The Poet’s War

Author(s): Francis O'Neill

Location(s): Italy

Genre(s): Fiction, Historical

Era(s): Interwar period and WWII

JOIN A HEROIC WARRIOR POET ON A JOURNEY THROUGH LOVE AND WAR IN THE NEXT EPIC NOVEL YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO PUT DOWN

“Brilliantly written, with superb characterizations”
— Praise for Francis O’Neill in The New York Times Book Review

From the mold of the expansive family drama on the European stage comes a story of manners and morals. After a childhood in Italy with his mother and her upper-class family, Alistair Stears finds his world changed by the fighting in that country during WWI. He goes on to an education at West Point, and eventually leaves a posting in the Philippines for the more genteel pleasures of literary Paris. His experiences thus far in life inspire him to writing verse and he finds himself a poet of some renown. His epic war poem is not his last entanglement with battle and espionage. The Poet’s War by Francis O’Neill [August 2020] sets another stage for WWII and the fall of a certain way of living and thinking.
After all this observation of the German-Italian military and a marriage to Ottavia, the sister of his best friend, Alistair watches as Mussolini’s rule slides into Hitler’s influence. Alistair’s convictions against fascism and the Nazis lead to a dangerous stint as a double agent and the peril of all he holds dear.
“This book celebrates the last holding on of an oligarchism of knightly pedigree with a modest popular role. It was too fragile to last,” O’Neill says. “Alistair’s stepfather The Colonel reminisces about his grandfather’s words as the first steam train rolled into Turin: ‘That machine will be the downfall of the gentleman.’ Seventy years later, the Colonel agrees that he was probably right.”
For fans of sweeping historical narratives and complex familial drama, The Poet’s War is a return to the great novelistic style of the 19th and early 20th Centuries.

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