Lost Sons

We live in a world in which trust and faith in the institutions of Church and State are being eroded. This is the story of the search for meaning on the part of three young men whose lives in the latter half of the 20th Century are entangled in the global, secret alliances of the Vatican in the Cold War. The involvement of the characters with right-wing dictators and governments in apartheid South Africa, Lesotho, Chile, El Salvador, the USA and the Vatican on the one hand, and in radical left-wing movements for justice and human rights on the other is very much the basis of the drama. And while the characters are fictitious, their actions are held to be entirely probable by many leading historians and journalists. Thus, the novel may be seen as 'faction', a combination of fact and fiction, to raise questions not open to historians.The three meet as teenagers in an Irish seminary in 1960. Two are rivals with fiercely opposing views and a third man is an intellectually gifted and wise African who acts as their mediator. Their diverse childhood experiences ... sexual abuse, alcoholic abuse and racial abuse ... and their family political histories, contribute to their antagonisms, and in the springtime of life the rivals lock horns on almost everything: communism and capitalism; Liberation Theology and Opus Dei; Vatican Council II and traditional church dogma; humour and sex; the Spanish and Irish Civil Wars and Northern Ireland and the IRA. Years later, in the summertime of life, this antagonism turns lethal in the contexts of apartheid South Africa, a 'Catholic coup' in the tiny African state of Lesotho and the horrific massacres in the 'proxy-war' in El Salvador.

• | Author: Denis Shanahan
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Nov 09, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 518 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1539766403
• | ISBN-13: 9781539766407