Mario Vargas Llosa

As The Dream of the Celt opens, it is the summer of 1916 and Roger Casement awaits the hangman in London's Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. And now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary and his secret life as a gay man ....

Vargas Llosa, with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative, takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo and Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor.

“The Dream of the Celt brings together some of the writer’s finest virtues and fits, moreover, into the line of fundamental thematic concerns reiterated throughout his work.” Ricardo Senabre, El Cultural

“Vargas Llosa has no rival: in The Dream of the Celt, the amount of prior reading and research is immense, colossal, titanic. Yet it never overwhelms the reader. Here lies the first merit of this novel: telling a story as if everything were true while hiding the lie. The second merit lies in the absolute and constant control of the creator over his creature. He has written technically more complex novels, but the structure of this one fits perfectly with what the novelist set out to achieve… With absolute command of the novel, which begins in 1903 and ends in a London prison in 1916, he shows exactly why the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel.” Ricardo Baixeras, El Periódico

“The Dream of the Celt portrays, through the tools of fiction, the ruthless inner workings of power and the force of individuality… The novel advances with an enveloping, impeccable rhythm, immersing us in a harrowing chronicle of despotism, with characters so deeply rooted in their painful and contradictory humanity that they make this novel a magnificent literary gift.” C. Méndez, Expansión

“A novel that aspires to encompass the entire, ungraspable expanse of a man’s life… With that way of telling a story that dazzles, sweeps along, hypnotizes—and once again proves that, indeed, death will find him writing—for, past the age of seventy, to write such a marvel as The Dream of the Celt inspires envy, boundless admiration, and wholehearted applause.” Francisco García Pérez, Información

“Once again, in Vargas Llosa’s fictional world, the truth of lies is revealed in all its starkness. Praise is unnecessary.” Juan A. Masoliver Ródenas, La Vanguardia (Cultura/s)