The Bureau

It's a great book...the underlying menace, the threats, the ghostliness, and the border as a character itself. It's searing, elegaic, haunting, poetic, scary. And sad.

For over thirty years, Eoin McNamee has been one of the outstanding writers of his generation. The Bureau is his most personal and heartbreaking novel yet, and stands shoulder to shoulder with hisfinest work.

Lyrical, atmospheric and full of foreboding, The Bureau takes the reader deep into the lawless hinterlands of the border. A beautiful book from a contemporary master, all the more extraordinary for being grounded in fact.

A Troubles set Bonnie and Clyde story played out to the stains of Springsteen's Born to Run. Inevitably the lovers cannot escape themselves in this poignant and tense doomladen tale. McNamee offers a deep insight of the place and time.

This is an astonishingly powerful portrait of a time and place saturated in sentimentality and cruelty, where, despite the ever-present sectarianism, "nobody was on anyone's side".

There are two important things to know about the novels of the Northern Irish writer Eoin McNamee. The first is that they are short; the second is that they are brilliant. The two points are connected: McNamee's books are intense and compressed, but so carefully worked that they read smoothly. He writes about difficult stuff, his voice somewhere between James Ellroy and Don DeLillo with a touch of Cormac McCarthy . . . Right from the start the pages sizzle with danger and death . . . You don't realise how many books are filled with empty sentences until you read one that doesn't have any. Nothing is wasted here: there's no blah, no waffle, none of what Elmore Leonard called "hooptedoodle". . . And the best part? It's all true - or true enough. Many of the characters, as with all McNamee's books, are real. Paddy and Lorraine were real, and did die together, in September 1997. You can read about them online. Or you can read about it in McNamee's tremendous novel, which is a lot more fun.