Picture of author.

Thomas Flanagan (1) (1923–2002)

Author of The Year of the French

For other authors named Thomas Flanagan, see the disambiguation page.

5 Works 1,261 Members 25 Reviews 3 Favorited

About the Author

Image credit: From the cover of "There You Are"

Series

Works by Thomas Flanagan

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Members

Discussions

The Irish History Novels of Thomas Flanagan in Historical Fiction (July 2016)

Reviews

Flanagan's End of the Hunt picks up where Tenants of Time left off; right after the Easter Rebellion. So begins the birth of the IRA (Irish Republic Army). Flanagan weaves intimate portraits of widow Janice Nugent as she tries to find love again; Patrick Prentiss as he navigates the world as a World War I amputee; and Frank Lacy, a contradiction in character with his weapons and Virgil in hand. Character development is so on point you swear you have met these people before. Meshed with real historic events and people, it is easy to see why End of the Hunt is a best-seller.… (more)
 
Flagged
SeriousGrace | 8 other reviews | Jun 29, 2023 |
This is the account of the Fenian Rising of 1867 in the time of the Parnell Special Commission. All of Ireland rises up and greets war with bravery and stern determination. The chief storytellers are Patrick Prentiss and Hugh MacMahon, but you'll also meet Robert Delaney, a shopkeeper and Ned Nolan, a terrorist. Like Katherine by Anya Seton Tenants of Time walks a tightrope between fact and fiction - a beautiful balance of great storytelling.
½
 
Flagged
SeriousGrace | 4 other reviews | May 12, 2023 |
1798. Ireland. It all starts when a school teacher is asked to write a letter to a landlord. Arthur Vincent Broome offers a narrative of the events that followed. Malcolm Elliot writes a memoir. Sean MacKenna shares a diary. Characters from every angle share a voice in the telling. Thus begins a long and tumultuous history of Ireland, starting with the Rebellion of 1798. As with any war, the Rebellion is violent tide that sweeps up anyone in its path, be they Protestant, Catholic, Papist, landowner, landless, landlord, farmer, soldier, blacksmith, teacher, poet, peasant, gentry, French, English, Irish, man, woman, or child. Narratives come from all of the above and readers are cautioned to read carefully, to concentrate on the voices. Flanagan puts you into the plot so well that at any given moment you are either on the side of the Protestants or Catholics. Either the French or the English welcomed you into their camps. Year of the French describes war maneuvers as well as personal rifts between families, struggles in marriages and livelihoods.… (more)
½
 
Flagged
SeriousGrace | 10 other reviews | Mar 29, 2023 |
During the tumult of the French Revolutionary Wars - before the Great Man himself transformed them into the Napoleonic Wars - the haphazard French attempts to aid Irish rebels in their independence are usually relegated to a footnote. After all, we know how the story ends, and the classically British mix of luck, skill, and sheer ruthlessness which ended those efforts condemned the Irish to over a century more of brutal colonial rule. But in Flanagan's hands this doomed effort to spread the flame of the Revolution to 1798 Ireland takes on a epochal significance. The French generals, British commanders, Catholic peasants, Protestant landlords, and more who populate the novel struggle with their own pieces of the conflict while never seeing quite the whole thing; it's an absorbing study of how warfare works on the ground as well as an effective way to shoe how different a cause seems on each side of the argument. You see the contradictions of French atheists liberating Catholic Irish from Protestant English, as well as the difficulty in replicating the formula of the self-liberation of the French in a country without its institutions and with a very different sense of itself, all while knowing that no matter how important the Irish struggle for self-determination felt to them, that even to their French allies they were a sideshow and a means to a broader end. It begins slowly, but by the end you get that rare sense of visiting a real living world that only the best historical fiction delivers.… (more)
 
Flagged
aaronarnold | 10 other reviews | May 11, 2021 |

Lists

Awards

You May Also Like

Associated Authors

Statistics

Works
5
Members
1,261
Popularity
#20,346
Rating
4.0
Reviews
25
ISBNs
59
Languages
2
Favorited
3

Charts & Graphs