The 13th Apostle
A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising
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4.6 • 7 Ratings
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The story—both romantic and terrifying—of how a handful of men, armed with nothing more than handguns and guts, forced the greatest nation in the world from their shores.
On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O’Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years.
The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins’s secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed “The Twelve Apostles.” On November 21, 1920, the squad—with its thirteenth member, young Eoin—assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland.
An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French and Leon Uris’s Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.
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PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
McEvoy's (Terrible Angel) choice to often interrupt a good historical novel about the Irish revolt against English rule that began in 1916 with scenes from 2006 featuring the grandson of one of the leads can prove distracting. But that aside, the author presents an engrossing blow-by-blow account of Michael Collins's efforts to bring independence to Ireland. Much of the story is told from the vantage point of Eoin Kavanagh, a fictional character, who joins Collins as a 14-year-old and rises through the ranks to become the charismatic leader's right-hand man. Kavanagh helps develop a sophisticated intelligence network to gather information about the British, but inevitably, his role becomes a violent one. Some aspects of the 2006 sections are puzzling, as when Kavanagh's grandson and wife speculate about a potential movie about Collins 10 years after a major Hollywood production but the natural drama of the rebellion comes through strong and clear.
