September 1919:20 year-old Tristan Sadler takes a train from London to Norwich to deliver some letters to Marian Bancroft. Tristan fought alongside Marian’s brother Will during the Great War but in 1917, Will laid down his guns on the battlefield, declared himself a conscientious objector and was shot as a traitor, an act which has brought shame and dishonour on the Bancroft family.
But the letters are not the real reason for Tristan’s visit. He holds a secret deep in his soul. One that he is desperate to unburden himself of to Marian, if he can only find the courage.
As they stroll through the streets of a city still coming to terms with the end of the war, he recalls his friendship with Will, from the training ground at Aldershot to the trenches of Northern France, and speaks of how the intensity of their friendship brought him from brief moments of happiness and self-discovery to long periods of despair and pain.
Reviews
“A wonderful, sad, tender book. There are some amazing things about this novel – one is the simplicity and purity of the narrative line; another is the sort of complexity within the characters and the emotions and the motives; another is the sense of the period, with all its restrictions. The book is going to have an enormous impact on everyone who reads it.”
- Colm Toibin
“Extraordinary…The narrative is by turns surprising and tragic in equal measure while its troubling conclusion will stay with readers long after they’ve closed the book. The Absolutist is an important work because although it is set mostly in the past the dilemma it explores – how is one to be good in the midst of catastrophe – is completely contemporary.”
- Carlo Gebler
“Political, personal, powerful… a fiercely interrogative novel that asks not just what it means to be a man but also what it means to be a human being in the extreme circumstances of war… It presents the reader with a vivid visual landscape, and a compelling flawed hero.”
- The Irish Times
“Shame and guilt are huge shadows in this book, and Boyne skillfully draws a thread through from sexual to moral to social shame. Boyne tells a good story. From start to finish, he reveals to you the exact information you want to know at the right time.”
- The Irish Independent
“Instantly absorbing.”
- The Sunday Times
“The Absolutist is a really enjoyable, if rather sad, read, full of historical and human interest.”
- The Sunday Independent
“Powerful, poignant and beautifully written. This will become a classic war novel.”
- The Bookseller
“(In) Boyne’s fiction, there’s a sense that people are fundamentally the sum of their traumas…. Boyne’s narrative grip is strong.”
- Literary Review
