The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising

The story—both romantic and terrifying—of how a handful of men, armed with nothing more than handguns and guts, forced the greatest nation in the world from their shores. On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the first great revolution of the twentieth century began as working-class men and women occupied buildings throughout Dublin, Ireland, including the general post office on O’Connell Street. Among the commoners in the GPO was a young staff captain of the Irish Volunteers named Michael Collins. He was joined a day later by a fourteen-year-old messenger boy, Eoin Kavanagh. Four days later they would all surrender, but they had struck the match that would burn Great Britain out of Ireland for the first time in seven hundred years. The 13th Apostle is the reimagined story of how Michael Collins, along with his young acolyte Eoin, transformed Ireland from a colony into a nation. Collins’s secret weapon was his intelligence system and his assassination squad, nicknamed “The Twelve Apostles.” On November 21, 1920, the squad—with its thirteenth member, young Eoin—assassinated the entire British Secret Service in Dublin. Twelve months and sixteen days later, Collins signed the Treaty at 10 Downing Street, which brought into being what is, today, the Republic of Ireland. An epic novel in the tradition of Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French and Leon Uris’s Trinity, The 13th Apostle is a story that will capture the imagination and hearts of freedom-loving readers everywhere.Review“Anyone who’s ever doubted the truth of William Faulkner’s famous assertion that “the past is never dead—it’s not even past” should read Dermot McEvoy’s The 13th Apostle. McEvoy gives us the story of the Irish War for Independence in all its vivid, intimate, squalid, intricate, heroic, and tragic immediacy. The dust and cobwebs are dispelled. Sepia turns technicolor. In McEvoy’s hands, the past lives, breathes and walks among us. This is historical fiction of a rare and wonderful sort.”—Peter Quinn, author of Banished Children of Eve on The 13th Apostle “The 13th Apostle is a compelling blow-by-blow account of the efforts Michael Collins led to bring independence to Ireland.” —Publishers WeeklyAbout the AuthorDermot McEvoy was born in Dublin in 1950 and immigrated to New York City four years later. He is a graduate of Hunter Collge and is the author of the novels Terrible Angel, and Our Lady of Greenwich Village. He lives in Jersey City, New Jersey.