Say Nothing

A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

By: Patrick Radden Keefe

Narrated by: Matthew Blaney

Length: 14 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Empire of Pain—a stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

"Masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow and mother of 10, from her Belfast home in 1972. In this meticulously reported book—as finely paced as a novel—Keefe uses McConville's murder as a prism to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Interviewing people on both sides of the conflict, he transforms the tragic damage and waste of the era into a searing, utterly gripping saga." —New York Times Book Review

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 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 book 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 I.R.A. 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 I.R.A. 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 I.R.A. 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 I.R.A. past--Say Nothing conjures a world of passion, betrayal, vengeance, and anguish.

Look for Patrick Radden Keefe's latest bestseller, Empire of Pain.

©2019 Patrick Radden Keefe (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER

LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE

"Resolutely humane. . .Say Nothing [has an] exacting and terrifying lucidity. . .meticulously reported. . .Keefe's narrative is an architectural feat, expertly constructed out of complex and contentious material, arranged and balanced just so. . .an absorbing drama.\ —JENNIFER SZALAI, The New York Times

"Say Nothing has lots of the qualities of good fiction. . . 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 best, though, is the tragedy, the damage and waste, and the idea of moral injury. . .Say Nothing is an excellent account of the Troubles. —RODDY DOYLE, The New York Times Book Review

Ghosts, and the cities that haunt them

Give this a listen before drinking a "car bomb" next St. Paddy's day. Starts off as a murder mystery, then dives deep into true Irish culture. Much deeper than I expected. The narrator is a legend.

Excellent!

This is narrative non-fiction at its absolute best. I highly recommend it. The narrator was the perfect choice.

same flaw as his podcast

the book was well written, with some sentences blasting you with their skillful phrasing. It sticks very close to it's subject matter, you'll learn nothing about the loyalists other than they existed, but what it reveals is complex and terrible and so very human. the narrator is akin to having silk in your ear.

I took away stars for the last chapter, wherein Keefe is so in love with his own clevernes he jettisons every lesson learned in the story in order to blindly accuse someone of murder because he thinks he's smarter than anyone in the UK and NI. it's a shocking bit of hack journalism in an otherwise well-written book. 29 chapters of painstaking research showing the incredible penalty paid for a wrong name or a wrong assumption, and he accuses someone of murder based on only two separate sentences spoken by two separate people. He might have got someone killed because his ego was that important to him. what a terrible thing to do. what a terrible way to end.

Deeply Fascinating

I couldn't stop listening. It was very informative and well written. I enjoyed the narrator's northern Irish accent.

Exceptional

Very engaging. Well written and well read. I mainly listened in the car and often found myself taking the back roads home to listen longer.

Outstanding

Keefe effectively humanizes the fraught intersection of lives defined and often destroyed by the Troubles.

Enlightening

I thought that I had a good grasp of the situation in the North of Ireland from the late 60s to the mid 90s. After listening to this book I had to face up to my own shortcomings in this area. During this period, I had three occasions to drive through this area constantly asking myself, “Am I in a friendly or a hostile area”. This book helped me grasp what it must be like to live full time with this tension.
Having a reader with a North of Ireland accent brought more credibility to the narrative. Fast pace, totally absorbing and enlightening.

Almost left me speechless

This book floored me.

Starting with the disappearance of a mother of 10, Keefe unravels a decades-long story, weaving together multiple characters and events in a fascinating and respectful way. He starts with this tragedy as a place to open up a whole history of the Troubles, and how the impact of those years continues to reverberate today. If you have any empathy, you will often find yourself in tears.

I had only basic knowledge of the Troubles before this, so I have learned a lot. What I appreciated most was how the author bypasses simplistic and patronizing analyses of the situation, such as “violence on all sides is bad.” Instead he demonstrated the ugly realities: inheriting sectarian thinking, undeclared civil war, colonial mentality coming home to roost, family loyalty, PTSD, guilt, and moral injury. He also brings up the opportunities for confession and reconciliation which were sometimes thwarted by violence and prosecution. He weighs not just the price of violence but the price of politics, the price of speaking up and the price of staying silent, and the complicated legacy of Gerry Adams. All of this is delivered under the title of an Irish poem by Seamus Heaney which describes a cultural credo of survivalist silence: “Whatever you say, say nothing.”

The author draws upon a large number of personal interviews, oral histories, news publications and declassified government documents. And in the process, he might just solve a murder.

If you like categorizing people into good and bad, this book will make you uncomfortable. Ultimately every character is a human being with a story to tell, or a secret to take to the grave.

My only complaint is that I wish the author had included more legal material from the Irish Constitution and the Good Friday Agreement. He describes the draconian laws in place from the time of partition, but doesn’t provide the necessary context by comparing the laws of Northern Ireland to those of the Republic after revolution. I had to do my own research to find this out. It also would have been helpful to know that some Irish revolutionaries has first done a London bombing campaign in the 1880s. He didn’t explain the local firearms laws. He did mention raids and weapons confiscations that were slanted to Catholic neighborhoods. But to be fair, the book could easily have been twice as long, so I respect the author’s need to restrict the scope. Those oversights don’t detract from how good the book is. It tells you enough to get you interested in the rest.

The audiobook is fantastic, because it’s narrated by a Belfast native, but it doesn’t include the extensive notes, if you’re interested in that. I bought a physical copy so I can read them.

An intense incredible story.

being of Irish American extraction and and inveterate reader of history books, I have only recently gotten interested in Irish history, prompted by a recent trip to Ireland. I had grown-up hearing the news of “the troubles“ but had relatively low interest in learning more about it. It just seemed to me that Catholic and protestant Irish were always killing each other. after reading several histories of Ireland, I thought it would be beneficial to focus on the more current history. this book more than satisfied my desire for information about this era. It is incredibly well researched, organized and thoughtful. at times the story it tells is so real that I was concerned about knowing too much about Irish history. For anyone in my situation or if you are looking for a good serious read on relatively current history, I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. After I finish this review, I am going to start listening to it again. and as a sidenote if you haven’t visited Ireland, you owe it to yourself to do so. This book will make the experience even more meaningful.

Fascinating account

In addition to the praise for the book itself, I found Matthew Blaney's narration absolutely brilliant. This seems to be his first audible narration and I wish him many many more.