Sinopsis

'An ambitious and vital novel with an epic sweep: a complex, timely story about liberty, equality, identity. [...] This book is an act of salvage, performed with great skill: cleanly written, sharp-eyed, undeceived.'—Hilary Mantel

In a London graveyard in 1857, Harriet Small is approached by a stranger, an unwanted intruder who insists that she hear him out . . . in the will of a woman she only barely remembers, Harriet has been left an unusual collection of papers: her father's True Narrative of his life after escaping slavery and his journey into the heart of revolutionary Ireland.

Nearly sixty years earlier, in the aftermath of Lord Edward FitzGerald's death and disgrace in the 1798 Rebellion, his sister, Lady Lucy, had commissioned Harriet's father, Tony Small, to write about his life as Edward's manservant in the form a 'slave narrative'. But Lucy's real motivation was to restore Edward's reputation and her family's fortune. What emerges from 'Faithful'...