Northern Ireland

Killing Thatcher is the gripping account of how the IRA came astonishingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and to wiping out the British Cabinet – an extraordinary assassination attempt linked to the Northern Ireland Troubles and the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.

The Northumbrians have been overlooked by British and global history, but they’ve made astonishing contributions to both. Dan Jackson sets out to recover this lost history, exploring the deep roots of Northumbrian culture - hard work and heavy drinking, sociability and sentimentality, militarism and masculinity - through centuries of border warfare and dangerous industry. He explains what we can learn about Northumbria’s people from its landscape and architecture and revisits the Northumbrian Enlightenment that gave the world the locomotive and the lightbulb.

The spectre of ‘the Disappeared’, those abducted, secretly executed and their bodies buried in remote locations, has overshadowed the debate around the legacy of the Troubles in Northern Ireland for the last two decades. Yet what most people don’t realise is that ‘forced disappearances’ have been part of violent political conflicts in Ireland for over 200 years. This groundbreaking book, the first of its kind, looks at the history of this practice in Ireland and identifies all known victims over the last century, from the North King Street Massacre in 1916 right up to 2003. Ó ...

It’s the final years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Bríd and her sister, Ina, try to maintain a stable life in a divided country. Pushed by her mother’s fanaticism and a family tragedy, Bríd joins the IRA and makes a devastating choice. Frightened and guilt ridden, she flees, leaving behind Ireland and her family for America. Years later, her guilt and tragic history still buried, Bríd is an overprotective mother raising her sensitive daughter, Bernie, in Southern California.

On 26th May 1986, the body of an undercover British agent was found by the side of a muddy lane, with a rope tied around its wrists and tape over each eye. The brutal killing of Frank Hegarty began a decades-long search for justice. In a compulsive blend of investigative journalism and true crime thriller, Henry Hemming exposes the parallel worlds of the IRA and British intelligence through the lives of those inextricably bound up in both.

A gruesome murder with a strange twist. Supermarket shelf stacker Regina Steps has been strangled, stripped to her underwear, her body found straddling one of the cannons of Derry’s city walls. And why has the killer done that with her thumb? For seasoned DI Liam McLaughlin and the ragtag officers of the Major Investigation Team, it’s a homicide they’ve never seen the likes of before. Middle-aged Regina might have kept herself to herself, but she always had a smile for everyone she came across. Who could have wanted to do her harm? Was she just unlucky? But delving deeper into her ...

Me Before Them is a collection of exquisite short stories that dispassionately explore life’s temperaments through characters and their actions that give us a better understanding of the enemies of peace―ambition, anger, avarice, envy, and pride―within us. In Dark Shades, a man embraces childlike trust again by baring his soul to his family and exorcising the ghosts haunting him; alas finding out that genuine happiness also comes with empathy and selfless giving. In The Grandmothers, brave matriarchs step in to whisk their grandchildren out of the labyrinths of desolation that their ...

A riveting political thriller from the journalist who covered the controversy for more than two years, Burned is the inside story of the shocking scandal that brought down a government. One of the most shocking scandals in Northern Irish political history: originally a green-energy initiative, the Renewal Heat Incentive (RHI) or 'cash-for-ash' scheme saw Northern Ireland's government pay £1.60 for every £1 of fuel the public burned in their wood-pellet boilers, leading to widespread abuse and ultimately the collapse of the power-sharing administration at Stormont.

The novel is set in the late 1970s, during the TROUBLES in Northern Ireland, and the story was told to the author by the only surviving member of the SAS team involved. The names and places have been changed, and the entire operation has always been denied by the British Government. O'Malley is a Special Forces trained Commando with a growing mental health problem, who is pushed over the edge by the death of his son at the hands of the British army. He turns rogue and begins shooting British soldiers. A specialist SAS assassination squad are assigned to eliminate him but begin to take ...

Northern Ireland is one hundred years old. Northern Ireland does not exist. Both of these statements are true. It just depends on who you ask. How do you write about a place like this? THE STRANGERS' HOUSE asks this question of the region’s greatest writers, living and dead. What have they made of Northern Ireland–and what has Northern Ireland made of them?

A City Imagined is a paean to the city of Belfast and its writers. Written in his highly regarded wry and lyrical style, Dawe’s memoir sketches the outlines of his life as he starts to understand the city in which he was born, before embracing some of the local writers whose early work had such an influential part in nudging him in the direction of writing – poets, in the main, whose first books were read with the enthusiasm of a young man beguiled by the language and music of poetry. Building on the critical acclaim of In Another World: Van Morrison & Belfast and Looking Through You ...

The Celts have always been seen to walk between the world of the living and a world driven by magic, passion, and fantasy. To those who want to venture down the rabbit hole, Alastar MacTire takes us on a walk through the Celtic Nations starting with the struggling, passionate, magical Irish.

My name is Nora Logue. You’ve probably heard of me – most people have. I am the mother of Daisy Logue. Seven years ago, I took her for a walk in the woods. Only I came out. I have no memory of what happened that day. I have tried to rebuild my life. Met a man, had another child – Luca. But I can’t let go of Daisy, or give up hope of seeing her again. And now, I have the chance to find out what happened to her. But what if pursuing the truth about my daughter risks my son’s life?

Two years of lockdown and no one knows how to behave. But embezzlement, smuggling, bombs and murder seems a little extreme, even in Northern Ireland. But Vic Gardner is willing to take any risk in order to escape her apartment As her brief trip to Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way is complicated by both her nephews as well as Nic, her ex-boyfriend, she is confronted with the question: stay with what she knows? Or throw everything over for something new? And at what cost?

"Best Served Frozen is a chick flick with the meddlesome mothers-in-law played not by Goldie Hawn and Diane Keaton but more like...if the Kray Brothers were women."--Colin Quinn Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but hardened mother of seven Fionnuala Flood plans on serving hers up frozen. Or so she thinks. The bells are ringing out in Derry, Northern Ireland, as the dirt-poor Floods and the rich and entitled Riddells prepare for the pairing in matrimony of their families and a bridging of the gap between the two sniping communities. But some are not best pleased, and it might be more ...

Staying on in Northern Ireland as a civilian after years of working on undercover missions against terrorists, Rob eventually gains employment in Bristol, undertaking security work, but things don’t work out and Rob ends up living in a squat. After a job offer from an old colleague, Rob heads to London to work in close-protection security for some of Hollywood’s royalty and later becomes involved in the rescue of some very well-connected people from a dangerous religious cult. Rob’s life seems to be getting back on track. But Rob’s work soon becomes more covert.

"A masterpiece!" Colin Quinn "The Irish family at the heart of this hilarious novel is so tawdry and despicable, it's a wonder they don't kill off each other in the first few pages. ...The central figure is Ursula, whose husband had won the lottery and has since gambled away much of the winnings. Ursula's new (and fading) riches have strained many of her personal relationships, particularly with her sister-in-law, Fionnuala, a first-rate villain who concocts get-rich-quick schemes based on the misery of others. ...Once the vulgarity and shenanigans set in, the novel is as absorbing as it is...

In this fascinating sequel to the ground-breaking publication of Broad Church in 2019, A Broad Church: Volume 2 reveals the true history of the Provisional Republican movement in the south of Ireland in the cataclysmic decade of the 1980s. This period saw a sea-change in the movement, with the political wing increasingly coming to fore of the republican struggle. This led to a rethink on the movement’s policy of abstentionism both within the military and political movements, culminating in the historic overturning of the policy in the Republic. This growing politicisation supplemented the...

"Continued brilliance. The characters will make you laugh and cry and fume while you're reading. Comic Irish writing at its best." Colin Quinn Desperate mother of seven, Fionnuala Flood, thinks her new get-rich-quick scheme will pay the bills, but instead it threatens to tear her family apart. The case of canned vegetables she bought contains not spuds but explosives, and a defunct IRA branch will stop at nothing to get them back. Meanwhile, her two oldest sons are in prison, her husband's hands are fondling more than frozen fish at work, and her lesbian daughter has published a tell-all ...

In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the '70s and '80s. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood.