A Fateful Promise: The Kinsella Chronicles Book One

Product Description

A Fateful Promise

Ireland 1925. Nine-year-old Philip Kinsella lives with his parents, eccentric uncles, terrifying grandmother and an alcoholic butler in the imposing castle of Lissanore. An unexpected visitor arrives from Spain with her daughter Constanza. Philip, whose romantic imagination is governed by stories of derring-do, pledges himself to be her knight, a promise that will dominate his life.  

Philip’s youthful existence is enlivened by the powerful presence of another visitor, his cousin, Nicholas Kinsella, a dashing cavalry officer from the Austrian branch of the family who becomes a major influence in his life.

Gripping, humorous and richly entertaining, A Fateful Promise is the first part in a major literary undertaking, covering eighty dramatic years of European history. It is a vivid evocation of a distant world that Gerald Warner brings alive in all its brilliance and compelling detail.

• This novel is a remarkable work of imagination.
• Book Two in the Kinsella Chronicles,  The Cross of Burgundy, takes Philip to the Spanish Civil War, when savage conflict engulfs Constanza’s homeland.

The Kinsella Chronicles could best be described as a novel of Europe: not the Europe of bureaucrats or modern tourism, but the Europe of the old dynasties and their nobilities; of chivalry, war and honour. It is the natural setting for a love story affected by all those elements. Initially, it seemed to me it would require eight volumes to accommodate this far-ranging epic; eventually it stabilized at six.

This novel sequence has a multiplicity of themes and is written in a variety of genres: it is, by turns, a tale of adventure, a great love story, a comedy of manners, a vehicle for humour and a philosophical novel. Catholicism, in its most traditional manifestation, is a central theme. So is loyalty to monarchy – it is arguably the first Legitimist novel since Balzac – and the aristocratic principle.

Some curious coincidences occurred during the writing of The Kinsella Chronicles. Book I, A Fateful Promise, required to be set in Ireland from 1925 and to feature a heatwave summer. After I had committed to that plan, my subsequent research revealed that 1925 had actually been an exceptional heatwave summer.

Similarly, in Book II, The Cross of Burgundy, set in the Spanish Civil War, I needed to feature a cavalry charge and presumed I would have to invent an imaginary combat. In fact, it transpired that the course of the war had been determined by a charge of massed cavalry at the Alfambra river, in February 1938.

The Kinsella Chronicles cannot easily be categorized, due to the vast range of themes, scenes and characters the series encompasses. A Fateful Promise, the first volume, is a Bildungsroman recording the childhood and adolescence of Philip Kinsella, the protagonist, at home in Ireland and at school in England.

Thereafter, the subsequent volumes range far across Europe, in wartime and in peace, in varied milieux, from the exotic to the commonplace, over a period of eighty years. It is a rich tapestry, yet I cannot confidently recount or rationalize precisely how it came to be woven. It is a tale that largely wrote itself, in my unconscious imagination.

Gerald Warner