Eoin McNamee

'Some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today' Irish TimesA Harper's most talked-about thriller novel 2025A Irish Times Book of the Year 2025A Critic Book of the Year 2025A Guardian Crime Book of the Year 2025Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called vivacious, always a bit of dazzle to her. Could she not see there was death about him? Could he not see there was death about her? Paddy worked the border, a place of road closures, hijackings, sudden death. Everything bootleg and tawdry, nobody is saying that the law is paid off but it is. This is strange terrain, unsolid, ghosted through. There's illicit cash coming across the border and Brendan's backstreet Bureau de Change is the place to launder it. Brendan knows the rogue lawyers, the nerve shot policemen, the alcoholic judges and he doesn't care about getting caught. For the Bureau crew getting caught is only the start of the game. Paddy and his associates were a ragged band and honourless and their worth to themselves was measured in thievery and fraud. But Lorraine was not a girl to be treated lightly. She's cast as a minx, a criminal's moll but she's bought a shotgun. And she's bought a grave.

'Achingly exquisite prose as concentrated as poetry, as unfailing an ear for the cadences and quirks of Belfast dialogue as Roddy Doyle has for Dublin and a fatalistic sense of suspense' Sunday Times'Impressively confident . . . as lean and grimly purposeful a book as the demon-driven terrorist it sets out to explore' Jonathan Coe'One of the most outstanding pieces of Irish fiction to come along in years' Irish TimesIn this harrowing, haunting debut novel by one of Ireland's most acclaimed writers, Eoin McNamee conjures a dreamlike appraisal of the roots of violence, in a city where reality has long since succumbed to the lure of conspiracy and paranoia. The central character is Victor Kelly, an Irish Protestant with a Catholic last name, a man with an artistic sense of violence and a fondness for John Dillinger movies. He is a killer in Belfast, a city of shadowed streets, abandoned alleyways, and dark, deserted spaces, a city that is as familiar and strange as any other - Los Angeles, Sarajevo, Paris, or Berlin. A city threatened and defined by invisible boundaries, where geography is the key to survival, and every sensory detail assumes the utmost importance. Victor's works of art are found kneeling, hands raised in supplication, the ragged lines of death cut deeply into their bodies. Kelly works under the protection of his own political organization, but as his murders become more terrifying and extreme, and the police investigation intensifies, he finds himself caught in a web of allegiance and betrayal.

Late 1944, and two teenagers dance the Vogue in silence on the projectionist's floor of the Cranfield Aerodrome. She draws the outlines of their footwork in eyebrow pencil on the white sheet. He loses their bet. Decades later, a ghost returns to Mourne to identify a body found in the shifting sands. Names have long since been changed; children long since cast out; lies long thought forgotten. Set against an eerie landscape, awash with secrets, The Vogueis a grimly poetic dance through the intertwined stories of a deeply religious community, an abandoned military base, and a long-shuttered children's Care Home.