A Question of Loyalties
Jan 2020 · Canongate Books
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352
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About this ebook
A man returns to France to unravel the truth about his father's actions during WWII in "a novel of scope, substance and strength all too rare today" ( Spectator).
Widely acclaimed as Allan Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties explores the complexities of loyalty, nationality, and family legacy after the horrors of World War II. Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book is "addictively narrated . . . Out of one broken man's story evolves the weighty history and treachery of a whole era" ( The Times).
Etienne de Balafré, half French, half English, and raised in South Africa, returns to postwar France to unravel the tangled history of his father. Was Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?
"I have no hesitation in calling it a major novel . . . Massie here has vigorously pushed back the narrowing boundaries of English fiction." — Spectator
Widely acclaimed as Allan Massie's finest novel, A Question of Loyalties explores the complexities of loyalty, nationality, and family legacy after the horrors of World War II. Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this powerful book is "addictively narrated . . . Out of one broken man's story evolves the weighty history and treachery of a whole era" ( The Times).
Etienne de Balafré, half French, half English, and raised in South Africa, returns to postwar France to unravel the tangled history of his father. Was Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?
"I have no hesitation in calling it a major novel . . . Massie here has vigorously pushed back the narrowing boundaries of English fiction." — Spectator
About the author
Allan Massie was born on 19 October 1938 in Singapore, and was educated at Trinity College, Glenalmond and Trinity College, Cambridge. He began his career as a teacher (1960-71) at Drumtochty Castle School, and also taught English as a second language in Rome (1972-5). He was Creative Writing Fellow at Edinburgh University (1982-4) and at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities (1985-6). He was a member of the Scottish Arts Council (1989-91), a Trustee of the National Museums of Scotland (1995-8), and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Allan Massie was a columnist for the Glasgow Herald (1985-8) and the Sunday Times Scotland (1987-91), and has been fiction reviewer for The Scotsman since 1976. He has been a columnist for the Daily Telegraph since 1991, The Daily Mail since 1994, and the Sunday Times Scotland since 1996. A former editor of the New Edinburgh Review, he also contributes to the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.
Alan Shaw Taylor was born in 1955 in Portland, Maine. He graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine in 1977. He went on to earn his PhD. from Brandeis University in 1986. He has become a professor of history at the University of California. Taylor is best known for his contributions to microhistory which he demonstrated in his Pulitzer Prize winning history of William Cooper and the settlement of Cooperstown, New York. In this work, Alan Taylor uses court records, land records, letters and diaries to reconstruct the economic, political and socila history of New England and the settlement of New York. He is also a regular contributor of book reviews and essays to The New Republic. His books include William Cooper's Town: Power & Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for history and the Bancroft Prize in American History. In 2014, he once again won the Pulitzer Prize for History in his title: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832.
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