Christmas, 1864, in the last years of the civil war, a
twenty-year-old Irish Canadian, Eoin O'Donoghue, is newly hired as
the personal secretary to the prospective head of the embryonic
Irish Republican Army in New York, William R. Roberts. Appalled
that the mayhem he sees around him is also being planned for his
own country, Eoin offers his services to Gilbert McMicken, head of
Canada's secret police. So begins the trajectory of what Eoin
himself calls, self-disparagingly, his 'Judas informantcy.'...
Against a backdrop of fusion and collapse, 600,000 Americans dead,
one nation, Canada, about to be created, another to its south in
disarray, Irish militants plan northward raids to win a 'New
Ireland' on the continent (its capital, Sherbrooke, QC), to split
Ireland itself off from Great Britain, and to avenge reverse,
cross-border Southern terror hatched in Montreal and approved by
Jefferson Davis - murder and bank robberies in St. Albans, Vermont,
a form of germ warfare (yellow fever spread by trunks of black
vomit encrusted clothing), Confederate Robert Kennedy's almost
successful plan to fire-bomb New York City, and the shooting of
Abraham Lincoln. Under assumed names, safely housed in the Moffat
Mansion on Union Square (with a sunburst flag on the roof, lavishly
furnished in mahogany and green, center of the Irish Republic in
exile), live the secret, illegitimate twin daughters of James
Stephens, Fenian leader in Europe. Who will capture Eoin
O'Donoghue's allegiance - his employer, radical New York
businessman and Fenian William R. Roberts (later US ambassador to
Chile), Deirdre Hopper (Stephens), accomplished painter and
musician and daughter of the leader in Dublin, or Canadian
spy-master Gilbert McMicken, who regularly insists his protege
provide 'less poetry and more police work.' ...Two spirits also
stalk the book, one Edmund Spencer, author of the Faerie Queene and
the Sheriff of Cork, who celebrated the flowers of Ireland and
contemplated mass starvation of the Irish as an instrument of
Elizabethan power. The other is Thomas D'Arcy McGee, Irish
revolutionary, poet, journalist, Father of Confederation, the only
federal politician in Canada ever to have been assassinated (by
Fenian separatists in 1868), almost three years to the day after
Lincoln's death at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Art or
authority, union or secession, integrity or 'informantcy', rapine
and war or love and the peaceable kingdom - Eoin O'Donoghue,
reluctant patriot and spy, is torn by these choices.
General
Imprint: |
DC Books,Canada
|
Country of origin: |
Canada |
Release date: |
March 2013 |
First published: |
2014 |
Authors: |
Keith Henderson
|
Dimensions: |
230 x 140 x 16mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback
|
Pages: |
266 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-897190-96-8 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
Genre fiction >
Historical fiction
|
LSN: |
1-897190-96-4 |
Barcode: |
9781897190968 |
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