No digas nada

In December 1972, several hooded men kidnapped Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old widow with ten dependent children. No one doubted, in that Catholic quarter of Belfast, that it was a retaliation from the IRA. However, the crime did not begin to be solved until 2003, five years after the Good Friday peace accords, when McConville's mortal remains were unearthed on a lonely beach. When Patrick Radden Keefe set out to investigate the ramifications of this case, he was unaware that he would end up writing a full account of the Northern Irish conflict that has been unanimously acclaimed. Interviewing with dozens of testimonies, many of which had never given their version before, he portrays the professionalization of the republican militias, the repression of the British state, the escalation of violence and, above all, the ideological evolution of some of its protagonists. For example, that of Dolours Price, who joined the IRA at an early age and was involved, among other attacks, in the execution of Jean McConville. Framed in the best tradition of narrative journalism and literary non-fiction, Don't Say Nothing is a book that brings together history, politics and biography, and that probes the moral dimensions of a conflict that, half a century later, still raises blisters.