There Will Be Fire

November 1, 2022

The Guardian's Ireland correspondent, Carroll chronicles the IRA's attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher in October 1984 in There Will Be Fire. Published on Israel's 75th anniversary, two-time National Jewish Book Award winner Gordis's Impossible Takes Longer considers whether Israel's founders achieved their goal of creating a national homeland that would transform Jewish life (60,000-copy first printing). In 1742, a ship landed on Brazil's coast with 30 starving men feted as survivors of the wrecked British warship the Wager--until three months later, when three stragglers on another ship landing in Chile claimed the Wager's men were mutineers; from the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon). Chair of medieval history at King's College, London, Heather offers new reasons why Christendom grew from a tiny sect persecuted within foundering fourth-century CE Rome to the religion dominating Europe 1,000 years later. Celebrated Czech novelist Kundera, who has lived in France since 1975, argues that the "small nations" of Europe--e.g., Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Ukraine--are culturally rooted in Europe and under Soviet rule constituted A Kidnapped West (40,000-copy first printing). Following the LJ-starred The Crown in Crisis, which chronicled the Abdication Crisis of 1936, British historian Larman's The Windsors at War moves on to King George VI and the conflict within the Windsor family during World War II as the Duke of Windsor cozied up to Hitler (40,000-copy first printing). From leading South African political commentator Malala, The Plot To Save South Africa covers the 1993 assassination of Nelson Mandela's prot�g� Chris Hani by a white supremacist hoping to ignite a war, even as Mandela had begun power-sharing discussions with President FW de Klerk. Good-bye, Eastern Europe broadly documents the region briefly called Eastern Europe, moving from pre-Christian times through the great empires (Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian), the rise of communism and fascism, and the post-Soviet era to Russia's invasion of Ukraine; A Polish-born contributor to the Atlantic, has a PhD in Eastern European history from Berkeley (25,000-copy first printing). Granted special access by Queen Elizabeth II to her parents' letters and diaries and to the papers of close friends and family, Smith, the New York Times best-selling author of Elizabeth the Queen, aims to show how a loving marriage helped George VI and Elizabeth lead a nation through war (50,000-copy first printing). From Simon, a former senior director for Middle Eastern and North African Affairs on the National Security Council, Grand Delusion tracks the four decades of oil-driven U.S. involvement in the Middle East, begun by the Reagan administration and moving through Desert Storm (which he challenges) to the Obama administration's step back. The acclaimed Winchester leaps nimbly from cuneiform writings through Gutenberg to Google and Wikipedia as he examines Knowing What We Know--that is, how we acquire, retain, and pass on information--and how technology's current capability to do those things for us might be threatening our ability to think (100,000-copy first printing).

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Starred review from February 27, 2023
Carroll (Comandante: Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela), the Guardian’s Ireland correspondent, recreates a real-life Day of the Jackal in this sterling account of a 1984 plot to assassinate British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Drawing on more than 100 interviews with “former IRA members, police detectives, bomb disposal experts, politicians, officials, and friends and relatives of key players,” as well as other sources, Carroll vividly describes the attack, which involved an Irish Republican Army operative placing a bomb at the Brighton, England, hotel where Thatcher was staying during a Conservative Party conference. The explosive was smuggled into the hotel and detonated by Patrick Magee, who, despite being on the radar of numerous security agencies for more than a decade, was able to check into the hotel and plant the bomb that came disturbingly close to killing Thatcher­­­­; five others died and more than 30 were wounded in the explosion. Carroll gives the definitive account of this terror attack, delving into the security lapses and placing the events in a larger geopolitical context: “For want of two minutes, or a few feet, history could have turned, and with it the fate of Northern Ireland, Thatcherism, and the Cold War.” This is must reading for anyone interested in the history of the Troubles. Agent: Will Lippincott, Aevitas Creative Management.

Starred review from February 15, 2023
A revealing story of an Irish Republican Army bombing against the vast backdrop of Irish history. "In the tangled, tortuous history of Britain and Ireland, the past is not a settled matter," writes Guardian journalist Carroll. "There is no grand, shared narrative. Atroc-ities and justified actions are in the eye of the beholder." Certainly, terrorism is how Margaret Thatcher's government characterized IRA attacks on British troops and civilians in the 1980s. At the center of the narrative is the 1984 bombing of a Brighton hotel where Thatcher addressed a Conservative Party conference. "Thatcher lived," writes Carroll. "Well, she and her government now knew that the Troubles could not be contained. The Provos had brought the war not just to England but to her inner sanctum." The bomber returned to Ireland and then traveled back to England to launch a planned campaign of bombings of British resorts to ruin the tourist economy and frighten the British populace. Although Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams--who, notes Carroll, refused to talk with him for this book--claimed to have no knowledge of the IRA's military campaign against Thatcher's government, the bombers had a role in Adams' "grand strategy." They met with less favor on the part of former backer Moammar Gadhafi, who dropped his support for the IRA and "sought other, bloodier ways to punish his enemies." Carroll closes his tense, riveting text by considering the what-ifs and long-term effects of the attack on Brighton--for which, he notes, the bomber later repented, sort of, after a lengthy prison sentence. One of those effects was Thatcher's increasing hatred of the European Union, of which Ireland was part, which led to Brexit, which in turn is leading to a growing call to integrate Northern Ireland into the Republic. "In the end," Carroll concludes, "it may be Margaret Thatcher's legacy, not IRA bombs, that delivers a united Ireland." A lucid history of the Troubles in all its manifold complexities.

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