The Dictator

John Ericson has just been thrown out of power. Once the strongman of Gloria, an invented South American republic, and the son of an English father and a Spanish mother, he arrives in London an exile with an honest temperament and no country to govern. McCarthy follows him through drawing rooms and political circles as old enemies from Gloria track him across the sea and set a fresh plot in motion. The book weighs ambition against conscience, and asks what a man of action does once the action is taken from him. Written in 1893 by an Irish nationalist who sat in Parliament, it reads as the political novel of someone who knew real corridors of power, and it carries the flavour of late-Victorian society fiction with a conspiratorial edge.