Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Written by Patrick Radden Keefe
Narrated by Matthew Blaney
5/5
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Currently unavailable
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About this audiobook
From award-winning New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe, a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.
In December 1972, Jean McConville, a 38-year-old mother of 10, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as "The Troubles". Everyone in the neighborhood knew the IRA was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it.
In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress — with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes.
Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing audiobook on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also IRA members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders.
From radical and impetuous IRA terrorists such as Dolours Price, who, when she was barely out of her teens, was already planting bombs in London and targeting informers for execution, to the ferocious IRA mastermind known as The Dark, to the spy games and dirty schemes of the British Army, to Gerry Adams, who negotiated the peace but betrayed his hardcore comrades by denying his IRA past — Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.
Editor's Note
The Troubles…
With the Brexit deadline looming, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are in the spotlight over worries that the return of a hard border could reignite bloody sectarian violence known as The Troubles. “Say Nothing” traces the devastation of The Troubles through the unsolved murder of a mother of 10.
Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, as well as two previous critically-acclaimed books, The Snakehead, and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change on the origins of the Scorpions’ power ballad, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020. He is the recipient of the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.
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Reviews for Say Nothing
47 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5OUTSTANDING! A fascinating and compelling read not to be missed!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not the best Nonfiction I have read this year but I still recommend. There were parts that just didn't make sense to me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A case study in violence, memory, how not to do oral history, and the cost of violence on revolutionary ideals.