The Truth Commissioner: A Novel

by David Park

Overview

As Northern Ireland leaves behind a period of bitter violence, part of the continuing peace process focuses on how best to come to terms with the suffering of the past. David Park illustrates how one solution might take shape by inventing a fictional truth commission, modeled on South Africa's TRC. Revolving around the lives of four men who are uncomfortably bound together in this communal search for healing, The Truth Commissioner chronicles the Commission's first hearing, that of Connor Walshe, a fifteen-year-old Irish Catholic boy who disappeared and whose fate has remained a mystery. Three men are called to testify: Francis Gilroy, a newly appointed government minister and former IRA leader; retired policeman James Fenton, who recruited Connor as an informer; and Danny, né Michael Madden, then an eighteen-year old IRA volunteer, who had fled to America, only to be called back to Belfast to testify fifteen years later.
Henry Stanfield, of Irish Catholic and English Protestant parentage, presides over the hearing. Selected for his neutrality, Stanfield is forced into the historic web of lies, and the truth, which is shaped by the four men's different pasts, remains as elusive as ever. An important novel from post-Troubles Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner is as gripping as it is insightful and powerfully reveals a shared humanity that transcends the bitter divisions of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596918733
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/17/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David Park has published four novels and one volume of stories. He was the winner of the Author's Club First Novel Award and the Bass Ireland Arts Award for literature, and was twice winner of the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award. His work has appeared in Best English Short Stories, The Best of Best Short Stories, and Contemporary Irish Fiction. He lives in County Downs, Northern Ireland, with his wife and two children.
David Park has written nine previous books including The Big Snow, Swallowing the Sun, The Truth Commissioner, The Light of Amsterdam, which was shortlisted for the 2014 International IMPAC Prize, and, most recently, The Poets' Wives, which was selected as Belfast's Choice for One City One Book 2014. He has won the Authors' Club First Novel Award, the Bass Ireland Arts Award for Literature, the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and the University of Ulster's McCrea Literary Award, three times. He has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year Award three times. In 2014 he was longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He lives in County Down, Northern Ireland.

Editorial Reviews

Beautifully written, always thoughtful, and readers of serious fiction will find that it remains with them long after they have set the book aside.” —Lincoln Journal Star

“With guile and wonderful imaginative sympathy, Park stays afloat on the most treacherous of thematic currents: the inhumanity of violence, the vulnerability of the individual before history, truth's inextricability from power, the elusive nature of redemption....The central attribute of the writing — and it's one of the things that make this novel of Ireland of more than parochial interest — is its conscientiousness. We're reminded that with writers like David Park, the novel can itself be a kind of truth commission.” —New York Times Book Review

“Powerful...Park humanizes all the participants but never backs away from the dark crime at the heart of the narrative—his dispassionate recounting of Connor's ordeal at the hands of the IRA is both chilling and heartbreaking.” —Booklist (starred)

“Forceful, lyrical, and elegantly written.” —Library Journal

“Park chillingly and entertainingly envisions the entanglements of a South African–style Truth and Reconciliation tribunal in post-Troubles Belfast...the novel is fast-paced and chilling, a pleasing hybrid of literary fiction and political thriller...Intricately constructed and powerful.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Wrenching…soulful...this powerful fiction both humanizes and universalizes the civil war that gripped Ireland for so long.” —Publishers Weekly

“David Park…is a writer of consequence, lyrical, precise, comic, and serious.” —The Boston Globe on The Big Snow

“A taut, riveting urban murder-mystery. Park is a superb writer.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) on The Big Snow

“A closely observed tale of how transfigured landscapes and familiar yearnings converge…absorbing.” —The Washington Post on The Big Snow

“Lyric eloquence…A moving and unusual novel filled with unexpected encounters and unpredictable outcomes.” —Orlando Sentinel on The Big Snow

From the Publisher