Brian Moore

Marie Davenport is planning to tell her husband Alex that she wants to leave him at the end of their French holiday. Before she can break the news, however, he is killed in a dreadful boating accident. She returns to the States and her lover but finds a surprise awaiting her.

Michael Dillon faces an impossible choice: ordered by the IRA to park his car in the carpark of a Belfast hotel, he knows that he will be planting a bomb that will kill and maim dozens of people, but that, if he doesn’t, his wife will be killed.

Set in the late 1850’s in France and Algeria the novel revolves around Emmeline Lambert, married to an illusionist sent by Napoleon III to persuade the Arabs that France is the greater power. Emmeline dazzles the Emperor and sheds her inhibitions along with notions of patriotism and propriety.

Father Paul Michel, a Canadian missionary on the desperately poor Caribbean Island of Ganae, rescues a little boy from abject poverty and sets him on the road towards a dramatic and dangerous future as a revolutionary Catholic priest.