The most recommended books about Northern Ireland

McKinty’s Sean Duffy series (The Detective Up Late is #7) has been a barnstormer of a series since the get-go.

Duffy, a Catholic Royal Ulster Constabulary officer in ‘Troubles’ torn Northern Ireland has a price on his head. So maybe as the 80s bleeds inexorably into the 90s and peace remains a long, long way off it’s time to retire. But before that one last case.

Ending a series on a high note is a tough proposition for any writer – but McKinty nails it and maybe, just maybe, there might yet still be a resurrection for Duffy ahead.  

By its very nature, poetry is about compression. At its best — again, at least to me — a great poem opens up over and over as you read and reread it. It’s a constant journey of discovery. And Northern Ireland’s Philip Larkin, the best English-speaking poet of the 20th century that most Americans have never read, is a master of the compressive arts. I’m recommending his entire Collected Poems here, but if you read only one Larkin poem, make it “Church Going.” In 474 carefully chosen words describing his visit to a mostly abandoned country cathedral, Larkin delivers the equivalent of a 10,000-word treatise on the state of religion in the Western World today.

Who could have expected a 14-year-old autistic boy, regularly bullied at school, to write with enthusiasm and eloquence about the natural world? Yet that’s exactly what the Irish teenager Dara McAnulty does.

He has a flair for language and a wild passion for other life forms. Whether he’s writing about dandelions (“A blaze of uplifting yellow to brighten even the greyest of days”), spiders (“They’re such a beguiling sight – it hurts me to think how people so carelessly kill them”), or birds (“Sparrow song, a coven of cackling. A raucous, glorious racket”), he wears his big heart on his sleeve.

Reading this book rekindled my own love of nature. It also taught me many lessons about autism. 

The fifth installment in the Sean Duffy detective series, Rain Dogs is as compelling, intelligent, and dark as the others.

Duffy is an Irish Catholic policeman in a mostly Protestant police force, solving crimes in 80s Northern Ireland. (Yes, I was on a Northern Ireland kick this year). He is smart and knows it, but he’s also flawed and very decent. He fights valiantly for what he believes is right, regardless of the side that lands him on politically.

But mostly, I love this book, and the series, for the gorgeous, spare prose and, in audiobook, for Gerard Doyle’s superbly dry, acerbic narration.

Belfast, 1981. Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy is the lone Catholic in a Protestant police force, investigating a series of seemingly unrelated murders and trying to do his job amid sectarian hatred and violence.

Kudos to McKinty for writing a dazzlingly intricate police procedural that maintains the historical integrity of The Troubles. And more kudos for the wickedly dark comic sensibility of the narrator, Duffy.

He is very smart, very smart-mouthed, and very funny. This was my fourth try this year at finding a well-written and compelling mystery series.

All the others fell short by the second book. The Cold Cold Ground is the first in the Duffy series of six books, and I’ve read them all!

The author of this fascinating book was an intelligence officer in a unit of the Provisional IRA, in the town of Newry in Northern Ireland, in the 1980s. Later, he broke under British interrogation and gave evidence against his former comrades. Though he later retracted the evidence, he was subsequently murdered, almost certainly by individuals linked to the republican movement. The book details the author’s reasons for joining the IRA, and his role in the movement’s armed campaign. Collins’s task was to seek out individuals linked in one way or another to British forces in the Newry area and then to facilitate their killing by the IRA. The book is written from a position of deep disillusionment with the campaign in which the author was engaged. It offers unique insight into some of the workings of this organization, and into the nature and motivations of the people involved.   

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.

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.

Although best known for his A Social History of English Cricket (1998), The Willow Wand is, for me, Birley’s best cricket book. I imagine I’d have enjoyed Birley’s company for he not only writes with great humour, he understood exclusivity was not the same thing as quality and he burst the elitist bubble that had long surrounded the game in England by dissecting the game’s most treasured and fervently protected myths and personalities with forensic precision. 

Be it imperialism, the game’s most revered chronicler Neville Cardus or, even, the game’s premier icon W. G. Grace, Birley leaves no stone unturned, and he even alludes to the distinct regional identities that define the game in the North and South of England, which formed the basis of my own book.

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.