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In 1982 Malcolm Macarthur, the wealthy heir to a small estate, found himself suddenly without money. The solution, he decided, was to rob a bank. To do this, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them, he killed two people, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest in the apartment of Ireland’s Attorney General nearly brought down the government. The case remains one of the most shocking in Ireland’s history.Mark O’Connell has long been haunted by the story of this brutal double murder. But in recent years this haunting has become mutual. When O’Connell sets out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes, he tracks down Macarthur himself, now an elderly man living out his days in Dublin and reluctant to talk. As the two men circle one another, O’Connell is pushed into a confrontation with his own narrative: what does it mean to write about a murderer?
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Like all great books, A Thread of Violence is the document of a great writer's obsession. Mark O'Connell draws the reader into a deeply engrossing story, and at the same time into a complex investigation of human brutality and of narrative writing itself. This is a superb and unforgettable book
Sally Rooney
Phenomenal. It's very dark, necessarily, but I found it very rich. Macarthur seems as though he's being generous and open, but there's also this manipulative side of him. It's like a chess game between the two of them, which I found really compelling
Guardian
No contemporary literary mind seems to me more subtle, perceptive or trustworthy… [An] eerie, philosophically probing book… A Thread of Violence instils the certitude not only that no one else could have written this book, but that no other need ever be written on the subject. It's a marvel of tact, attentiveness, and unclouded moral acuity
Guardian Book of the Week
Ruminative, sophisticated, urgent and inky dark. O'Connell is one of the best non-fiction writers around… Biographers and writers of true crime, I suspect, will come to regard this as a classic. It is more than a niche masterwork, though; it is an exceptional piece of storytelling
The Sunday Times
O'Connell writes with great humanity about Macarthur's victims… This is one of the really out-standing books of modern Ireland. It is a heady cocktail of reportage, detection, and reflection… A magnificent book
Irish Examiner
Queasily brilliant… A clever and thoroughly disquieting book
FT
One of the most disturbing things I've read for a good while… O'Connell is a gripping writer and some episodes have a scalding chill… Fantastically interesting
Daily Telegraph
This is the single best book I read all summer
Phillipe Sands
In the gallery of criminals who have fascinated writers, the elegant Malcolm Macarthur is one of the most enigmatic. And in the pantheon of writers fascinated by criminals, Mark O'Connell proves himself among the most brilliant. It is one of the boundaries that cut humanity in two: those who have killed someone, those who have not. O'Connell roams around this boundary, in this grey area, from which he has brought a fascinating narrative
Emmanuel Carr�re, author of The Adversary
In A Thread of Violence Mark O'Connell has investigated, with immense skill and insight, the mind of a double murderer, and in the process has shown the essential mysteriousness of such a mind-perhaps of any mind. The result is a beautifully wrought narrative that is at once frightening and thrilling. A masterly work
John Banville
A ridiculously good book. The prose is apparently knowing and smooth; the subject is anything but. Malcolm Macarthur, an infamous, ageing double murderer, exists on every page, in almost every sentence, and yet recedes continually out of reach. The effect on the reader is like being in the eye of hurricane – terrifyingly calm – the moral vortex at the heart of breathtaking violence. It's like watching dangerous dance, a folie a deux, between a deeply skilled and humane writer and a murderer with a high regard for his own etiquette. You want to chuck it across the room and then run after it and then carry on reading, as gripped as you were before
Sam Knight, author of The Premonitions Bureau
I read it at one sitting, so gripping was the account of Mark's conversations with a man who cannot call himself a murderer and yet killed two people utterly senselessly. The sensitivity of the work and the attention to language made this book one of the best of its kind and an example to others of how to do it
Dr Gwen Adshead, Consultant forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist, and author of The Devil You Know
A masterful, haunting book by an author at the height of his powers. Mark O'Connell asks us how much we can ever understand about the darkness that resides in other people, and in ourselves
Ed Caesar
Stays with you for weeks. The eerie, tenuous relationship between journalist and killer lives in the legacy of Janet Malcolm and Truman Capote
Caitlin Doughty
A Thread of Violence is nourished by a powerful moral intelligence and an enormous curiosity. Mark O'Connell circles the inner life of the murderer Malcolm Macarthur with subtlety and forensic care… Complex and disturbing as well as intriguing and compelling
Colm To�b�n
| Weight | 0.218 kg |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 198 × 129 × 18 cm |
