As The Dream of the Celt" opens it is the summer of 1916 & Roger Casement awaits the hangman in Londons Pentonville Prison. Dublin lies in ruins after the disastrous Easter Rising led by his comrades of the Irish Volunteers. He has been caught after landing from a German submarine. For the past year he has attempted to raise an Irish brigade from prisoners of war to fight alongside the Germans against the British Empire that awarded him a knighthood only a few years before. & now his petition for clemency is threatened by the leaking of his private diary & his secret life as a gay man... Vargas-Llosa with his incomparable gift for powerful historical narrative takes the reader on a journey back through a remarkable life dedicated to the exposure of barbaric treatment of indigenous peoples by European predators in the Congo & Amazonia. Casement was feted as one of the greatest humanitarians of the age. Now he is about to die ignominiously as a traitor."