I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the book review podcast.

This summer, when we here at the book review, published the results of a survey that asked more than 500 literary luminaries what they thought the best books published since the year 2000 were.

Say nothing?

A true story of murder and memory in

Northern Ireland came in at number 19. Nick Hornby, the great Nick Hornby, who wrote about

the book for us, called it one of the greatest literary achievements of the 21st century.

In Say Nothing, the journalist Patrick Redden Keefe gives us a history of the troubles,

the name for the 30-year conflict in Northern Ireland between the British and the Irish,

through a series of characters, the most prominent of which are DeLora's Price,

one of the first female frontline soldiers in the Irish Republican Army, the IRA,

and Gene McConville, a widowed mother of 10, whose abduction and killing by the IRA

remains one of the conflict's most infamous moments.

Say Nothing has now been adapted into a nine-part FX series, all episodes of which are streaming

on Hulu, and one of the show's executive producers,

also the book's author, is our guest this week. Patrick, Bradenkeef, welcome to the book review

podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Hopefully many of our listeners have already read say nothing,

but in the event they haven't, do what you've been doing for the past six years,

and tell us about it.

It's a book about a handful of people. It's not really a history of the troubles. It's a book about a particular episode that happened in 1972, which kind of bound together a handful of

people. So one night in 1972, and this is in the early years of the troubles,

there was a woman named Gene McConville, who was a widow and a mother of 10, and she lived in a big

public housing complex in West Belfast, and a gang of masked intruders came to her door, and they

...