It is perhaps providential that this the youngest son of Ireland's famous Pirate Queen, Granuaile (Grace O'Malley) was born on the high seas aboard his mother's galley. This event, as well as inheriting her maritime skill, gave rise to his name, Tiboid-ne-Long (Theobald or Tibbott-ofthe-Ships).
Saved at birth from kidnap and from a life of slavery by Barbery Coast pirates,Tibbott Bourke, seems destined to fulfil his birthright and, like his father, become a minor leader in the fragmented and twilight world of Gaelic Ireland.
But national and international politics catapults him into prominence in a period of immense change and transition in Ireland, as the battlelines between two incompatible protagonists - the antique Gaelic world of his birth and the exploitive, acquisitive world of Elizabethan England - are drawn. Survival becomes the spur. Only one side can win. Only the very few will survive.
With a Machiavellian mind that out manoeuvers his opponents, both Irish and English, with opportunism, cunning and daring,Tibbott sets out to salvage what he can from the wreckage. Enduring imprisonment, torture, famine, dispossession and isolation along the way, earning the suspicion, envy and hatred of both sides, resorting to double-dealing, chicanery, even murder, Tibbott ducks and weaves his way through the military and political morass in his all-consuming passion to survive.
Shadow Lord is more than just a portrait of Tibbott Bourke, it is also a unique commentary and insight into one of the most profound periods of Irish history. It incorporates much hitherto unpublished manuscript material to which the author was given exclusive access.
Shadow Lord also presents new information on the descendents of Tibbott Bourke and on the legal controversy that surrounds his title,Viscount Mayo, to the present day.
