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A Question Of Loyalties

by Allan Massie

ISBN: 9781841952994
Imprint: Canongate Classics
Publication Date: Jun 2008
Format: Paperback
Price: £8.99
Stock Status: not in stock

Widely acclaimed as Massie’s finest novel, A Question of Loyalties engaged 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 by 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 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 history.

Alan Massie was born in Singapore in 1938 and brought up in Aberdeenshire, before reading History at Trinity College, Cambridge. He subsequently worked as a teacher for thirteen years, in Scotland and Rome. Since the mid-1970s he has worked as a journalist and author. His first novel, Change and Decay in All I See, was published in 1978, and since then he has published seventeen novels, widely successful and translated into fourteen languages. He has also published a range of non-fiction works, including two critical biographies. Massie has been a Creative Writing fellow at both Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities. He has also worked as editor of The New Edinburgh Review, as a television critic and sports columnist. For over twenty-five years he has been principal fiction reviewer for The Scotsman, and a columnist and reviewer for The Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. He lives with his wife in the Scottish Borders, and has three grown up children.

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