The Bureau

De: Eoin McNamee

Narrado por: Alan Turkington

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

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. ©2025 Eoin McNamee (P)2025 Quercus Editions Limited

Reseñas de la Crítica

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. (Anna Burns)

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 hisfinest work. (David Peace)

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 (John Self)