Book description
Introduced by Alan Taylor Widely acclaimed as Massie's finest novel, A
Question of Loyalties engages with all the complexities and ambiguities
of loyalty, nationality and family as they are put under threat by
betrayal, by errors of judgement, or simply friendship. Etienne de
Balafré, half French, half English and raised in South Africa, returns
to post-war France to unravel the tangled history of his own father. Was
Lucien de Balafré a patriot who served his country as best he could in
difficult times, or a treacherous collaborator in the Vichy government?
Rife with the anguish of hindsight and the irony of circumstance, this
powerful book brilliantly explores the ties between fathers and sons and
the pains of love and duty in a period of European history that is still
characterised by wilful denial and hatred. 'Miraculous.' Auberon Waugh
'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 '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 Telegraph
