9 March 2015

Author profile: Thomas Paul Burgess

“White Church, Black Mountain just sucks you in. Like Brian Moore given a make-over by James Ellroy. Excellent stuff.” - Colin Bateman

Thomas Paul Burgess's debut novel White Church, Black Mountain (2015) is a political thriller set in Belfast that "explores a society’s hunger for redemptive catharsis".

At its beginning, DI Dan Watson of the Historical Enquiries Team enters an interview room for a routine consultation, only to find the younger brother of his late partner, who was brutally assassinated by the Provisional IRA two decades before.

"I killed my own brother... and he deserved what he got."

The action segues between the early 1970s and modern times, in a Northern Ireland where the fragile Peace Process is still haunted by crimes of the past.

Burgess has drawn from his own experiences as a community relations worker to create a fiction based on real events. He grew up on Belfast's Shankill Road and was a member of the band Ruefrex in the late 1970s and 1980s.

Burgess has degrees from the universities of Ulster, Cork and Oxford and has been published widely in the areas of cultural identity and community. He is now a senior lecturer at University College Cork. His academic research focuses on education, cultural identity and community work.

Official author website: Thomaspaulburgess.co.uk

Author on Twitter: @PolBrugha

Are you this author or their agent?  Contact us if you would like to add or update biography details.