Showing results by narrator "Alan Turkington" in All Categories

‘Paddy’ Mayne was one of the most outstanding special forces leaders of the Second World War. Hamish Ross’s authoritative study follows Mayne from solicitor and a rugby international to troop commander in the Commandos and then the SAS, whose leader he later became and whose annals he graced, winning the DSO and three bars, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d’Honneur.

Freddie Scappaticci was born in 1946 and raised in a deeply nationalist area of Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in 1969, he joined the Provisional IRA, where he quickly rose through the ranks, becoming commander of Belfast in 1984. From the outside, Scappaticci appeared to be a dedicated volunteer, but inwardly, he had become disenchanted with the IRA and, in 1977, he started working for British intelligence.

In this thought-provoking and engaging book, Malachi O'Doherty argues that division in Northern Ireland is fundamentally not about whether the country should be governed as part of Ireland or as part of Britain—as presumed by the Good Friday Agreement—but rather is entirely sectarian, an inter-ethnic stress comparable to racism. Part memoir, part history and part polemic, How to Fix Northern Ireland shows how the split between Catholics and Protestants infests everyday life and asks what can be done to solve a centuries-old social rift and heal the relationship at the heart of the problem.

Keeley and Jude are closer than blood. Inseparable since childhood, they share everything: clothes, secrets, booze - and blame. So when they wake up after a new year’s party to find Keeley’s boyfriend stabbed to death beside them, they agree to share something else: the story they’ll tell the police. But who is that story really meant to protect? Is Jude risking her bright future to protect her friend? Is there more to sharp-eyed Keeley than she lets on? Or are they conspiring to let Keeley's brother get away with the drugs he's been selling in their small town?

Stuart Neville is a writer known for shining an unflinching light on his home country and its people. Ireland - North and South - in Neville's hands, is a land haunted by ghosts, both real and imagined. This collection is divided into two parts: 'New Monsters' and 'Old Friends'. And many of the characters from Stuart's novels, like Gerry Fegan from The Twelve, can be found haunting this audiobook.

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.

In this powerful and brutally honest memoir of his extraordinary experiences, John Crawley details the gruelling challenges of his Marine Corps training, and how, not long after his discharge, he joined the IRA. Soon he found himself in Boston, working with notorious American mobster James ‘Whitey' Bulger to amass a shipment of weapons. When captured on the Marita Ann gun-running trawler off the Kerry coast, Crawley was imprisoned for ten years, and upon his release he became one of the masterminds behind the IRA's plan to throw London's electrical system into disarray.

When civil rights protests in the 1960s gave way to armed struggle, the Provisional IRA in Derry–both city and county–led the fight against the British security forces. In the city Martin McGuinness–a young butcher’s assistant from the Bogside–quickly rose through the ranks, launching a bombing campaign that reduced the city centre to rubble. In tandem, the IRA’s active service units fought the British Army in the streets and alleys of the Bogside, Creggan, Shantallow and the Waterside.

Life throws a lot of unexpected and unpleasant things at us. Many people just struggle on, but others find someone to talk to, someone like Stephen Joseph, who, as a therapist, is trained to listen to their concerns. They turn up with problems—failing relationships, stalled careers, conflicts, feelings of upset—that all seem very real to them in the moment. They may say they just want to 'get back to normal' or 'get back on track'. But sometimes the truth is that things have changed too much to go back. 

'Some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today' Irish Times Lorraine 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...