Thomas Flanagan (1) (1923–2002)

Flanagan's End of the Hunt picks up where Tenants of Time left off; right after the Easter Rebellion. So begins the birth of the IRA (Irish Republic Army). Flanagan weaves intimate portraits of widow Janice Nugent as she tries to find love again; Patrick Prentiss as he navigates the world as a World War I amputee; and Frank Lacy, a contradiction in character with his weapons and Virgil in hand. Character development is so on point you swear you have met these people before. Meshed with real historic events and people, it is easy to see why End of the Hunt is a best-seller.… (mer)

1798. Ireland. It all starts when a school teacher is asked to write a letter to a landlord. Arthur Vincent Broome offers a narrative of the events that followed. Malcolm Elliot writes a memoir. Sean MacKenna shares a diary. Characters from every angle share a voice in the telling. Thus begins a long and tumultuous history of Ireland, starting with the Rebellion of 1798. As with any war, the Rebellion is violent tide that sweeps up anyone in its path, be they Protestant, Catholic, Papist, landowner, landless, landlord, farmer, soldier, blacksmith, teacher, poet, peasant, gentry, French, English, Irish, man, woman, or child. Narratives come from all of the above and readers are cautioned to read carefully, to concentrate on the voices. Flanagan puts you into the plot so well that at any given moment you are either on the side of the Protestants or Catholics. Either the French or the English welcomed you into their camps. Year of the French describes war maneuvers as well as personal rifts between families, struggles in marriages and livelihoods.… (mer)

During the tumult of the French Revolutionary Wars - before the Great Man himself transformed them into the Napoleonic Wars - the haphazard French attempts to aid Irish rebels in their independence are usually relegated to a footnote. After all, we know how the story ends, and the classically British mix of luck, skill, and sheer ruthlessness which ended those efforts condemned the Irish to over a century more of brutal colonial rule. But in Flanagan's hands this doomed effort to spread the flame of the Revolution to 1798 Ireland takes on a epochal significance. The French generals, British commanders, Catholic peasants, Protestant landlords, and more who populate the novel struggle with their own pieces of the conflict while never seeing quite the whole thing; it's an absorbing study of how warfare works on the ground as well as an effective way to shoe how different a cause seems on each side of the argument. You see the contradictions of French atheists liberating Catholic Irish from Protestant English, as well as the difficulty in replicating the formula of the self-liberation of the French in a country without its institutions and with a very different sense of itself, all while knowing that no matter how important the Irish struggle for self-determination felt to them, that even to their French allies they were a sideshow and a means to a broader end. It begins slowly, but by the end you get that rare sense of visiting a real living world that only the best historical fiction delivers.… (mer)