Hard work, but good.
Subtitled ‘A true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland’, this is a very selective history of the troubles from the late 1960’s through to and beyond the Good Friday agreement.
Two characters are prominent, Jean McConville a thirty-eight year old mother of ten who was abducted and murdered by the IRA in (I think) the 1970’s; and Dolours Price, who may well have been one of her killers.
The stories of both families are interspersed with a history of the troubles, particularly from a (non-partisan) Catholic point of view. It is, as you would expect, a pretty bleak tale, and certain characters, Gerry Adams in particular, come out of it pretty badly.
The bulk of the contents appear to have come from the Treasure Room in Boston College library, where a huge amount of material about the Troubles is stored. A transcript of a transcript of interviews with Brendan Hughes an ex-IRA man plus interviews with the living survivors. Good, but the only one of (many) books about the Troubles that I have read. So not sure how this locates itself in the genre.
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