It's a great book...the underlying menace, the threats, the ghostliness, and the border as a character itself. It's searing, elegaic, haunting, poetic, scary. And sad. -- Anna Burns For over thirty years, Eoin McNamee has been one of the outstanding writers of his generation. The Bureau is his most personal and heartbreaking novel yet, and stands shoulder to shoulder with his finest work. -- David Peace Lyrical, atmospheric and full of foreboding, The Bureau takes the reader deep into the lawless hinterlands of the border. A beautiful book from a contemporary master, all the more extraordinary for being grounded in fact. * Louise Kennedy * A Troubles set Bonnie and Clyde story played out to the stains of Springsteen's Born to Run. Inevitably the lovers cannot escape themselves in this poignant and tense doomladen tale. McNamee offers a deep insight of the place and time. * Crime Time * This is an astonishingly powerful portrait of a time and place saturated in sentimentality and cruelty, where, despite the ever-present sectarianism, "nobody was on anyone's side". * Guardian * There are two important things to know about the novels of the Northern Irish writer Eoin McNamee. The first is that they are short; the second is that they are brilliant. The two points are connected: McNamee's books are intense and compressed, but so carefully worked that they read smoothly. He writes about difficult stuff, his voice somewhere between James Ellroy and Don DeLillo with a touch of Cormac McCarthy . . . Right from the start the pages sizzle with danger and death . . . You don't realise how many books are filled with empty sentences until you read one that doesn't have any. Nothing is wasted here -- John Self * The Times * McNamee has established himself as one of the leading anatomists of the Troubles and the Border's crepuscular hinterland . . . McNamee has to be, on a sentence-by-sentence level, the author of some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today . . . reminiscent of McCarthy or Proulx . . . Every page has a phrase or whole passages to take away the breath of any attentive reader . . . If you're interested in what the Border truly means, read this exceptional novel. * Irish Times * [ McNamee] recreates a combustible era of rampant criminality against the backdrop of political violence . . . it confirms McNamee as one of the greats of Irish crime writing * The Telegraph *