Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles

Product Information

The scrupulous, austere, secular litany that is Lost Lives is the greatest act of remembrance that has yet emerged.

The incredible human toll, the waste, the confusion, the passion, the misery, and yes, also the compassion, the dignity, the courage, the forgiveness, all of it is detailed here in a way that is at once both decidedly personal and quite objective. I admit to having no personal connection with the events described at all, but I remember being very moved when we visited Belfast a couple of years ago and spent an afternoon in the museum which had at the time an exhibition detailing the history you describe. Before joining the BBC he was a senior reporter with the Irish News where he specialised in security-related stories.Even here, though, Mark Garrett’s roaming camera detects a certain manmade melancholy, and those words and stories keep coming at us, their accumulated weight of detail socking the viewer in the gut and bringing tears to the eyes.

We became engrossed and we starting collecting more files and more information and it turned into one of the most worthwhile things that I have ever done, growing and growing all the time into a huge book," he said. There is something so powerful about a Reference Book, something about setting criteria, making a record and aiming for completeness. It comes in hardcover, was first published in 1999, and last published in revised format in 2008 by Chris Thornton (Author), Seamus Kelters (Author), Brian Feeney (Author), David McKittrick (Author). David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton are four people from very different backgrounds, all with a strong connection to the events in Northern Ireland, and they have succeeded in what to many would be an insurmountable task.More than 20 years later when it was out of print, Chris Thornton said that much more material had become available and that he and the other authors had hoped to update it but no publishers were interested at the time. The book was written by the journalists Seamus Kelters of the BBC, David McKittrick of The Independent, and the Belfast journalists Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton. Over a seven-year period, they examined every single death which was directly caused by the troubles. This book--a brilliant combination of the journalistic and the scholarly--will stand as a memorial to the dead.

To do that we approached David McKittrick, then the London Independent's Ireland correspondent, a man already recognised as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Troubles and someone who had a considerable personal archive. With the last update of the book in 2008, a number of killings have not been recorded for posterity in Lost Lives and probably never will be. A film based on the book premiered at the 2019 London Film Festival [6] and was broadcast on BBC One in February 2020. He has come to try to process his grief and make himself desirable again as a husband, a father and a business partner.There is not space to do justice to the scholarly comprehensiveness, the magisterial evenhandedness or the moral integrity of this astonishing book. A warm, unsentimental and beautifully-observed book for our times' Lucy Caldwell, author of These Days 'If I were in bother I'd want the Ballybrady bunch at my back.

Eason's has gathered the collection together to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the conflict. And following the death of co-author Seamus Kelters, Mr Thornton said: “It’s wonderful that the book is still being recognised as important.Now that the Troubles seem to be over, the publication of Lost Lives is perhaps the great monument for which the bloody history of Northern Ireland has been waiting”.