The Bureau

a gritty tale of love and death in Northern Ireland

Eoin McNamee

$49.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

riverrun
24 June 2025

True crime; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Crime & Mystery

'Some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today' Irish Times

Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called vivacious, always a bit of dazzle to her.

Could she not see there was death about him? Could he not see there was death about her?

Paddy worked the border, a place of road closures, hijackings, sudden death.

Everything bootleg and tawdry, nobody is saying that the law is

paid off

but it is. This is strange terrain, unsolid, ghosted through.

There's illicit cash coming across the border and Brendan's backstreet Bureau de Change is the place to launder it. Brendan knows the rogue lawyers, the nerve shot policemen, the alcoholic judges and he doesn't care about getting caught. For the Bureau crew getting caught is only the start of the game.

Paddy and his associates were a ragged band and honourless and their worth to themselves was measured in thievery and fraud. But Lorraine was not a girl to be treated lightly. She's cast as a minx, a criminal's moll but she's bought a shotgun. And she's bought a grave.

By: Eoin McNamee
Imprint: riverrun
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 236mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 28mm
Weight: 460g
ISBN: 9781529440423
ISBN 10: 1529440424
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 24 June 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Eoin McNamee is the author of eight novels including Resurrection Man, later filmed, and the Blue Trilogy. His work has been nominated for and won many major prizes including the Man Booker Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Kerry Fiction Prize, the Imison Award and the CWA Steel Dagger. Liam McIllvaney said of McNamee's prose that it has the 'cadenced majesty of McCarthy or DeLillo, but the vision it enacts is all his own.'

Reviews for The Bureau: a gritty tale of love and death in Northern Ireland

It is a great book . . . the underlying menace, the threats, the ghostliness, and the border as a character itself. It's so good, very sad, elegiac, haunting, poetic, scary. And sad. -- Anna Burns