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SAY NOTHING
by Patrick Radden Keefe
Jean McConville's abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. 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...
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © Philip Montgomery 2022
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks; Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction; and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which the Guardian and Entertainment Weekly named the #1 podcast of 2020.
PRAISE FOR THE BOOK
New York Times Bestseller • National Book Critics Circle Award Winner • Selected by the New York Times as one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century • A Washington Post Top Ten Book Of The Year Long • Listed for the National Book Award • TIME Magazine’s Best Nonfiction Book of the Year • Best Book of the Decade by EW and LitHub • Winner of the Orwell Prize
“Meticulously reported, exquisitely written, and grippingly told.”
—DAVID GRANN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wager
"Unquestionably one of the greatest literary achievements of the 21st Century." —NICK HORNBY, New York Times bestselling author of High Fidelity
"Unforgettable" —DUA LIPA
“Reads like a novel.” —Rolling Stone
“A bracing, empathetic, heartrending work of storytelling.”
—COLUM McCANN, New York Times bestselling author of Transatlantic
A Best Book of the Year: The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Chicago Tribune, GQ, Slate, NPR, Variety, Slate, Minneapolis Star Tribune, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, and BookPage
"Keefe is a terrific storyteller... He brings his characters to real life. The book is cleverly structured. We follow people--victim, perpetrator, back to victim—leave them, forget about them, rejoin them decades later. It can be read as a detective story. . .What Keefe captures...
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Book Two
Human Sacrifice
11.
Close England!
THE CROCUSES WERE ALREADY in bloom around London’s parks and monuments on March 8, 1973. It was a Thursday, a crisp, crystalline early-spring morning. After a wet English winter, people were venturing outdoors, beckoned by the sun. The Queen left Buckingham Palace to inspect the first blooms in her garden. There was a transit strike that day, and with train service suspended, commuters were forced to drive into the city. As a result, central London was overrun with automobiles. In order to accommodate the surge of vehicles, the city had suspended parking restrictions for the day. Cars were everywhere—in loading zones and other areas that were usually off-limits, or at meters that had long since expired.
Just after lunchtime, at around 2 p.m., a phone rang at the headquarters of The Times of London. A young woman named Elizabeth Curtis, who had just started working on the news desk at the paper, picked up the call. She heard a man’s voice, speaking very quickly, with a thick Irish accent. At first she couldn’t make out what he was saying, then she realized that he was reeling off the descriptions and locations of a series of cars....
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