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| "Watching the Door brings it all back: the sounds and the smells. In this bittersweet madeleine of a book, Kevin Myers recreates the moral and political slum that was Belfast, and dispels political illusions with irony and caustic wit. What a way to lose your youth." —Christopher Hitchens |
| Watching the Door is soaked with survivor guilt; he had the information to save a handful of lives, and even though he knows he would have been killed had he talked, he still cannot help but blame himself for their deaths. This is memoir as exorcism, and it’s a beautiful, brutal piece of work. —Jessa Crispin |
| “Dark, witty, grim, caustic, despairing, wise, searingly honest and beautifully written... The best informed and most exciting personal account of the Troubles ever published.” —Mail on Sunday |
| “Ghastly, hilarious, black with humour, black with death and cruelty, and lucid with humanity.” —Literary Review |
| "Raw and memorable...sharp and laconic...Myers captures exactly the noise, the smells, the fear, the rain and the weird mixture of warm friendliness and sudden viciousness...A book that will be read after many others about that horrible turbulence are forgotten." —Times Literary Supplement | |
Watching the Door: Drinking Up, Getting Down, and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast
Kevin Myers
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| Paper | 5 1/2 x 8 1/4 | 288 pgs. | ISBN: 978-1-59376-235-3 | List: $15.95 | 04/1/2009 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: When he first started out as a journalist in 1970s Belfast, Kevin Myers was a young, wide-eyed and naive outsider. Thrust into the thick of the conflict in Northern Ireland as it teetered on the brink of civil war, Myers was quickly absorbed into the local community and became privy to the secrets (and, to be frank, privy to their conjugal beds in some instances) of both the Protestant and Catholic paramilitaries, gaining a unique perspective into both sides of the sectarian violence.
Devoid of any political agenda, Myers describes the streets of Belfast at its bloodiest with searing clarity, capturing every inch of the city's disturbing violence. Flirting with death at every turn, Myers comes of age as the world around him falls apart, fueled by psychotic rage, senseless murder and unrelenting terror that surrounds Northern Ireland's loyalist gangs, paratroopers, squaddies, police force and the wider population.
Part unofficial history, part personal memoir, Watching The Door is raw, provocative, and, darkly funny, offering an unbridled account of sex, death, violence in Northern Ireland by one of its most dynamic witnesses.
About the author: Kevin Myers is a writer, broadcaster and novelist. His previous books include Banks of Green Willow (2001) and Kevin Myers (2001). In the 1980s, he covered the Lebanese Civil War, and in the 1990s the Bosnian War. He is now a columnist on the Irish Independent.
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