after the first was taken apart by litigation, divorce and betrayal — surviving each brush with ruin and death by a margin so precise he came to suspect the universe of running a very personal account on him. And, in his seventh decade, he found unconditional love.

But beneath the glamour and the gallows humour runs a darker confession: the violence that survival demanded, in the slum and the boardroom alike; the things he did, and the things he left out; and the one wall he could never burn through.

You may not envy the journey. You will not forget the man who made it.