Books

Our resident book critic Andrew Lynch picks the history, politics and biography books that stood out from the crowd in a year jam-packed with good reads

BIOGRAPHIES / MEMOIRS

BIOGRAPHY / MEMOIR OF THE YEAR

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder

By Mark O’Connell

Mark O’Connell’s absorbing psychological study is essentially a series of interviews with Malcolm Macarthur, the eccentric bohemian and double murderer whose arrest at the attorney general’s apartment in 1982 inspired Charles Haughey’s era-defining acronym GUBU: “grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented”. While the author absolutely does not excuse Macarthur’s horrific crimes, his shrewd questions and deep analysis go a long way towards explaining their root causes. A Thread of Violence should be read in conjunction with The Murderer and the Taoiseach by Harry McGee (also published in 2023), which puts this sad but memorable story into a wider political and social context.