Audiobooks narrated by Alan Turkington

The Yank: My Life as a Former US Marine in the IRA

HE YEAR IS 1975. A young Irish-American is on a mission to enlist in an elite unit of the US Marine Corps. His goal: to receive the most intensive military training possible and then go to Ireland to join the IRA and fight to end the British occupation of the North. In this powerful and brutally honest memoir of his extraordinary experiences, John Crawley details the gruelling challenges of his Marine Corps training, and how, not long after his discharge, he joined the IRA. Soon he found himself in Boston, working with notorious American mobster James ‘Whitey' Bulger to amass a shipment of weapons. When captured on the Marita Ann gun-running trawler off the Kerry coast, Crawley was imprisoned for ten years, and upon his release he became one of the masterminds behind the IRA's plan to throw London's electrical system into disarray. Crawley is blisteringly candid about the people he worked with and unflinching in his commentary on the IRA leadership. Through it all comes the steadfast voice of a man on a mission, providing an evocative and passionate account of where that mission led him and why. To this day, he remains committed to the establishment of an all-Ireland Republic.

John Crawley (Author), Alan Turkington (Narrator)

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Stakeknife's Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA's Nutting Squad and the British Spo

Freddie Scappaticci was born in 1946 and raised in a deeply nationalist area of Belfast. When the Troubles broke out in 1969, he joined the Provisional IRA, where he quickly rose through the ranks, becoming commander of Belfast in 1984. From the outside, Scappaticci appeared to be a dedicated volunteer, but inwardly, he had become disenchanted with the IRA and, in 1977, he started working for British intelligence. At the same time, he took up a leading role in a newly formed IRA Internal Security Unit (ISU), aka ‘The Nutting Squad'. He personally executed two suspected informers and condemned at least thirty-seven more to death. Was he the serial killer that history portrays him? Undoubtedly. But it's not that simple, because every time he passed the death penalty on an informer, he told his British intelligence handlers about the intended execution, giving them the opportunity to prevent the killing. Did the tasking and co-ordinating group, the primary British intelligence organisation in Northern Ireland during the troubles, aid and abet the IRA in the mass-murder of British citizens? That is the question Richard O'Rawe poses in Stakeknife's Dirty War. But O'Rawe goes further: he lays out a very compelling case that points to the TCGs running the IRA's war from the mid-1980s to the 1994 ceasefire. Such was the British intelliegence penetration of the IRA, that Freddie Scappaticci, aka ‘Stakeknife', was in control of all IRA operations in the Belfast Brigade area. This book will shock readers, and cause them to reevaluate everything they formerly held to be true about Stakeknife's dirty war in Ireland.

Richard O'rawe (Author), Alan Turkington (Narrator)

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Paddy Mayne: Lt Col Blair 'Paddy' Mayne, 1 SAS Regiment

‘Paddy' Mayne was one of the most outstanding special forces leaders of the Second World War. Hamish Ross's authoritative study follows Mayne from solicitor and a rugby international to troop commander in the Commandos and then the SAS, whose leader he later became and whose annals he graced, winning the DSO and three bars, the Croix de Guerre and the Légion d'Honneur. Mayne's achievements attracted attention, and after his early death legends emerged, based largely on anecdote and assertion. Hamish Ross's closely researched biography challenges much of the received version, using contemporary sources, the official war diaries, the chronicle of 1 SAS, Mayne's papers and diaries, and a number of extended interviews with key contemporaries. It has the support of the Mayne family and the SAS Regimental Association. In Ross's analysis Mayne is a dynamic, yet principled and thoughtful man, committed to the unit's original concepts; not flawless, but whose leadership qualities and tactical brilliance in the field secured the reputation of the SAS.

Hamish Ross (Author), Alan Turkington (Narrator)

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How To Fix Northern Ireland

In this thought-provoking and engaging book, Malachi O'Doherty argues that division in Northern Ireland is fundamentally not about whether the country should be governed as part of Ireland or as part of Britain - as presumed by the Good Friday Agreement - but rather is entirely sectarian, an inter-ethnic stress comparable to racism. Part memoir, part history and part polemic, How to Fix Northern Ireland shows how the split between catholics and protestants infests everyday life - from education and segregated housing, from street protests, bonfires and parades to the high politics of power sharing and Brexit - and asks what can be done to solve a centuries-old social rift and heal the relationship at the heart of the problem.

Malachi O'doherty (Author), Alan Turkington (Narrator)

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The Traveller and Other Stories

With a Foreword by John Connolly. Stuart Neville is a writer known for shining an unflinching light on his home country and its people. Ireland - north and south - in Neville's hands, is a land haunted by ghosts, both real and imagined. This collection is divided into two parts: New Monsters and Old Friends. And many of the characters from Stuart's novels, like Gerry Fegan from The Twelve, can be found haunting these pages. Childhood, innocence, guilt and redemption are all themes that are represented in Stuart's novels and in this collection, as John Connolly puts in his Foreword, 'here are monsters, both human and non-human. Here are hauntings, real or imagined. Here are old friends and older fiends.' Stuart's pleasure in the short story is evidenced in these thirteen tales, culminating in the previously unpublished novella, 'The Traveller', which sees Jack Lennon (from The Final Silence) and his daughter Ellen McKenna, pitted against the unnamed assassin who is targeting them. This is a collection of stories covering a decade of the author's writings and, as Connolly says, is 'the work of a prodigiously talented writer'. This is Irish noir at its best.

Stuart Neville (Author), Alan Turkington (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Alan Turkington