Here are 98 books that Rain Dogs fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve always read and loved crime fiction – so much so I did a doctorate in it. I believe good crime fiction has the capacity to explore particular societies, places, and times in interesting and enjoyable ways. I also like crime fiction’s focus on character, and particularly in crime series which show a character evolving over time. That’s why I chose the theme of ‘flawed detective’ and that’s what I’m trying to do in my Schalk Lourens series, of whichPresent Tenseis the first. I hope you enjoy it, and also the other books I’ve recommended here.
Ireland again, this time in the 80s, and right in the middle of the Troubles. Adrian McKinty’s cop, Sean Duffy, is an outsider, a Catholic in a Protestant police force. He’s irreverent, sarcastic, bitter, and a more than occasional drug user. InPolice at the Station(6th in the series) Duffy investigates the murder of a small-time heroin dealer, who’s been shot by a crossbow. Meanwhile his posh girlfriend wants to move…the Sean Duffy novels are tough, funny, exciting, and extremely well done. Enjoy!
Another thrilling mystery featuring Detective Sean Duffy and his most dangerous investigation yet
Belfast, 1988. A man is found dead, killed with a bolt from a crossbow in front of his house. This is no hunting accident. But uncovering who is responsible for the murder will take Detective Sean Duffy down his most dangerous road yet, a road that leads to a lonely clearing on a high bog where three masked gunmen will force Duffy to dig his own grave.
Hunted by forces unknown, threatened by Internal Affairs, and with his relationship on the rocks,…
I grew up in one of America’s most heavily Irish areas, outside Philadelphia. After Northern Ireland exploded in 1969, IRA gunrunning cases made the local news, and came up in conversations – one friend told me his ancestors smuggled weapons in the 1920s. So I was hooked when I ran across a vivid 1922 account of an IRA shooting in Manhattan, splashed on the front page of The New York Times, my employer. My first book was about Irish rebel gunmen, the Molly Maguires of the Pennsylvania coal fields, where my Irish ancestors were miners. I’ve given lectures about the IRA’s American activities at conferences in Cork and California.
A comprehensive history of the IRA from the 1916 Easter Uprising to the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles in the 1970s.
Bell did extensive research, interviewing many IRA veterans, and he offers insights on the organization’s high points and low points, of which there were many. What I liked best, though, was Bell’s writing – his words bring these people and events to life.
The Secret Army is the definitive work on the Irish Republican Army. It is an absorbing account of a movement that has had a profound effect on the shaping of the modern Irish state. The secret army in the service of the invisible Republic has had a powerful effect on Irish events over the past twenty-five years. These hidden corridors of power interest Bell and inspired him to spend more time with the IRA than many volunteers spend in it. This book is the culmination of twenty-five years of work and tens of thousands of hours of interviews. Bell's unique…
Born to Irish parents in London, the conflict in Northern Ireland was a subject of discussion (but not debate) throughout my childhood. My understanding of the conflict was shaped by the distance we were from it and the (often romanticized) history of Ireland that was shared with me. I then spent many years studying the conflict and found myself agreeing with the view of Paul Anderson (used as the epigram to a book I chose for this list), ‘I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.’ But I believe we still need to look.
The emergence of the violent phase of the conflict in Northern Ireland (euphemistically known as ‘The Troubles’) in the late 1960s has been subject to much debate over the years. But there is a danger that, given what happened once the violence erupted, its origins and their complexity have been obscured.
Many now see the conflict as simply about which jurisdiction should have sovereignty over the region. I like that Bob Purdie’s book on the civil rights movement (CRM) brought nuance and complexity back into the debate. The tendency of some books to either downplay the CRM or portray it as just another facet of the constitutional/jurisdictional question is avoided (and indeed refuted) in this book.
Purdie encourages us to question the structures and politics of Northern Ireland before the violence started and to examine the relationship between the CRM and the violence that followed it. The book made me…
The civil rights movement of the 1960s profoundly transformed the political situation in Northern Ireland. Exposing injustice at the heart of the Northern Ireland state - political favouritism, gerrymandering, sectarian discrimination in housing and job allocation - the civil rights protests were a militant but constitutional challenge to Unionist domination.
Based on extensive research and interviews with leading activists like Eamonn, MacCann and Michael Farrell, Politics in the Streets tells the compelling story of the growth of the civil rights movement from its hopeful origins in the early 1960s to the mass demonstrations of 1968 and 1969. Incisive in his…
Truth told, folks still ask if Saul Crabtree sold his soul for the perfect voice. If he sold it to angels or devils. A Bristol newspaper once asked: “Are his love songs closer to heaven than dying?” Others wonder how he wrote a song so sad, everyone who heard it…
I grew up in this place, born here when the Troubles began. In one form or another, the conflict was everywhere. It was built into the infrastructure, into attitudes. It infested conversations, hurt friendships, killed old folks, children, friends, and family. Fiction from and about Northern Ireland was inevitably hamstrung by that dominant, terrible story. Since the 1994 ceasefires, our fiction has come charging forward. It’s analytical, bullish, enlightening, funny as hell, and it moves us forward by taking honest stock of what came before. I love this emerging place and its new voices. And I love to read and write stories about it. It’s a stubborn home, often maddening, truly kind, forever breath-taking.
A masked IRA gunman presses a bullet into a small hand. He warns the boy he’ll put the same bullet into his father if instructions are disobeyed. It’s a pointed detail because it happened. The author was that boy. This story glides between fiction and nonfiction in search of truths about two rural murders and a vanished informer. But, as we have been learning here, dissecting darkness reveals only darkness. At heart this is a tale of a family’s composure, of a faithful bond to land, of being at odds with truths and lies. And that omnipresent terrain, with its moving shadows and thorny wilds, played witness to it all. This story takes place near where I grew up. It has stayed with me longer than I’m used to.
"The result is a breathtakingly brutal piece of crime writing that is relentless in its pursuit of the truth" Declan Burke in the Irish Times
"Among many other things, Murder Memoir Murder is a brilliant evocation of Ireland's border culture, its contentions and unwritten protocols" Garrett Carr, author of The Rule of the Land
"Hugely evocative, deeply felt and beautifully written, Murder Memoir Murder is a brave, brutal exploration of our shared past, his family’s own personal history and the act of storytelling itself." Brian McGilloway
Murder Memoir Murder is both a memoir and a crime fiction story involving a…
Born to Irish parents in London, the conflict in Northern Ireland was a subject of discussion (but not debate) throughout my childhood. My understanding of the conflict was shaped by the distance we were from it and the (often romanticized) history of Ireland that was shared with me. I then spent many years studying the conflict and found myself agreeing with the view of Paul Anderson (used as the epigram to a book I chose for this list), ‘I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.’ But I believe we still need to look.
I am sometimes put off by ‘big’ sprawling works of history, that cover hundreds of years in hundreds of pages and may end up sitting on my shelf both goading and embarrassing me for my failure to do them the courtesy of finishing them. (Although admittedly, maybe looking good when people pop around!).
Paul Bew’s engaging examination of over 200 years of Irish history is an exception to this. Written by one of Ireland’s most eminent historians, it manages to combine academic rigor with accessibility (no mean feat). Bew offers a survey of the development and course of conflict in Ireland as well as an analysis of the decisions (and mistakes) made by key leaders along the way.
It covers a period much longer than the years Northern Ireland has existed as a political entity, but I found the analysis helpful in explaining its emergence and development.
The French revolution had an electrifying impact on Irish society. The 1790s saw the birth of modern Irish republicanism and Orangeism, whose antagonism remains a defining feature of Irish political life. The 1790s also saw the birth of a new approach to Ireland within important elements of the British political elite, men like Pitt and Castlereagh. Strongly influenced by Edmund Burke, they argued that Britain's strategic interests were best served by a policy of catholic emancipation and political integration in Ireland. Britain's failure to achieve this objective, dramatised by the horrifying tragedy of the Irish famine of 1846-50, in which…
I am a journalist who spent 15 years reporting from all over the world – Kabul, Baghdad, New Delhi, Beijing, Washington D.C. – returning to London in 2015 to report on the UK’s relations with Europe. Then Brexit happened. As a reporter, I’d chronicled the rise of China and India after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, but I’d failed to understand how far Britain had been consumed by the forces of populism that have roiled all Western democracies. I’ve spent the last eight years reporting on the fallout, from both sides of the English Channel; trying to unpack what went wrong, and see what we can do about it.
As a young reporter in the mid-1990s, I cut my teeth reporting the end of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ and the eventual signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement peace deal. That deal was based around a constitutional ambiguity that was rocked by the Brexit vote.
This pithy volume by Queen's University Belfast politics professor Katy Hayward manages to blend absolute concision and with ambition, tracing the history of the Irish border that found itself at the heart of the UK’s often bitter Brexit negotiations with Europe.
Amid so much rhetoric, Hayward trades only in the facts while carefully framing the future choices that Brexit might bring to Northern Ireland.
The Irish border is a manifestation of the relationship between Britain and Ireland. When that relationship has been tense, we have seen the worst effects at the Irish border in the form of violence, controls and barriers. When the relationship has been good, the Irish border has become - to all intents and purposes - open, invisible and criss-crossed with connections. Throughout its short existence, the symbolism of the border has remained just as important as its practical impact.
With the UK's exit from the European Union, the challenge of managing the Irish border as a source and a symbol…
Nine-year-old Chloe Janis is missing. Abby, her mom, is now faced with an impossible decision—revealing seventeen-year-old secrets she's kept hidden, or losing her daughter forever.
Everything unravels after Abby receives a cryptic message from a man from her past, someone she’d tried to erase from her memory. But now, he’s…
My name is Lee Andrew Taylor. I write novels and screenplays, mostly in the horror genre, with a few signed by Producers since 2021. I write what I see. It’s worked for me so far, with many discussions with producers in the past few years. If I can see a movie when I read someone’s story then there’s a great chance other people will see the same thing. I am always creating new worlds inside my mind, new stories to write, and new paths to take.
I’m recommending this book because of how well the author described the events taking place in a country where they lived. It’s another story about a virus, similar to the deadly Covid one, but the people who die come back as zombies. I love how the main characters have to deal with the outbreak & how they try to stop it.
PROLOGUE Finaghy, Northern Ireland 17th June 2010 There was a woman screaming in his face. She was one of many, crowding around him. But he couldn't hear her. With the headgear he was wearing, Sergeant George Kelly couldn't hear what any of them were saying. They were all just muffled words. Muted. Censored. Like sounds you would hear under water. But he could see her talking, see her screaming. And he knew she was swearing. It was something about the way her lips were moving. Shaping the words as if they were heavy. Teeth showing. Almost growling rather than speaking.…
I grew up on a farm in Northern Ireland. Ulster was always an inspiration, for both my painting and my writing. My first novel, The Misremembered Man, became a bestseller worldwide, and I followed it with several more works of fiction. I attribute their success to the magic of rural Ireland, and the wonderful characters who peopled my childhood. My formative years, unhappy and fearful though they were, serve as a repository of emotion and stimulation, which I draw upon frequently in my writing. Having the courage to change and grow in difficult circumstances is a common theme. Since all my novels are character-driven, my book choices broadly reflect this strength in the authors I have chosen.
Tara Doherty has come to live in Connemara following the death of her husband. She’s distraught and lonely here in "the back of beyond." Until a mysterious stranger rents a little cottage close to Tara’s. James Dunford, she learns, is Irish-born but lived in the USA. He spends his days fixing up his cottage and walking the beach with a stray dog. As time goes by, Tara learns from a local villager that James is not what he seems and that his motive for renting the cottage is far from conventional. She confronts him, and their two lives intertwine in an unexpected way, in a tale told with exceptional erudition.
Highly atmospheric, engaging and perceptive, Sunsets Never Wait plunges the reader into a bleak Connemara landscape and the tortured lives of two lost souls. It’s a page-turning exploration of the weight of secrets and the courage it sometimes takes to…
The weight of secrets... The courage it takes to sometimes speak the truth...
From the Amazon bestselling author of The Storm Beyond The Tides comes the personal saga of two people whose troubled lives intersect on the remote west coast of Ireland in 1981.
"...Emotionally charged and deeply moving..."― Christina McKenna, bestselling author of The Misremembered Man and The Disenchanted Widow
Winters are long on the windswept coast of Connemara, where Tara Doherty has come to live after the death of her husband. The isolation is all but unbearable until a mysterious tenant moves into the house at the bottom…
I have always believed in the power of journalism to tell stories of people: the powerful as well as the ordinary and disenfranchised. In the hands of the right writer, such stories can have as much dramatic sweep and be as engrossing as any work of fiction. I have read literary nonfiction since before I became a journalist, and as a foreign correspondent, while breaking news is a key part of my job, longform narrative writing is where I really find gratification, as a writer and a reader. It’s a vast genre, so I focused this list mostly on stellar examples of foreign reporting. I hope you enjoy it.
This is a master class in investigative journalism and in nonfiction storytelling. Radden Keefe is one of my journalistic role models, and this book about the troubles in Northern Ireland is gripping from page one as it investigates the 1972 murder and abduction of Jean McConville in a way that probably only a foreigner could do, given the sensitivity of the topic. It is a vital historical document, a gripping thriller, and an empathetic social observation all in one.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions
"Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review
When a high security prison fails, a down-on-his luck cop and the governor’s daughter must team up if they’re going to escape in this "jaw-dropping, authentic, and absolutely gripping" (Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author) USA Today bestselling thriller from Adam Plantinga.
Born to Irish parents in London, the conflict in Northern Ireland was a subject of discussion (but not debate) throughout my childhood. My understanding of the conflict was shaped by the distance we were from it and the (often romanticized) history of Ireland that was shared with me. I then spent many years studying the conflict and found myself agreeing with the view of Paul Anderson (used as the epigram to a book I chose for this list), ‘I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way did not become still more complicated.’ But I believe we still need to look.
Set in 1975, Louise Kennedy’s novel deals with some themes particular to Northern Ireland and its sectarian characteristics, such as the challenges of navigating conversational and attitudinal hurdles when engaging with someone from the ‘other’ community and the travails of undertaking ‘everyday’ tasks against the invasive background of the security situation.
However, I liked that the work also dealt with wider issues, such as differences in expectations and behavior in rural and urban settings and the impact that class and education may have on social interactions. I enjoyed the novel both as a love story between the young Catholic barmaid and the older married Protestant lawyer (who doesn’t like a love story?) but also as an observational analysis of the conditions in Northern Ireland at the time and their sad outworkings on the lives of people only peripherally involved in the politics of that society.
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
“Brilliant, beautiful, heartbreaking.”—J.Courtney Sullivan, New York Times Book Review
“TRESPASSES vaults Kennedy into the ranks of such contemporary masters as McCann, Claire Keegan, Colin Barrett, and fellow Sligo resident, Kevin Barry.” —Oprah Daily
Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a shattering novel about a young woman caught between allegiance to community and a dangerous passion.
Amid daily reports of violence, Cushla lives a quiet life with her mother in a small town near Belfast, teaching at a parochial school and moonlighting…
