The Princes of Ireland, the first volume of Edward Rutherfurd's magisterial Dublin Saga, ended with the disastrous Irish revolt of 1534, the appearance of Protestantism in Ireland, and the burning of the sacred Staff of Saint Patrick. THE REBELS OF IRELAND takes readers to an Ireland transformed by plantation—a policy that encouraged English settlement and marked the final step in the centuries-long English conquest of Ireland.

A master of historical fiction, Edward Rutherfurd tells Ireland's history through the stories of families from all strata of society—Protestant and Catholic, rich and poor, conniving and heroic. His richly detailed narrative brings to life watershed moments and events, from the time of plantation settlements to the "Flight of the Earls," when the native aristocracy fled the island, to Cromwell's suppression of the population and the imposition of the harsh anti-Catholic penal laws. He describes the hardships of ordinary people and the romantic, doomed attempt to overthrow the Protestant oppressors, which ended in defeat at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, and the departure of the "Wild Geese." Moving into periods of Irish history more familiar to contemporary readers, Rutherfurd re-creates Wolfe Tone's attempted French invasion of 1798, the Catholic campaign of Daniel O'Connell, the catastrophic Famine, the Great Migration to America, and the glorious Irish Renaissance of Yeats and Joyce. And through the eyes of his characters, he captures the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the great Irish nationalists and the birth of an Ireland free of all ties to England.

A tale of fierce battles, hot-blooded romances, and family and political intrigues, THE REBELS OF IRELAND brings the story begun in The Princes of Ireland to a stunning conclusion.