Time of Exile is the last volume in the famous Europe Trilogy, by Gaither Stewart. Previous volumes include The Trojan Spy and Lily Pad Roll.  Written as spy thrillers and compared by many to John le Carré's best novels, the main theme informing this trilogy is the struggle between Western and Russian/Soviet intelligence and military operatives, issuing from America's century-old quest to encircle, disrupt and finally "neutralize" --read: dismember--Russia into a vassal, second-rate power. In our day, with the resurrection of the Cold War, this clash has acquired the contours of a multifaceted battle between the unipolar bloc led by the U.S. (seeking to preserve its global hegemony), and the multipolar world led by Russia and China, resisting American domination, and reclaiming their rightful place as two great sovereign powers on the world stage. Involving many characters, heroes and anti-heroes, this novel takes place largely in the present, and at times offers a look forward into the future; flashbacks to the past are infrequent and targeted in those moments when the characters recall their own past and its effect on their present and future. The real action remains, however, in the dynamic present. In that sense this novel raises a number of moral questions, moral dilemmas, moral choices in which men can choose on which side they stand in the continuing story of the good-and-evil of mankind in all ages and times. Perhaps the major moral theme of this novel is the question of guilt and innocence and the possibility of eventual repentance. In one way or another, each of us must in the end choose. For in our age, in most ages in fact, indifference or neutrality--the refusal to commit or choose--is also a choice and blameworthy in many contexts: for example, one can not be morally 'neutral' about war. The awful judgment is that evil triumphs when 'good' people do nothing. Moreover, the choices we make decide the verdict we ourselves, in the end, pronounce on our lives.