Midwinter - John Buchan

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Résumé :
Midwinter is a wonderfully written historical novel. Alastair Maclean. A scottsman who has been in exile in France goes to Englad to join the Scottish Army as it advances on London. En route Maclean discovers a plot that will endanger the Scottish cause. Further complicating his situation he finds himself falling in love with a married English Lady. He must decide between honor, love, and country.

Biographie:
John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875, the son of the Reverend John Buchan, a Presbyterian clergyman, and his wife Helen Masterton, the daughter of a sheep farmer. He read classics at the universities of Glasgow and Oxord before embarking on a career spanning the London bar, the Fleet Street press, the northern and southern hemispheres of the British Empire, the Houses of Parliament, and the long wooden shelves of literature. Best known today for his adventure stories, and in particular The Thirty-Nine Steps, which Alfred Hitchcock brought to the cinema in 1935, he was a stakhanovite of English letters, penning dozens of novels and historical works in all. He died in Montreal in 1940....

Sommaire:
Midwinter is a historical novel by John Buchan set during the Jacobite rising of 1745. Departing from his more familiar modern thrillers, Buchan turns here to the eighteenth century and the divided loyalties of Britain in the age of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The narrative follows Alastair Maclean, a young Highlander drawn into the Jacobite cause, whose journey carries him from the Scottish Highlands into England amid the uncertainties of rebellion. As in Buchan's later adventure fiction, questions of honour, allegiance, and personal integrity remain central. Yet Midwinter is more reflective in tone than his contemporary spy novels, grounding its drama in historical circumstance and political complexity. The shifting fortunes of the rising provide the backdrop for a study of character shaped by conviction and restraint. Measured in prose and attentive to atmosphere, the novel stands as an example of Buchan's sustained engagement with Scottish history and national identity....