Northern Ireland

2019 · Patrick Radden Keefe · 464 pages · Nonfiction / History

Say Nothing opens with masked intruders taking a widowed mother of ten from her Belfast flat in 1972, and spends four decades and four hundred pages answering what happened to her and what happened to everyone who kept the secret. Patrick Radden Keefe braids the Jean McConville disappearance through the lives of IRA radicals, hunger strikes, peace deals, and a Boston College oral-history project that detonated decades later, producing the consensus masterpiece of Troubles nonfiction. It reads like a novel, argues like an indictment, and closes with a deduction that made headlines. The sprawling middle asks commitment. The ending repays it with interest.

2024 · 1 Season · FX on Hulu · Drama

Say Nothing is a gripping limited series about the Northern Ireland Troubles that manages to be both a riveting political thriller and a devastating human drama. The dual-timeline structure follows IRA members from their radical youth in the 1970s to the reckoning of old age, and the ensemble cast delivers career-best work across the board. It handles an incredibly sensitive subject with intelligence and nuance, never simplifying the moral complexities of political violence. The nonlinear structure occasionally disrupts momentum, and the final episodes slow as the focus shifts from action to reflection. But as a piece of historical storytelling that trusts its audience completely, it's one of the strongest limited series in years.

2018 · Anna Burns · 348 pages · Literary Fiction

A relentlessly inventive novel about a young woman stalked by a paramilitary figure in an unnamed Northern Irish city during the Troubles, written in a singular voice that captures the suffocating psychology of life under community surveillance.

2021 · Kenneth Branagh · 98 min · Drama

Belfast is Kenneth Branagh's warmest and most personal film, a black-and-white memory piece about growing up during the Troubles that favors nostalgia over political complexity. The performances, particularly from Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds as the grandparents, are wonderful, and the film captures the magic of childhood perception with genuine affection. It's a beautiful film about a terrible time, though its reluctance to engage with the harder edges of its setting leaves it feeling lighter than its subject deserves.