The most recommended books about Northern Ireland

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.

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. 

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.

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.

Michael Magee’s novel is a cracking exploration of life in contemporary Belfast. The examination of a young man’s quest to find some direction and economic stability whilst working in precarious employment had me hooked from the outset. His attempts to deal with the fall-out from a casual act of violence and his romantic/friendship dilemmas seemed to sum up well the struggles many faced in their early 20s, between university and their ‘future’ (alas, a distant memory for me now). 

So far, so rite of passage-y. But what I think makes the book an informative read on Northern Ireland and its conflict is the fact that the impact of that violent period is an ever-present but infrequently acknowledged factor in a book set 30 years after the violence (largely) ended.  When it does appear in the novel, it is often unheralded, disruptive, and fleeting. This made me reflect on the extent… show more.

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.   

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.  

For the longest time, I have wanted to better comprehend the winding and complex years-long road to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, the multi-party accord, which, with the US government serving as an international peace broker, ended decades of sectarian and state violence at the end of Paul O’Dwyer’s life.

This lucid and objective scholarly account helped me grasp how O’Dwyer and a cadre of fellow grassroots organizers managed in 1992 to elicit a public vow from Bill Clinton to appoint a US envoy to Northern Ireland, with Clinton making good on the promise during his presidency. 

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.  

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.