A thirty-three year rite of passage. Three interlocking cycles of revenge. Love, sex, war, terrorism and redemption against the backdrop of Ireland, Germany and Iraq.
Patrick De launcey, only son of an irredentist Anglo-Irish widow, leaves his native Dublin for an education in Northern Ireland just as that province begins its descent into civil war. It is there that he discovers love, sex and heartbreak. Returning to Northern Ireland several years later, as a soldier in the British Army, he, unwittingly instigates one of the quests for vengeance that drive this story onwards.
As seventies Europe slides increasingly into anarchy and terrorist outrage, Patrick finds himself sucked into his own revenge mission, whilst also being drawn into the shadow world of West Germany's Autonomen culture, by the fey but seductive Marisa Bruckner.
Crossing sexual frontiers, breaking taboos and plumbing the depths of human behaviour, Patrick, cynically, thinks he has seen it all until he is called to the maelstrom of The First Gulf War.
Disillusioned by all he has seen and become, Patrick begins anew in Dublin only to find that old ghosts have not been yet laid to rest. As the Northern Ireland troubles draw to a stuttering close, so too the three separate but linked revanchist missions come full circle before a brooding backdrop of blood-soaked Ulster history, where, finally, Patrick finds redemption.