Making Sense of the Troubles, by David McKittrick & David McVea

Co-written by The Independent's acclaimed Northern Ireland correspondent and a Belfast academic, this is a brisk, lucid, admirably impartial account of "a lethal but fascinating time".

After years of uneasy peace, the ignition point for the past 30 years of conflict came in 1968 when a rights march was brutally suppressed by the RUC. Grimly documenting the tit-for-tat bloodletting that followed Bloody Sunday in 1972, this book stirs memories of an astonishing sequence of events, ranging from "the most dramatic day of the Troubles", when Lord Mountbatten was assassinated and 18 paratroopers were killed in August 1979, to the unexplained disappearance of the £56m given to John De Lorean.

The authors note that, with Colonel Gaddafi's assistance, the IRA became "one of the world's best-equipped underground organisations". They suggest that the British tendency to regard republicans and loyalists as "two inherently unreasonable tribes" overlooks the fact that the settlement that created Northern Ireland "was an almost guaranteed recipe for tensions."

In a fascinating analysis, the authors explain why they see the three most substantial figures in the Troubles as Gerry Adams, John Hume and Ian Paisley ("one of the brightest and most subtle minds of his generation"). Northern Ireland is "never going to be a placid place", but the authors conclude that the future will bring "much improvement on the past three decades."