Say Nothing and Writing About the Troubles

A mysterious kidnapping. Political murder. The cat-and-mouse games between terrorists and spies. 

New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe packs several gripping stories into one volume with his bestselling Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. The book begins with the abduction of Jean McConville from her Belfast apartment in 1972. It goes on to blend true-crime storytelling with dramatic revelations from insiders in the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the group implicated in McConville's disappearance. 

Say Nothing doubles as a history of the sectarian conflict known as the Troubles, in which militant fighters for Irish independence faced off in the streets of Belfast against Loyalist paramilitaries and British soldiers. The conflict began in 1968 and officially ended in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement, but unresolved issues linger for many in Northern Ireland. For readers interested in diving deeper into the history and literature of the conflict, here are some suggested reads.  

History and Memoir

Disputes between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant English in Northern Ireland stretch back centuries. To get up to speed, try Northern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction, one of the ongoing series of brief topical overviews published by Oxford University Press.

Belfast-born journalist David McKittrick has been reporting on the Troubles since 1971. His and David McVea’s Making Sense of the Troubles: The Story of the Conflict in Northern Ireland is regarded as an even-handed history.

For a fuller account of the Protestant Unionist viewpoint, read The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions by Irish historian Ruth Dudley Edwards. For an insider account of the 1998 Good Friday peace negotiations, try Peacerunner: The True Story of how an ex-Congressman Helped End the Centuries of War in Ireland. Book:

Literary and Historical Fiction

Bernard MacLaverty's short novel Cal, published in 1983, grapples with the moral dilemmas of militant Irish republicanism in the story of a young getaway driver for the IRA. 

Martin McDonagh's darkly comic 2001 play The Lieutenant of Inishmore centers on a paramilitary soldier considered too unstable for the IRA. 

Northern Irish writer Anna Burns received the 2018 Booker Prize for Milkman, a novel set in the 1970s that follows an 18-year-old girl who becomes the unwanted target of an IRA officer's affections. American author Morgan Llywelyn writes historical fiction inspired by the sweep of Celtic history. She depicts the Troubles from both ends in 1972: A Novel of Ireland's Unfinished Revolution and 1999: A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace.   

Thrillers and Crime Fiction

During the height of the Troubles, popular novelists were fascinated by the image of the violent, ideologically driven IRA soldier. In Nelson DeMille's Cathedral, an IRA man takes hostages in Manhattan's Saint Patrick's Cathedral. In Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, an Irish paramilitary organization serves as nemesis for the debut of Clancy's celebrated hero, Jack Ryan. 

Many crime novelists have used the Troubles as the setting for their own dark tales of murder, retribution and moral ambiguity. The 2014 short-story anthology Belfast Noir gathered 14 examples of this "Northern noir" genre. The anthology's editors, Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, each have produced several crime novels set against the backdrop of the Troubles or the uneasy peace that followed. 

Recent books have revisited the era of the Troubles. In High Dive,  British novelist Jonathan Lee fictionalizes a real-life 1984 attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Lynda La Plante's Good Friday follows a character from the TV series Prime Suspect back to the 1970s to investigate an IRA bombing. Peter Cunningham’s Acts of Allegiance spins a twisty espionage tale in which an Irish civil servant becomes a spy for England. 

In Patrick McGuiness's thoughtful Throw Me to the Wolves, a detective investigating the murder of a former student is forced to reckon with what he did—and didn't do—when a school friend was accused of being an IRA sympathizer.