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ONE OF THE TIMES’ BEST HISTORY BOOKS OF 2021

‘The tale of the Phoenix Park murders is not unfamiliar, but Kavanagh recounts it with a great sense of drama… Kavanagh’s account reminds me of the very best of true crime.’ The Times (Book of the Week)

On a sunlit evening in l882, Lord Frederick Cavendish and Thomas Burke, Chief Secretary and Undersecretary for Ireland, were ambushed and stabbed to death while strolling through Phoenix Park in Dublin. The murders were carried out by the Invincibles, a militant faction of republicans armed with specially-made surgeon’s blades. They ended what should have been a turning point in Anglo-Irish relations. A new spirit of goodwill had been burgeoning between Prime Minister William Gladstone and Ireland’s leader Charles Stewart Parnell, with both men forging in secret a pact to achieve peace and independence in Ireland – with the newly appointed Cavendish, Gladstone’s protege, to play an instrumental role. The impact of the Phoenix Park murders was so cataclysmic that it destroyed the pact, almost brought down the government and set in motion repercussions that would last long into the twentieth century.

In a story that spans Donegal, Dublin, London, Paris, New York, Cannes and Cape Town, Julie Kavanagh thrillingly traces the crucial events that came before and after the murders. From the adulterous affair that caused Parnell’s downfall to Queen Victoria’s prurient obsession with the assassinations and the investigation spearheaded by the ‘Irish Sherlock Holmes’, culminating in a murder on the high seas, The Irish Assassins brings us intimately into this fascinating story that shaped Irish politics and engulfed an empire. This is an unputdownable book from one of our most ‘compulsively readable’ (Guardian) writers.

Publisher Review

Julie Kavanagh has done an adroit unpicking of the intricacies of the history, and her book is at once admirable for its scholarship and immensely enjoyable in its raciness. -- John Banville * New York Times Book Review * The tale of the Phoenix Park murders is not unfamiliar, but Kavanagh recounts it with a great sense of drama... Kavanagh's account reminds me of the very best of true crime...Kavanagh never hurries; she takes the time to describe characters and places with exquisite detail. An engaging story is rendered beautiful because of the tiny ephemera that a less sensitive author might have carelessly discarded. * The Times (Book of the Week) * What Julie Kavanagh has done here is to bring this most extraordinary of assassinations to life...one of the best researched and most enjoyable historical reads I have come across in quite some time. * Sunday Independent * The dramatic story of the Phoenix Park murders...is told with novelistic panache by Julie Kavanagh. -- Kim Bielenberg * Irish Independent * These tragic events are vividly recounted in Julie Kavanagh's lively and suspenseful The Irish Assassins...a fluent, well-researched study of Anglo-Irish relations in the Victorian era. * Wall Street Journal * A compelling blend of political history and true crime...a colourful, ambitious book...makes most other accounts of the period seem bloodless by comparison. * Sunday Business Post * this skilful, multi-faceted historical narrative...draws in the strands of the story with extraordinary dexterity -- Conor Brady * Sunday Times (Ireland) * [A] sweeping and compelling narrative of a story that more than bears retelling. -- Frank Callanan * Irish Times * You could think of this as the prequel to Patrick Radden Keefe's best seller Say Nothing...Although the events in these two books are set nearly a hundred years apart, they are linked by the push and pull in that country between Protestant and Catholic, between peace and violence, between independence and accord. * Amazon Editors' Pick * her account is gripping. But what makes her book fresh and different is her determination not just to tell a good story but to give full attention to the background and the aftermath...a fine book. -- Anne Chisholm * The Tablet * [A] page-turning history...This entertaining and richly detailed chronicle offers fresh insights into a conflict whose repercussions are still felt today. * Publishers Weekly * Kavanagh's gripping account of the murders is a stark reminder that history is a chaotic jumble of chance, circumstance, and opportunity, as much about what could have been as about what was. * Literary Hub * A cinematic, multilayered revenge tragedy centered on Ireland's fraught quest for independence. * Kirkus Reviews * Julie Kavanagh has taken a violent and sensational event, the assassination of two senior government official in Dublin in 1882, and placed it in a richly contextualised and many-layered historical setting. Using a wide range of sources and opening up new avenues of enquiry, she vividly demonstrates the convulsive reverberations of one violent act, tracing the shockwaves it sent into political salons at Westminster, cabins in County Donegal, court circles at Windsor, revolutionary cabals in Paris, the Irish leader Parnell's secret life in a London suburb, and the complex world of the transatlantic Irish diaspora. Consummately well-written and full of novel insights, this is the best kind of historical detective story. -- R.F. Foster, Emeritus Professor of Irish History, University of Oxford In The Irish Assassins, Julie Kavanagh has brilliantly succeeded in making a complex sequence of events irresistibly accessible, providing an engrossing narrative that is violent, tragic, sometimes funny, extremely astute and remarkably well written. -- Selina Hastings This is one of those rare books that is superbly written, tells me something I need to know and which grips the imagination from first word to last. Julie Kavanagh has produced an engrossing account of revolutionary violence, political folly and human weakness. It is a powerful work. -- Fergal Keane, BBC correspondent for Ireland A fascinating, beautifully written account of an event whose consequences reverberate even today...[It is] made of course all the more interesting by the extraordinary characters with leading roles in the drama. -- Tony Blair In The Irish Assassins, Julie Kavanagh manages the extraordinary feat of guiding the reader through the complexities of Anglo-Irish politics while building the combined tension of an electric political thriller with a tragic love story. The people are real, the events still matter today and the impact is Shakespearean. -- Ralph Fiennes Enlightening, absorbing and very exciting. -- Lady Antonia Fraser