(Secker and Warburg, 1990)

Opening in 1989, The Good Republic begins by depicting Jacob Balthus’s life as a political émigré in London. He is invited to return to his home country in the Baltic by the renascent nationalist movement and looks back on his life before and during the Second World War under both German and Russian occupations. On his return he learns the terrible price of remaining an “innocent” in history.

When The Good Republic was reissued by Faber in 2009, Edward Lucas of The Economist picked it as part of his summer reading:

“Your columnist flirted with some ambitious ideas such as rereading Czeslaw Milosz in Polish, or finishing the Miklos Banffy trilogy about aristocratic life in pre-communist Transylvania. What he actually ended up packing was a newly republished edition of William Palmer’s neglected 1990 classic, The Good Republic… Mr Palmer’s book set a standard for an east European historical novel that has yet to be matched—an especially impressive feat for an outsider… It is a tribute to his novelist’s skills that anyone reading the book has the feeling of complete authenticity in both history and geography. Readers are left longing for a sequel.”

“With the current debate about war crimes, and the alarming resurgence of anti-Semitism in much of the ‘new’ Europe, this is as topical a narrative as one can imagine – which is surely the greatest tribute possible to a historical novel.”
Kevin Loader, Daily Telegraph 

‘I can’t say that I felt particularly consoled when I closed the book. It is altogether too tragic and honest for such a sop to be convincing… Undoubtedly, though Palmer’s achievement is far more significant for that.’
Robert Potts, Literary Review