The most recommended books about The Troubles

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.

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.

Megan Abbott has been called the queen of crime fiction, and it’s easy to see why.

This is my personal favorite of her books, set in the academic world—as usual, Abbott’s prose is vivid and dazzling, and she crafts deeply flawed but sympathetic characters. Her evocation of female friendships, highlighted here in the context of an elite scientific research lab, is second to none. This haunting tale of ambition and rivalry kept me up at night.

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.

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.

I’ve always found the history of The Troubles fascinating, as grim and confounding as it is. This book does an excellent job of providing a general overview of that history by taking the disappearance in the 1970s of a single mother as its starting point.

Say Nothing reads like a murder mystery (because it basically is one) as it winds its way through the streets of Belfast and Northern Ireland’s turbulent, recent past. Narrative nonfiction at its best.

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. 

For its razor-sharp evocation of land and sea. For its trenchant insights into Irish history. For its elliptical style. But most of all, for its characters.

Magee sets her novel on a small island off Ireland’s west coast in 1979 when the Troubles were at their height in Northern Ireland. The dynamic running through the narrative involves a bitter dispute between two self-important visitors: an English painter and a French academic.

But the islanders themselves provide the emotional heart of the book, especially a teenage boy named James, who is patronized by one of the visitors and betrayed by the other.

When I remember The Colony now, I think first and foremost of that lonely, vulnerable boy.

I was twenty-five and enraged at the self-pity and posturing dominating the Irish peace process. I was dying to write yet terrified of even attempting to say anything in print. And then, like a rogue rocket, Divorcing Jack arrived. A hilarious assault on Northern Irish sacred cows right at the bitter end of the bloody Troubles. A timely, wisecracking strike back at a place where being a self-important Muppet had become a job description. So… Dan Starkey, suspected of murdering a lover, stumbles through local fiefdoms to solve the crime himself. He was in places I knew, bars I drank in, saying things that needed to be said. Divorcing Jack started a train of thought that still runs in my mind, one that insists rules are for rulers, not writers.