This address once carried a weekly list of new books. Our list is not limited to new titles. These are eleven books we recommend for anyone trying to understand the questions this site deals with: how states and armed groups use violence, how societies remember it, and how law tries to hold power to account.
Northern Ireland and the Troubles
- Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe (2018). Built around the 1972 abduction and murder of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, by the IRA, it widens into a study of the conflict, secrecy and the oral history archive at Boston College.
- Lost Lives by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton (first published 1999). A record of every death caused by the Troubles, each with a short account. Not a book to read straight through, but essential.
- Milkman by Anna Burns (2018). A novel, winner of the Booker Prize, about a young woman in an unnamed city who is pursued by a paramilitary. It captures the pressure of rumour and surveillance better than many histories.
- Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay (2021). Interviews with Protestants across Northern Ireland about identity, loyalty and change after Brexit.
- Anatomy of a Killing by Ian Cobain (2020). A close reconstruction of a single IRA killing of a police officer in 1978, and of everyone it touched.
- Lost, Found, Remembered by Lyra McKee (2020). Writing by the Belfast journalist, published after she was killed by dissident republicans in Derry in 2019.
- North by Seamus Heaney (1975). Poems written in the early years of the Troubles, including "Punishment", discussed in our article on poetry and paramilitary violence.
- We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole (2021). A personal history of the Republic of Ireland since 1958, useful for seeing the Troubles from the south.
Law and justice beyond Ireland
- Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson (2014). The founder of the Equal Justice Initiative on representing people on death row in Alabama, including a man wrongly convicted of murder.
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2010). An influential, and debated, argument about mass incarceration and race in the United States.
- Gideon's Trumpet by Anthony Lewis (1964). The story of Clarence Earl Gideon, whose handwritten petition led the US Supreme Court to guarantee lawyers for poor defendants. A classic about why legal representation matters.
A note on choosing
We have favoured books that are careful with evidence and fair to people on different sides. Several deal with killings by the IRA, others with the state and loyalists; none of them settles the arguments, but all of them make the arguments better informed. For the Finucane case itself, start with our guide to the 2012 report.