Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

Description

Soon after the Anglo-Irish Agreement, when the tension was at a peak in Northern Ireland, Colm Toibin travelled along the Irish border from Derry to Newry. Bad Blood tells of fear and anger, and of the historical legacy that has imprinted itself on the landscape and its inhabitants.Marches, demonstrations and funerals are rituals observed by the communities that live along this route. With insight and intelligence Toibin listens to the stories that are told, and unfolds for the reader the complex unhappiness of this fraught border.

Colm Toibin was born in Ireland in 1955, and lives in Dublin. He is the author of four novels, including the 1999 Booker nominated The Blackwater Lightship. His non-fiction includes Bad Blood, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross, and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time.

Toibin writes prose of a heart-breaking beauty. * Daily Telegraph * Toibin has the narrative poise of Brian Moore and the patient eye for domestic detail of John McGahern, but he is very much his own man. * Observer * High-class reportage . . . Toibin was conscientious about talking to real people, not just "names" with a good line in TV chat, and went to see and hear and sense things at a local, grassroots level. * Irish Times *