Book Description

This “vast and intriguing novel” explores the life of an Irish nationalist who exposed Britain’s colonial crimes—by the Nobel Prize–winning author (Guardian, UK). In 1916, the Irish nationalist Roger Casement was hanged by the British government for treason. Casement had dedicated his extraordinary life to improving the plight of oppressed peoples around the world—especially the native populations in the Belgian Congo and the Amazon. But when he dared to draw a parallel between the injustices he witnessed in African and American colonies and those committed by the British in Northern Ireland, he became involved in a cause that led to his imprisonment and execution. When Casement’s homosexuality was revealed by his prosecutors—who drew excerpts from his personal “black diary”—the resulting scandal tainted his image to such a degree that his pioneering human rights work was nearly forgotten to history. In The Dream of the Celt, Mario Vargas Llosa—one of Latin America’s most vibrant, provocative, and necessary literary voices—brings this complex character to life as no other writer can. A masterful work, sharply translated by Edith Grossman, The Dream of the Celt tackles a controversial man whose story has long been neglected, and, in so doing, pushes at the boundaries of the historical novel.