The most recommended books about Belfast

This is a unique novel, both in ideas and in concept.

It’s actually two novels in one, the first taking place in 1880s England, the second in1930s California. The two novels are apposite, meaning after you finish the first you’re obliged to flip the book over to read the second. This format is actually quite old. It’s called tête-bêche – a book split into two parts back-to-back, head-to-foot.

To be honest, I don’t know how this will work or if it will work in ebook form. But like all of my picks it should be read in hardcover. The two tales are steeped in the mores of their respective time periods. They read like a first-rate thriller, and of course both become revelatory at the end of the second novel when they intersect.

The author’s grasp of both time periods is absolute and his characters grip you from the first… show more.

Set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, Trespasses tells the story of Cushla, a young schoolteacher living with and caring for her alcoholic mother.

At night, she works at her family’s pub, where she meets Michael, a barrister known for defending IRA members. He is also Protestant (Cushla is Catholic), married, and devastatingly handsome.

Trespasses has it all: gorgeous writing, humor, pathos, romance, and a rising sense of dread as you try to figure out which tragic turn the story will take.

The unique underground setting hooked me from the start.

Ember is the last beacon of light in a darkened world, and now even its great lamps are at risk of going out. Friends Lina and Doon must find a way to keep them burning or face utter darkness and the end of civilization as they know it.

I loved the post-apocalyptic feel to this story, as well as all the mysteries and secrets lurking behind every dimly lit corner. 

The brief scenario on the book's cover reminded me of a classic Agatha Christie novel. Neither Miss Marple nor Hercule Poirot, however, were among the guests gathered at a remote hotel on the North Devon coast for a New Year's Eve murder mystery game devised by a member of staff.

I was not surprised that make-believe quickly became fact, nor that everyone present—guests and staff—would have a motive. My attention was gripped by the many twists and turns in the story, linked to an old lighthouse and two deaths in the nearby village years earlier.

I didn't guess the identity of the murderer until revealed in the last few pages, but in retrospect, I realised that subtle clues had been placed in the narrative.

Paris has an incredibly vibrant food scene, and some of that energy is generated by a shapeshifting community of expat chefs and foodies. Hugh Corcoran, a Belfast born writer and cook, spent the most part of the last decade living and working in France, in Paris and beyond.

This lovely book is a collection of vignettes from his travels, simply and honestly written, remembering people he met along the way and the meals they shared. Each story ends with a recipe, including some French classics like roast chicken, gratin dauphinois, or carottes râpées.

If the book’s tone is gentle, it’s actually an urgent call to action, as the epigraph confirms: “Friends and neighbors, wet your mouths, for after death you won’t touch another drop.”

I found this novel on a secondhand stall in Kenya when I was 18 or 19 and devoured it. Little known today, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted by the BBC.

Judd relates a tour by a fictional British Army unit in Northern Ireland in some of the most violent days of the Troubles in the 1970s. The protagonist, Charles Thoroughgood, is an Oxford graduate at a time when most army officers were school leavers, and the book chants his increasing disillusionment.

My early edition featured on the cover – next to a crouching individual in combats toting a pistol on a lanyard – an endorsement from Jack Higgins: “Quite simply one of the best novels of army life I’ve read in years.” Higgins was right. 

I'm completely charmed by Peter Grainger's D.C. Smith, a seemingly (but only seemingly) mild-mannered police detective whose understated style and sly humor remind me of John le Carré's George Smiley. This book, although part of a series, is close to being a stand-alone, with Smith far from home and work.

Thirty years earlier, Smith was a British officer in Belfast, undercover with the IRA. He barely escaped with his life when his cover was blown, and he's had no contact with anyone there since, including people he'd grown to love. That changes when a young Belfastian tracks him down, blaming him for the disappearance (unbeknownst to Smith) of his uncle right after Smith fled. Smith returns to Belfast to try to discover what happened that night.

The story emerges as Smith risks his life to confront and question members of the IRA cell he betrayed.

If Walter Lord’s book is the definitive account of the sinking, this large-format encyclopaedic volume, almost large enough to sink a ship, is the definitive story of the Titanic, from the drawing board to the bottom of the ocean, with nothing omitted between the two events. It is an epic work of research so comprehensive that it deserves a wholly new category of publishing: more than a book, Titanic – Triumph and Tragedy, is a museum.

First published in 1986, it was updated in the 1990s to include new information and photographs following the discovery of the wreck, which Eaton and Haas, both acknowledged Titanic experts, had seen for themselves from a submersible. 

The book’s structure is that of a sequential archive illustrated by more than a thousand contemporary photographs, including Harland & Wolff’s original architectural plans and engineering drawings. It moves from the launch in Belfast to life… show more.

With its taut, beautiful writing and ever-rising tension, this novel kept me reading late into the night. In 2008 Belfast, “the Troubles” are very much alive, and sisters Tessa and Marian have grown into adulthood in a combustible atmosphere of menace.

When Tessa discovers that her sister has been involved in the IRA and has now become an informer against it, she plunges into the world of spies to help Marian end the ceaseless cycle of violence and retribution. The novel is more than a hold-your-breath thriller. I loved its exploration of what “terrorism” means when the terrorists are your neighbors and family and how much two women are willing to risk for peace—and each other. 

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. In Police 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!