Say Nothing

Book Description:

Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2019

A New York Times Bestseller

One night in December 1972, Jean McConville, a mother of ten, was abducted from her home in Belfast and never seen alive again. Her disappearance would haunt her orphaned children, the perpetrators of the brutal crime and a whole society in Northern Ireland for decades.

With gripping, forensic reportage and lyrical, vivid detail, Say Nothing weaves the stories of Jean McConville and her family with those of Dolours Price, the first woman to join the IRA as a front-line soldier, who bombed the Old Bailey when barely out of her teens; Gerry Adams, who helped bring an end to the fighting but denied his IRA past; Brendan Hughes, a fearsome IRA commander who turned on Adams after the peace process and broke the IRA's code of silence; and other indelible figures.

Keefe captures the intrigue, the drama and the profound human cost of the Troubles. This is a searing chronicle of the lengths that people are willing to go to in pursuit of a political ideal, and the ways in which societies mend - or don't - in the aftermath of a long and bloody conflict.

Longlisted for the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Writing.

About the Author

Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, and the author of 'The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld' and the 'American Dream and Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping'. He writes about legal issues, crime, national security, and foreign policy. (And pop culture occasionally, too.) In 2014, Patrick received the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story A Loaded Gun.

The recipient of a Marshall Scholarship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Patrick has been a finalist for the J. Anthony Lukas Prize and the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award for Best Book on International Affairs. Patrick grew up in Dorchester, Massachusetts and went to college at Columbia. He received Masters degrees from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics, and a JD from Yale Law School.