Summary

The first six chapters of Say Nothing form part of Book 1, “The Clear, Clean, Sheer Thing.”

Chapter 1, titled “An Abduction,” is very brief. It describes the day Jean McConville, a 38-year-old widow with ten children, was abducted by a group of armed individuals hiding their features with balaclavas, taking her from her dingy flat in Belfast in 1972 in front of all of her terrified children.

Chapter 2, “Albert’s Daughters” introduces a different family, the Prices, who are a highly influential Catholic republican family of IRA members and otherwise active republican volunteers. Dolous and Marian Price, the two daughters, grew up listening with pride to their parents’ radical politics, their stories of arrest and protest, and their fervent refusal to be cowed by Protestant oppression of Catholics in Northern Ireland. As young women, Dolours and Marian took up the mantle that their parents had...