The Bureau

About the Book

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

A Harper's most talked-about thriller novel 2025

A Irish Times Book of the Year 2025

A Critic Book of the Year 2025

A Guardian Crime Book of the Year 2025

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.

About the Author :
Eoin McNamee's first children's book THE NAVIGATOR has received critical acclaim in the US and the UK. His adult books have been shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize and twice longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has lived in London, Dublin and New York and is now settled in Sligo on the west coast of Ireland.

Review :
It's a great book...the underlying menace, the threats, the ghostliness, and the border as a character itself. It's searing, elegaic, haunting, poetic, scary. And sad. For over thirty years, Eoin McNamee has been one of the outstanding writers of his generation. The Bureau is his most personal and heartbreaking novel yet, and stands shoulder to shoulder with his finest work. Lyrical, atmospheric and full of foreboding, The Bureau takes the reader deep into the lawless hinterlands of the border. A beautiful book from a contemporary master, all the more extraordinary for being grounded in fact. A Troubles set Bonnie and Clyde story played out to the stains of Springsteen's Born to Run. Inevitably the lovers cannot escape themselves in this poignant and tense doomladen tale. McNamee offers a deep insight of the place and time. This is an astonishingly powerful portrait of a time and place saturated in sentimentality and cruelty, where, despite the ever-present sectarianism, "nobody was on anyone's side". There are two important things to know about the novels of the Northern Irish writer Eoin McNamee. The first is that they are short; the second is that they are brilliant. The two points are connected: McNamee's books are intense and compressed, but so carefully worked that they read smoothly. He writes about difficult stuff, his voice somewhere between James Ellroy and Don DeLillo with a touch of Cormac McCarthy . . . Right from the start the pages sizzle with danger and death . . . You don't realise how many books are filled with empty sentences until you read one that doesn't have any. Nothing is wasted here McNamee has established himself as one of the leading anatomists of the Troubles and the Border's crepuscular hinterland . . . McNamee has to be, on a sentence-by-sentence level, the author of some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today . . . reminiscent of McCarthy or Proulx . . . Every page has a phrase or whole passages to take away the breath of any attentive reader . . . If you're interested in what the Border truly means, read this exceptional novel. [McNamee] recreates a combustible era of rampant criminality against the backdrop of political violence . . . it confirms McNamee as one of the greats of Irish crime writing An extraordinary contribution to McNamee's project of depicting the process through which violence in the north is mythologised and crystallised into history; with it, he offers his most personal novel yet, without compromising the political mission that makes him one of the most radical and important writers on the island. This is a well-nigh perfect book. McNamee's sentences have always been meticulous and miraculous, and this novel is the full flower of his genius. It is a story so bitter you had better have sweet tea to hand as you are going through. The courage required to write like this is Somme-like, and the ability to carry it off rarer than a flawless diamond Time, place, skewed morals and machismo are powerfully evoked in beautifully spare prose It's a stunning performance - and it does feel like a performance, a book you gape at as much as read. There are plenty of dead bodies here, but no dead air. Its heartbreaking plot will stay with you long after you've finished the last page An intimate and pitch perfect portrait of Irish borderland villainy