Nobel Prize winner, Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel for about six years is a powerful historical-biographical novel re-imagining the life of Roger Casement. Irish champion of oppressed peoples, seen as a traitor by the British and tortured by his own sexuality. Beginning in 1916 with Casement waiting to be hung for his part in the Easter Uprising, the author, being as faithful to the facts as possible, takes us back through the remarkable life of this flawed hero.
| Primary Genre | Historical Fiction |
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As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man...Vargas-Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.
The Dream of the Celt features in the following genres: Historical Fiction, Modern and Contemporary Fiction, eBooks of the Month, Fiction, General Fiction, Recommendations
The Dream of the Celt is available in Paperback, Hardback
The Dream of the Celt was written by Mario Vargas Llosa and published by Faber and Faber
The Dream of the Celt has 498 pages
£11.69
