Jubilee — Robert McCrum

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 treachery. And it is, Finally, Sam Gilchrist's story: part confession and part quest, however compromised, for the truth.