At more than 1,600 pages, a thickness greater than some editions of the Bible, and weighing something like an average roast, theft of the object involved substantially more than sliding it into your waistband and strolling out the door. For a non specialist like me, it provides a solid orientation in the history of the troubles – after all, there is nothing like the way people die to tell you about the conditions in which they lived – and at the same time makes it all immediate in a way that those of us who grew up elsewhere could not otherwise experience. Consider the case of 11-year-old Alan McCrum (no relation) who was killed on 15 March 1982 by a no-warning car-bomb left by the IRA in the centre of Banbridge, one of a total of 34 people injured in the explosion. It was – and remains – the only book to record the circumstances of every single death in a conflict.

I was born in Dublin 1969 and would love to go back in time to show both sides of the troubles all of the unnecessary murders and carnage that would unfold in the forthcoming years. It’s necessary to have a war memorial such as this for the Troubles, even unusually in literary form. It's not a book one can sit down and read cover to cover, but more a volume of reference that the reader will re-visit time and time again, sadly with some truly heartbreaking stories of the slain, espescially those of the children and the innocent. Lost Lives first appeared not long after the Good Friday Agreement, and that timing is probably important in understanding the book's impact: it came at a moment when Northern Ireland was just beginning to look at the immensity of what happened over the previous 30 years. This is a five star book and I’ll probably never finish it, I’m only on page 60 of 1542 closely printed pages, it will take years.In dispassionate, objective prose, the authors--three journalists and an academic--record the circumstances of every death and a detail about the dead. What this book does well, is that it asserts that ‘a victim is a victim’, but in doing that, readers unfamiliar to the NI conflict might also conclude that ‘a killer is a killer’ – inscribing the killers with unlimted agency and dislocating them from the structural injustices and the lack of choices that created them. His grieving father was reported as saying: 'It's terrible that a wee lad coming home from school should be mowed down in such a horrible way. Having worked together at their production company DoubleBand Films since the late 1980s, they have a long track record in producing and directing documentaries and feature documentaries.

But such is the variety of accounts and of perspectives in the literature surrounding the troubles that something like Lost Lives is extremely useful, even if only for keeping track of where the events and people described intersect.Hewitt and Lavery wouldn’t have had to wander far into the archives for visual evidence of the taut, fraught Ireland of yesteryear, yet be warned: there are images here that couldn’t have been shown on the nightly news, interrupting the detachment instilled in the original prose. DoubleBand Films had been keen to do something with the book but David McKittrick, who had worked as a consultant with them on a number of occasions, said he couldn't envisage how anyone could turn Lost Lives into a film or TV programme. But Seamus mostly understood that this was a sign of the book's egalitarian appeal; that Lost Lives' goal, which was simply to record every death caused by the Troubles, was recognised and appreciated as much by thieves as it was by professors.