Question Of Loyalties - Hardcover

Massie, Allan

4.05

160 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0091739292 ISBN 13: 9780091739294

Publisher: Random House UK, 1989

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Winner of the Enid McLeod Award, this is a story of war and peace in the 20th century, which centres on the Fall of France in 1940. The novel's themes are treason, personal treachery, the delusions of ideology and the effect of these on both the actors and the innocents caught up in their wargames.

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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.

Review:

Addictively narrated ... Out of one broken man's story evolves the weighty history and treachery of a whole era. (The Times)

As a prose stylist, Massie can write like an angel ... taut yet elegiac, epigrammatic yet wistfully lyrical. (Sunday Telelgraph)

If anyone needs a virtuoso example of what fiction can do that history can't, I would direct them to this novel. It renders Vichy France absolutely palpable in a way I have not read before: in all its abysmal compromises, hatreds, self-loathings, betrayals and silences. (Nicholas Shakespeare Waitrose Weekend)

I have no hesitation in calling it a major novel ... Massie here has vigorously pushed back the narrowing boundaries of English fiction. This is a novel of scope, substance and strength all too rare today. (Spectator)

Miraculous. (Auberon Waugh)

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