Thomas Flanagan (1923-2002) was an Irish-American, born in Connecticut. After serving in the Navy, he studied for his PhD at Columbia University, during which time his thesis was published as a book- The Irish Novelists (1959). His novels include The Year of the French, The Tenants of Time, and The End of the Hunt. Seamus Deane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1996 for his novel Reading in the Dark.
“Flanagan’s method is to plunge the reader into a strange, wild,
poetic, cruel, and finally hopeless world of Irish peasants,
absentee British landlords, revolutionary terrorists, and men and
women trying to hold on to what they have in a universe threatening
to turn upside down. You have to make your own way through this
landscape, so the stranger everything is for you, the more
adventurous the experience. The story Flanagan tells makes our own
dark times seem eminently manageable. I wanted to be taken
somewhere else by a book, and I was.” — Louis Menand, The New
Yorker
"...a circumspect and grippingly authentic account that stands as a
stark warning against the romanticisation of torrid times. The
result is a classic of historical fiction” —The Times (London)
“I recall the excitement when this book was published in the late
1970's - and then discovered (not always the case) that the book
merited it. Flanagan, an American history professor of Irish
descent, pulled off a substantial coup in that he brought a
historian's training to bear upon a romantic moment, the period
when the French landed in the west of Ireland in 1798 and all
Ireland thought liberation was at hand. His research never lies
around the novel in pools, it stains the entire fabric, so that
when his character's point of view is emerging from a dispossessed
farmer's clay hovel or a small town merchant's table in the local
hotel, we smell them - their clothes, their breath and (this is
Ireland after all) their politics.” —Frank Delaney, The
Guardian
"A masterwork of historical fiction." —The Philadelphia
Inquirer
"The book's wide-ranging scope and erudition are reminiscent of
Tolstoy." — Chicago Tribune
"This deserves every major literary prize." — Publishers Weekly
“In his prodigious first novel, Thomas Flanagan grants this
historic episode a new and panoramic life....[a] thoughtful,
graceful elegy.” — Mayo Mohs, Time
“Such a brutal and pathetic story would alone have sufficed to make
this book absorbing, but Flanagan has much more on his mind. He
means to create not only a plausible sense of place and character,
and an accurate account of evens, but to recreate, from barroom to
manor hall, the entire intellectual and emotional climate of the
time....not only a serious book...but a distinguished one as well.”
— Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek
“a rich and complex narrative...[an] extraordinary achievement" —
George Garrett, The New York Times
"I haven't so enjoyed a historical novel since The Charterhouse of
Parma and War and Peace." — John Leonard, The New York Times.
“handsomely written...[a] splendid novel.” — Denis Donogue, The New
York Review of Books
"Thomas Flanagan was one of irish-America's—one of the literary
world's—great treasures. he wrote in flowing, baroque sentences
that defied literary conventions born of minimalism and the modern
attention span. His novels had texture and context, and
were—astonishingly—critical successes and popular bestsellers."
—Terry Golway, The Irish Echo
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