The most recommended books about The Troubles

I love how Megan Abbott combines beautiful writing with deeply chilling subject matter in all of her novels. In this book, she showcases her talent for exploring female ambition, friendship, and rage—that leads to murder.

As a teenager, Diane Fleming’s twisted relationship with both her parents and her drive to succeed is counterbalanced by her yearning for intimacy with her best friend, Kit Owens, the first-person narrator of the novel.

However, when Diane divulges her terrible secret, the aftereffects ripple in Kit’s life. As young women working together in the same science lab, the past catches up with both of them—in the bloodiest ways—binding them closer together. This is a page-turner that focuses on brilliant, passionate, troubled women.

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.

How to address the bloody past is constantly debated in Northern Ireland. The lawyers can’t get it right, nor the politicians or police. Yet this writer does. The book strips everything away and leaves, well, the bones. It’s a father-and-son story. The former, an ex-paramilitary, takes in the troubled latter. The prison veteran father has been trying to be better. The lovesick son is trying to be normal. Both remain curiously opaque, their stories not quite gelling. These are precision-hewn Troubles characters, murderer and son, never as disappointed in each other as they are with themselves. Theirs is a small house filled with history and filling up with paranoia and mistrust. And we learn it all via a prison diary. A mighty debut novel.

I loved this fast-paced, witty, moving account of Ireland’s recent history.

O’Toole is the kind of narrator you want to spend more time with. I admired the style of this fascinating memoir: O’Toole tracks the history of Ireland over the course of his lifetime, weaving together the personal with the political, economic, and cultural.

I’ve conducted research in Ireland since 2016. It’s a remarkable place, changing rapidly, full of contradictions and grappling with the darkness of its recent past. I loved O’Toole’s book because he made sense of these contradictions in lively and nuanced ways.

This book is the best of memoir, blending together a person’s experiences with their wider context to provide a rich narrative of a life.

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. 

Ian Cobain’s writing style is fluid and his story of the real-life murder of Constable Millar McAllister by the IRA in 1978 reads like a bestselling crime novel.

The politically violent period between 1968 and 1998 is euphemistically referred to in Ireland as ‘The Troubles.’ A civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland’s divided society was hijacked by violent people on either side. Cobain, a British journalist, superbly sets the story of the killing in the political context of the time. He vividly describes the role each IRA member played in the murder and the consequences for them as individuals. If you are interested in Ireland, Irish politics, or would just like to comprehend the domestic terrorist war that was—‘The Troubles,’ Cobain’s account is riveting.

McGilloway writes a taut, intricate novel, his focus is on story and character.

We see an Ireland torn by the Troubles and how all this affects and plays into everyday life. His settings are concise and spare. Here is a novel with a strong and engaging protagonist who solves several disturbing murders by not giving in to outside pressures. A terrific read. 

A man is found stabbed to death. Garda Inspector Ben Devlin is shocked to learn that he’s heard of him. The victim has just been released from prison after spending twelve years inside. As a young lad he was jailed for the rape and murder of a teenage girl.

Devlin’s beliefs are tested when the current opinion is that the man got what was coming to him, but is that justice? Devlin doesn’t think so.

I loved this book because it tells the story of a young woman in a perilous political situation who doesn’t cave to horrifying violence or conform simply to stay safe. I admire the voice Burns creates for the main character, called “middle sister,” because it’s unlike any narration in any other novel. 

For me, the strangeness of middle sister’s narration gets at the disconnect between the way a young woman sees herself and the way the rest of the world sees her—as inconsequential, as a sexual object, as a target. I love the way that she thinks her way out of the traps all around her, using humor and clear-sightedness to survive ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland during the 1970s.  

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!

In contrast to earlier works on the Garda history, Conway frames policing experience in Ireland by examining its history and development in the context of post-colonialism, its impact, and lived experiences. As Ireland achieved independence, she shows, ‘time constraints and lack of alternative experience led to the retention of many core features of colonial policing’, resulting in an organisation ideologically different but practically similar to the Irish forces of the preceding century. In 1925, the new police of the Irish Free State absorbed the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the Civic Guards, who filled the niche left vacant by the disbanded Constabulary, and contentiously, many ex-RIC men. Conway skillfully weaves gardaí interviews into this varied contemporary history of policing the Republic of Ireland.