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Give Them Nothing: A Novel of Love and the Troubles
The day Niall Loughran buried his brother was one of the worst of his life. It was 1985; he was sixteen, and the war in the North of Ireland had already taken more from his family than it would ever give back. Michael — a volunteer, sent out and lost — and at the graveside, with the British helicopters low over the crowd, Niall learned the thing that would shape the rest of his how to stand still, feel everything, and give nothing away.
What the British never guessed — and what almost no one in the republican movement was ever allowed to know — was what that young man would later become. To British intelligence he was a frightened informer, turned through the leverage of his private compromised, handled, contained, and therefore safe to confide in. They had it exactly backwards. He was loyal to the last, and the thing they believed they held over him was the thing he had made his weapon. His work was patient, intimate, all but invisible — moving in and out of the lives of those close to the heart of British power, becoming to each of them the thing they had always wanted and never let themselves have.
He was good at it because he had been broken in exactly the way the work required. Then, in the first fragile months of an IRA ceasefire that seemed it might finally hold, he met the one man he should never have touched — an adversary whose job was to catch people like him, and who, knowing only half of what Niall was, came to love him. Their affair ran the length of that brief peace; and when the peace shattered in the bombing of Canary Wharf, the order came to destroy the man Niall loved.
Give Them Nothing is the account he sets down years later, in exile in Boston, for the one person who might read it and not turn away — the sister he has lied to all his life. It is a novel about of a war, of a life, of a man's whole capacity for love, given over to a cause that would deny he ever existed. And it is about the one thing that waste could not touch. Spare and devastating, tender and merciless, it is a Troubles novel and a love story and a spy novel like no other — quiet where the others are loud, and unbearable where they are merely tense.
For readers of John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Anna Burns's Milkman, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.
What the British never guessed — and what almost no one in the republican movement was ever allowed to know — was what that young man would later become. To British intelligence he was a frightened informer, turned through the leverage of his private compromised, handled, contained, and therefore safe to confide in. They had it exactly backwards. He was loyal to the last, and the thing they believed they held over him was the thing he had made his weapon. His work was patient, intimate, all but invisible — moving in and out of the lives of those close to the heart of British power, becoming to each of them the thing they had always wanted and never let themselves have.
He was good at it because he had been broken in exactly the way the work required. Then, in the first fragile months of an IRA ceasefire that seemed it might finally hold, he met the one man he should never have touched — an adversary whose job was to catch people like him, and who, knowing only half of what Niall was, came to love him. Their affair ran the length of that brief peace; and when the peace shattered in the bombing of Canary Wharf, the order came to destroy the man Niall loved.
Give Them Nothing is the account he sets down years later, in exile in Boston, for the one person who might read it and not turn away — the sister he has lied to all his life. It is a novel about of a war, of a life, of a man's whole capacity for love, given over to a cause that would deny he ever existed. And it is about the one thing that waste could not touch. Spare and devastating, tender and merciless, it is a Troubles novel and a love story and a spy novel like no other — quiet where the others are loud, and unbearable where they are merely tense.
For readers of John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Anna Burns's Milkman, and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty.
386 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 2, 2026
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 30, 2026
I enjoyed this book. It took me a bit to get into as it is a very different writing style that I have never read before. It has very little dialog throughout the story which made it a bit challenging to keep up with everything and everyone involved. It also dealt with real life events in the past between England and Northern Ireland that I wasn't very educated on and had to stop to look a lot of things up. I learned a lot; which is always a bonus.
It's a character driven story about a gay man that, due to circumstances, had to take on a life that he was never should have had to. It's about having to give up everything while showing none of who he is and living with that pain in silence.
A really beautiful and tragic story.
Edited to add that the author, Eoin Devlin, is an independent author that has 3 published books. Please check them out and support independent and LGBT creators!
It's a character driven story about a gay man that, due to circumstances, had to take on a life that he was never should have had to. It's about having to give up everything while showing none of who he is and living with that pain in silence.
A really beautiful and tragic story.
Edited to add that the author, Eoin Devlin, is an independent author that has 3 published books. Please check them out and support independent and LGBT creators!
Displaying 1 of 1 review