Death and Nightingales

A “deeply moving, powerful, and unforgettable book" (Michael Ondaatje), Death and Nightingales is an epic story of love, deception, betrayal and revenge, set on a single day in the Irish countryside in 1883.

Soon to be a major television event starring Matthew Rhys and Jamie Dornan.


It is 1883 and the farms of County Fermanagh, on the border of Ulster and what we now know as the Republic of Ireland, are crisscrossed with religious, political, and generational tensions. Through the events of a single day in the life of Elizabeth Winters, we see decades of pain, betrayal, and resentment build to a devastating climax.

Against the fearsome beauty of the Fermanagh landscape, the fate of McCabe's heroine, Beth, slowly and suspensefully unfolds. Born to a Catholic mother and an unknown Catholic father, conceived shortly before her mother's marriage to Protestant Billy Winters, Beth has lived a life of silent suffering since her mother's death. Determined to decide her own fate but doomed to repeat the tragic circumstances of her birth, McCabe illuminates her quiet, searing power with the tenderness of a poet, offering up a powerful, lyrical indictment of the tensions that tear families and nations apart.

'A masterpiece. Death and Nightingales is a miracle of a novel which combines prose of bleak, unadorned beauty with a plot which keeps you up all night.'-Colm Toibin

'A deeply moving, powerful, and unforgettable book' - Michael Ondaatje

'Brilliant, richly conceived, and perfectly narrated with the suspense of a good thriller.' -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)