Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

"So this is a fairly recent book. It’s loosely structured around a single murder, the murder of a mother of ten children, after she was accused of informing on the IRA. She disappeared, was murdered, and the case was never solved. I say loosely structured around it, because the book starts and ends with that, and returns to it at various points, but actually the book spins out into a much broader story about the IRA, the British state, and by following particular figures, we learn about conditions in British and Irish prisons, the functioning of elite units in the IRA, political action and shifting public perception of the Troubles. A lot of what I’d read about this book presented it as a sort of murder mystery . And it does offer a resolution of this unsolved case. But although that’s a thread that runs through the book, it’s much broader than that, while managing to remain really, really vivid. “I’m very interested in the question of how we remember history, particularly recent history” If you’ve grown up in the UK, Gerry Adams and other prominent Republicans will be familiar figures. But seeing them rendered like this, we get an incredibly intimate view of the movement and how and why people got involved. It doesn’t shy away from the brutality, and you get a very clear view of the complicity of the British state. It does that, again, through close personal retellings. So it’s wide, but also focused. You move between different people who were affected and involved. It’s very vivid, very gripping, and illuminates a familiar and very close part of history, at least for those of us living in the UK. Exactly. I’m personally very interested in the question of how we remember history, particularly recent history, and a few of these books engage with this very directly. Stasiland suggests that it’s almost harder to look at the recent past than long ago events, and Say Nothing deals with that too. It raises all these questions about the nature of historical memory and unresolved legacies. And in a very readable way."