David Park Books In Order

The Big Snow

Shaken free from the normal patterns of their lives by a catastrophic blizzard, the intimate desires of a Northern Irish community are thrown into sharp relief as they experience love, death, and finally, murder. In a house with windows flung defiantly wide, a wife dies before her husband can make his confession. Her coffin is pulled to the church on a sledge by Peter, a young man engulfed by his first feelings of love for an older, unattainable woman. Elsewhere, an old woman searches desperately for a wedding dress in her dream of love. When the electricity fails, a lonely headmaster is forced to close his school and in shadowy candlelight he is tempted into indiscretion. Meanwhile, in the very heart of the city, the purity of snow is tainted by the murder of a young woman, and as one man begins to unravel the dark secrets of the city, he knows he is in race against time to find the murderer before the snow melts. David Park peers into the souls of his characters with an insight and compassion that makes this flawed slice of humanity somehow glorious. He is a writer of rare dignity and talent.

Swallowing the Sun

In the museum Martin stands watch over the past. He has travelled a long way from his brutal childhood in the Loyalist heartlands of Belfast and built a life he never imagined he would have a devoted wife, Alison, two children, Rachel and Tom, a respectable job. But the happiness he has found feels brittle. Rachel’s academic success is launching her out of her proud father’s orbit. Tom, eclipsed by his sister, has withdrawn into a fantasy world. Martin’s gratitude to Alison is a gulf between them. He feels unworthy of his wife, his life, his luck. Returning home one night to find police cars waiting, Martin feels his sins must have finally caught up with him. But their news is wholly unexpected, a senseless tragedy. And in the face of this devastating trauma, which tears his fragile family apart, Martin finds the violence of the past is not gone but merely dormant; its call must be answered at last. David Park’s new novel is a gripping and unforgettable portrait of a man for whom, like the city in which he lives, peace can only be uneasy and imperfect. Deeply moving, humane and full of sombre beauty, it proves him a unique Irish voice.

The Truth Commissioner

A novel that explores the concept of social justice in a moving search for personal and societal truth.

As Northern Ireland leaves behind a period of bitter violence, part of the continuing peace process focuses on how best to come to terms with the suffering of the past. David Park illustrates how one solution might take shape by inventing a fictional truth commission, modeled on South Africa’s TRC. Revolving around the lives of four men who are uncomfortably bound together in this communal search for healing, The Truth Commissioner chronicles the Commission s first hearing, that of Connor Walshe, a fifteen year old Irish Catholic boy who disappeared and whose fate has remained a mystery. Three men are called to testify: Francis Gilroy, a newly appointed government minister and former IRA leader; retired policeman James Fenton, who recruited Connor as an informer; and Danny, n Michael Madden, then an eighteen year old IRA volunteer, who had fled to America, only to be called back to Belfast to testify fifteen years later. Henry Stanfield, of Irish Catholic and English Protestant parentage, presides over the hearing. Selected for his neutrality, Stanfield is forced into the historic web of lies, and the truth, which is shaped by the four men s different pasts, remains as elusive as ever. An important novel from post Troubles Northern Ireland, The Truth Commissioner is as gripping as it is insightful and powerfully reveals a shared humanity that transcends the bitter divisions of history.