Jubilee

Sam Gilchrist - former presidential speechwriter, half English, half American - now contemplates the failure of his marriage and his career, washed up on the shore of Reagan's America. On retreat to Cape Cod, he realizes that in order to forestall personal collapse he will have to come to grips with the moment in his life that he would most like to forget. In London in 1977, at the height of his success, he finds himself drawn into a painful and passionate affair. Ruth, his lover, introduces him to a stranger who relates a mesmerizing story - a shocking dirty tricks conspiracy by disenchanted patriots to topple the British administration. At the conclusion of their meeting, stirred and fascinated by these allegations, Gilchrist makes a promise. But almost immediately he discovers that to keep it he may have to betray his own father, a distant but powerful figure at the heart of the British ruling class. Now, five years later, his father is dead and the stranger's predictions have come true, leaving Gilchrist to untangle an intrigue spanning two countries and two governments, exposing far-reaching, unsuspected machinations of power at every turn. As he uncovers layers of deceit and betrayal, he must also calculate the cost of his allegiances to his lover, his father, and his own confused identity. Jubilee is an emotionally charged thriller that unites the intensely personal with the intensely political to explore the nature of treachery. And it is, finally, Sam Gilchrist's story: part confession and part quest, however compromised, for the truth.

Review :
"Robert McCrum has written a new kind of spy story: a father-son thriller with a plot twist that makes most espionage novels seem simplistic. McCrum's agents may be fictional, but what they did, and what this story is about, was real." -- Seymour Hersch "Jubilee is a brilliantly composed, suspenseful, and poignant novel of a political and personal betrayal. As a storyteller, Robert McCrum is himself a master of betrayal in the double sense of the word -- he knows exactly when to enlighten and when to deceive us as to the motives and destinies of his extraordinarily seductive cast of characters. This is, I think, the best of his novels so far." -- Richard Poirier "Jubilee is both fanciful and highly realistic, each in the right way. Few novelists can handle political themes without becoming preachy, or cover Anglo-American relations without giving way to caricature. Robert McCrum accomplishes both of these tasks in this very successful novel."