Synthesizing a vast body of scholarly work, Henry Patterson offers a compelling narrative of contemporary Ireland as a place poised between the divisiveness of deep-seated conflict and the modernizing - but perhaps no less divisive - pull of ever-greater material prosperity.

Although the two states of Ireland have strikingly divergent histories, Patterson shows more clearly than any previous historian how interdependent those histories - and the mirroring ideologies that have fuelled them - have been. With its fresh and unpredictable readings of key events and developments on the island since the outbreak of the second world war, Ireland Since 1939 is an authoritative and gripping account from one of the most distinguished Irish historians at work today.