Blood-Dark Track: A Family History »

Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, South Africa, Iran, Turkey, and Holland. His works include the novels Netherland, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award, This Is The Life, and The Breezes. He writes regularly for The Atlantic Monthly. He lives with his family in New York City.

From the bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Netherland, a fascinating, personal, and beautifully crafted family history.

Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers—one Turkish, one Irish—were both imprisoned for suspected subversion during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA. O'Neill's other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was interned by the British in Palestine on suspicion of being an Axis spy.

With intellect, compassion, and grace, O'Neill sets the stories of these individuals against the history of the last century's most inhuman events.

The Washington Post - Marie Arana

A gaping rift separates memoir and history, but Joseph O'Neill negotiates it nimbly in Blood-Dark Track, an account of two men in the fitful years before World War II. A chasm divides East and West, too, but O'Neill negotiates it just as agilely, for the men in his sights lived in disputed lands—one in Turkey, the other, Ireland…[O'Neill] peels back each layer of the past with care and deliberation. In the process, he displays considerable research skills, but he also exposes a touching tenderness for his family and a rare wisdom about the complicated world at large.