By Patrick Radden Keefe

London. Harper Collins. 2018. 521p.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland" is a nonfiction book by American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, published in 2019. The book tells the story of the conflict in Northern Ireland, known as "The Troubles", through the lens of one particular crime – the disappearance of a young mother of 10 named Jean McConville.

Keefe uses McConville's disappearance as a focal point to explore the complex and violent history of Northern Ireland, the rise of the Provisional IRA, and the role of secret paramilitary groups like the Irish Republican Army and British Army's Military Reaction Force. He also examines the legacy of the conflict, including the ongoing search for McConville's remains and the Good Friday Agreement, which brought an end to much of the violence in Northern Ireland.

Through extensive research and interviews with those involved, Keefe creates a gripping and detailed narrative that delves into the lives of those caught up in the conflict, including McConville's family and the IRA operatives responsible for her disappearance. He also explores the ways in which memory and trauma continue to shape the lives of those affected by the conflict.

By Anthony Burgess

From the cover. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE_-Anthony Burgess' most famous novel-is a book of stunning force, the most cogent and terrifying vision of the future since George Orwell's 1984. Adrift in the impersonal, iron-gray society of the superstate, the novel's main character, 15-year-old Alex, leads his gang of teen-age rockers in all-night orgies of random violence and destruction. Told in a slang as electric as the events described, this is Alex's storyo f rapes and stompings and rumbles with the police, of prison life and the frightful "Ludovico Technique" by which Alex is "recon ditioned" into a model citizen, and of his subsequent adventures as a mindless pawn in the cynical hands of the authorities. "A brilliant novel . . . a tour de force in nastiness, an inventive primer in total violence, a savage satire o n t h edistortions o fthe single and collective minds."-New York Times.

NY. W.W. Norton. 1962. 184p.

By Richard Flanagan

Kif Kehlmann, a young, penniless writer, thinks he’s finally caught a break when he’s offered $10,000 to ghostwrite the memoir of Siegfried “Ziggy” Heidl, the notorious con man and corporate criminal. Ziggy is about to go to trial for defrauding banks for $700 million; they have six weeks to write the book.
 
But Ziggy swiftly proves almost impossible to work with: evasive, contradictory, and easily distracted by his still-running “business concerns”—which Kif worries may involve hiring hitmen from their shared office. Worse, Kif finds himself being pulled into an odd, hypnotic, and ever-closer orbit of all things Ziggy. As the deadline draws near, Kif becomes increasingly unsure if he is ghostwriting a memoir, or if Ziggy is rewriting him—his life, his future, and the very nature of the truth.
 
By turns comic, compelling, and finally chilling, First Person is a haunting look at an age where fact is indistinguishable from fiction, and freedom is traded for a false idea of progress.

London. Penguin, 2017, 392p.

By Salman Rushdie

A mixture of science fiction and folktale, past and future, primitive and present-day . . . Thunderous and touching. After drinking an elixir that bestows immortality upon him, a young Indian named Flapping Eagle spends the next seven hundred years sailing the seas with the blessing–and ultimately the burden–of living forever. Eventually, weary of the sameness of life, he journeys to the mountainous Calf Island to regain his mortality. There he meets other immortals obsessed with their own stasis and sets out to scale the island’s peak, from which the mysterious and corrosive Grimus Effect emits. Through a series of thrilling quests and encounters, Flapping Eagle comes face-to-face with the island’s creator and unwinds the mysteries of his own humanity. Salman Rushdie’s celebrated debut novel remains as powerful and as haunting as when it was first published more than thirty years ago. A book to be read twice . . . [Grimus] is literate, it is fun, it is meaningful, and perhaps most important, it pushes the boundaries of the form outward.

London. Vintage. 1975. 253p.

By Paula Hawkins

An addictive novel of psychological suspense from the author of #1 New York Times bestseller and global phenomenon The Girl on the Train and A Slow Fire Burning.

“Hawkins is at the forefront of a group of female authors . . who have reinvigorated the literary suspense novel by tapping a rich vein of psychological menace and social unease… there’s a certain solace to a dark escape, in the promise of submerged truths coming to light.” —Vogue

A single mother turns up dead at the bottom of the river that runs through town. Earlier in the summer, a vulnerable teenage girl met the same fate. They are not the first women lost to these dark waters, but their deaths disturb the river and its history, dredging up secrets long submerged.
 
Left behind is a lonely fifteen-year-old girl. Parentless and friendless, she now finds herself in the care of her mother's sister, a fearful stranger who has been dragged back to the place she deliberately ran from—a place to which she vowed she'd never return.
 
With the same propulsive writing and acute understanding of human instincts that captivated millions of readers around the world in her explosive debut thriller, The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins delivers an urgent, twisting, deeply satisfying read that hinges on the deceptiveness of emotion and memory, as well as the devastating ways that the past can reach a long arm into the present.

London. Transworld. Penguin. 2017. 357p.