Colm Toibin is the author of four previous novels, The South, The Heather Blazing, The Story of the Night, and The Blackwater Lightship, which was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. He lives in Dublin.

Diarmaid Ferriter is Professor of Modern Irish History at University College, Dublin. He has written a number of books on Irish history, including The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000, Occasions of Sin: Sex & Society in Modern Ireland, and Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s. In 2010 he presented the RTE TV series The Limits of Liberty.

This unique volume, comprising Colm Tóibín's acclaimed short text and a linked collection of key documents put together by one of Ireland's leading younger historians, offers a many-sided view of one's of history's most poignant and far-reaching catastrophes. This book will allow the reader to understand the complex way in which the fragmentary past is both available to us ... and distant from us.' We get those insights from Tóibín's short history and from a rich collection of documents -- government papers, recipes, journalism, letters, statistics, personal statements, all linked so the book can be read as a whole.