Watching The Door: A Memoir 1971-1978 - Tapa dura

A young Irish Leicester-raised catholic, fresh from UCD with a first in history, socialist in sympathy, is sent north as a junior reporter in the Belfast bureau of RTE News to cover the increasingly vicious conflict erupting on the streets of a hate-filled city as the IRA campaign began. Reporting for Hibernia in Dublin, the "London Observer" and NBC Radio in North America, Myers becomes the eyes and ears for an uncomprehending world during a bloody decade that saw the collapse of Northern Irish society, from internment to the La Mons bombing. Raw, candid, courageous and vivid, these wartime dispatches chronicle loyalist gangs, paratroopers, provos, politicians, British agents, and an inimitable citizenry, forming a remarkable double portrait of a divided society and an emergent self - a witness to humanity, and inhumanity, on both sides of the sectarian faultline. This title offers a wonderfully vivid, trenchant first-hand account of life on the streets of Belfast during the height of 'the Troubles', as a young reporter witnesses the blood-fueds and chaos of a divided society on the brink of civil war: a litany of violence, observation and emotional free-fall, combining humour and reflection with history in the making. It interweaves the political and the personal in a very human tale at once funny, self-deprecating and sexual, a coming-of-age story like no other, on the streets and between the sheets. It gives a beautifully written, evocative and shockingly honest narrative record of a pivotal time in Ireland's recent past, blending articulacy with savage indignation.

Kevin Myers has been a broadcaster, novelist (Banks of Green Willow, 2001) and columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. He is author of the best-selling Kevin Myers (2001), a gathering of his celebrated and provocative Irishman's Diary in the Irish Times, for whom he wrote for over twenty-five years. He is now with the Irish Independent.