Ezra's Bookshelf

Say Nothing

by Patrick Radden Keefe · 561 pages · ~10 hrs

HistoryPolitics & Government

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Patrick Radden Keefe uses the 1972 abduction of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was dragged from her Belfast home and never seen alive again, to tell the larger story of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. McConville's disappearance was ordered by the IRA, which believed she was an informer. For decades her children searched for answers, even as the peace process required parties to move on without accountability. Keefe, an investigative journalist at The New Yorker, traces the lives of those involved: Dolours Price and Marian Price, young sisters who became IRA bombers; Brendan Hughes, a charismatic IRA commander who later grew disillusioned; and Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader who denied his IRA involvement for decades. The book draws on interviews and on the Belfast Project, oral histories with former paramilitaries that became the subject of legal battles. Keefe writes with thriller pacing about moral complexities that resist easy judgment. The result is both a gripping crime story and a meditation on political violence, its costs, and the impossible choices that peace requires.

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