Acts of Allegiance
A Novel
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
For readers of The Goldfinch and classic le Carré, a propulsive tale of espionage, betrayal, loyalty, and love, set during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Marty Ransom, son of the Captain and heir to a hilltop estate near Waterford in independent Ireland, lives a comfortable, boring life with his tennis-playing, Anglican wife, Sugar, and a job in the Department of External Affairs. Among their closest friends are an Anglo-Irish couple, a banker who was Sugar's childhood flame and his alluring diplomat wife, Alison. But Marty is a man divided. While his father fought with the British Army and found respectability in marriage, Marty's closest childhood friend was his cousin Iggy, the rebel son of a working-class Irish patriot whose gift for tinkering with radio parts has grown into a bomb maker’s skill.
When Marty is lured into keeping tabs on the growing IRA activities in support of the Catholic North, he finds himself walking a tightrope of conflicting yearnings and loyalties, balancing between nations, lovers, and parts of his own past, never knowing whom he can trust. But after Bloody Sunday escalates the violence and the British mount a desperate operation to take out a notorious IRA bomber, he must choose, and risk putting everything he loves most—his wife and young son—as well as his own life, at risk.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Marty Ransom, the mild-mannered narrator of this remarkable novel from Irish author Cunningham (The Trout), works in the economics section of the Department of External Affairs in Dublin. With his wife and children, he spends weekends at his family's farm in the country, where, one day in the summer of 1964, his friend Alison, who's employed by the British Home Office and whose husband once dated Marty's wife, suggests that he should either have an affair with her or do some spying for the English. He agrees to the latter. As the years pass, Marty meets occasionally with Alison to talk about what the Irish government is planning, especially after the 1969 riots in Northern Ireland. Eventually, Alison asks Marty to help capture the Irish Republican Army's top bomb maker, Iggy Kane, who's his cousin and childhood friend. As Marty tumbles down the rabbit hole of espionage, his marriage begins to fail and his secret involvement with the English turns deadly. Readers are advised to pay close attention as Cunningham's beautiful, twisting story unfolds until arriving at its sad, shocking conclusion.
