An almanac to the world of Whatever You Say Say Nothing by Gilles Peress also published by
Steidl this season Annals of the North combines essays stories photographs documents and
testimonies to open up for the reader the complicated and contradictory storylines that emerged
from the conflict in the North of Ireland. Weighed down by 800 years of colonization but only
the size of Connecticut (with half its population) the North provides a remarkably intimate
stage set. Interweaving text and image Annals of the North examines the multifaceted struggle
between Irish Republicans Nationalists Protestant Unionists Loyalists and the imperial
British to explore broader themes of empire retribution and betrayal as well as the tense
dialectic between the ordinary demands of everyday life and intense periodic explosions of
violence. Wide-ranging yet deeply personal and political alternately dense and humorous legal
and literary Annals of the North is an almanac not an academic history of the North of
Ireland offering a multiplicity of entry points into the North and by extension into the
geopolitics of the twentieth century and their impact on the people trapped in the gears of the
machine.
