The Nonfiction Book Club meets the first Monday of each month at 7 PM. Registration is not required.  Just read the book and join us for the discussion.  Note: We always love hearing from new people with different perspectives, and we promise not to bite. 

This month's book is:

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland 
By Patrick Radden O’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 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.

Author Note

Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. The recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, he is also the creator and host of the 8-part podcast "Wind of Change," about the strange intersection of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian and has been downloaded more than 10 million times. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.