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Mudlark signs veteran journalist Carroll’s account of the 1984 Brighton bombing
HarperCollins has acquired veteran journalist Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher: The IRA, the Manhunt and the Long War on the Crown – an account of the 1984 Brighton bombing.
Mudlark and HarperNonFiction publishing director Joel Simons acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Abner Stein on behalf of Will Lippincott at Aevitas Creative Management. Killing Thatcher will be published on 4th April 2023, ahead of the 25th anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the 10th anniversary of Thatcher’s death later that month.
The synopsis reads: “The 1984 Brighton bombing reshaped the UK’s political landscape and the trajectory of the Troubles. The extraordinary assassination attempt saw the IRA come shockingly close to killing Margaret Thatcher and wiping out the British Cabinet, in the most daring conspiracy against the Crown since the Gunpowder Plot.
“Now, for the first time ever, and through more than 100 interviews with former IRA members, police detectives, bomb disposal experts and politicians, Dublin-born Rory Carroll retraces the decades-long IRA campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland that culminated in one of the deadliest terrorist attacks on British soil.
“From the shocking assassination of Lord Mountbatten and Thatcher’s dismissal of hunger strikes by republican prisoners, to the hide-and-seek between the IRA and security services that led to an extraordinary manhunt – Killing Thatcher explores one of the most important events in the tangled recent history of Britain and Ireland.”
Carrol, the Guardian’s chief Ireland correspondent who has been a foreign correspondent at the newspaper for more than 25 years covering the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, Latin America and Los Angeles, said: “When I started this book I thought the main outlines of the story were known. I was wrong. It took me into the inner sanctum of the IRA’s ‘England Department’ operatives, the soldiers and police tasked with stopping them, and the private realm of Thatcher. It was a collision of different worlds."
Simons said: “Killing Thatcher is narrative non-fiction at its very best: deeply researched and relentlessly paced, Rory’s book is a masterpiece of political thriller writing. I can’t wait to publish it in April.”
