The Rebels of Ireland: The Dublin Saga » (Reprint)

Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury, England, and educated at Cambridge University and Stanford University in California. His first bestselling novel, Sarum, was based on the history of Salisbury and Stonehenge. Russka, his second novel, recounted the sweeping history of Russia. London tells the 2,000-year story of the great city, bringing all of the richness of London’s past unforgettably to life. His last novel, The Forest, was set in England’s ancient “New Forest.” A former resident of London and New York City, Edward Rutherfurd has had a home in Dublin for over ten years. He has two children.


From the Hardcover edition.

Edward Rutherfurd’s stirring account of Irish history, the Dublin Saga, concludes in this magisterial work of historical fiction. Beginning where the first volume, The Princes of Ireland, left off, The Rebels of Ireland takes us into a world transformed by the English practice of “plantation,” which represented the final step in the centuries-long British conquest of Ireland. Once again Rutherfurd takes us inside the process of history by tracing the lives of several Dublin families from all strata of society – Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, conniving and heroic.

From the time of the plantations and Elizabeth’s ascendancy Rutherfurd moves into the grand moments of Irish history: the early-17th-century “Flight of the Earls,” when the last of the Irish aristocracy fled the island; Oliver Cromwell’s brutal oppression and confiscation of lands a half-century later; the romantic, doomed effort of “The Wild Geese” to throw off Protestant oppression at the Battle of the Boyne. The reader sees through the eyes of the victims and the perpetrators alike the painful realities of the anti-Catholic penal laws, the catastrophic famine and the massive migration to North America, the rise of the great nationalists O’Connell and the tragic Parnell, the glorious Irish cultural renaissance of Joyce and Yeats, and finally, the triumphant founding of the Irish Republic in 1922.

Written with all the drama and sweep that has made Rutherfurd the bestselling historical novelist of his generation, The Rebels of Ireland is both a necessary companion to The Princes of Ireland and a magnificentachievement in its own right.


From the Hardcover edition.