Faber to publish new Mario Vargas Llosa novel

Benedicte Page

Faber editorial director Lee Brackstone said there was "a lot of excitement within the Spanish language world" at the Frankfurt Book Fair earlier this month over the imminent appearance of the Peruvian writer's novel El Sueno del Celt (The Dream of the Celt) with publishers believing it would be "the biggest book of the autumn."

Faber plans to publish the book in English early in 2012, simultaneously with US publisher Farrar Straus Giroux. A translator has not yet been confirmed.

The Dream of the Celt explores the life of the Irish revolutionary Sir Roger Casement, who was executed for treason in 1916 after his involvement in the Easter Rising. Broad in scope, the novel will travel with its protagonist from Liverpool and Dublin to the Congo and Peru, where Casement worked as a British consul, and to London, where he ended his life in Pentonville jail.

Particularly interesting will be Vargas Llosa's interpretation of Casement's experiences in South America, where he was involved in humanitarian campaigning against abuses of the indigenous workers in the Peruvian Amazon by the rubber companies.

Brackstone said the novel "sits in the tradition of Vargas Llosa's major novels – Conversations in the Cathedral, War of the End of the World and The Feast of the Goat – in its preoccupation with political issues and its international scope". Casement's experiences in Peru and the Congo were a profound influence in the development of his Irish nationalism, Brackstone said, "because he came to associate the British government with the abuses of colonialism."

He added that The Dream of the Celt, which takes its title from a line in one of Casement's own poems, would explore the life of "a peculiarly modern figure for the late Victorian landscape", with his contemporary-seeming humanitarian concerns and the issues around his homosexuality, revealed in the secret "Black Diaries" which were used against him at his trial.

Casement's literary friendships with Joseph Conrad – with whom he debated the situation in the Congo, setting for Conrad's famous novel Heart of Darkness – W B Yeats and George Bernard Shaw are also expected to feature in the novel.

Faber has published Vargas Llosa for more than three decades, and the publisher's chief Stephen Page promised it would be "seeking to grow his English language readership dramatically" following the Nobel win. Telegraph