'My direct and indirect forebears are a wonderfully heterogeneous lot - down and up the social scale (mostly down), in and out of church and chapel, Lurgan Papes and Wexford Prods, hanged and hangmen, street-brawlers and scholars, full-blown Orangemen and republican activists.'

In A Twisted Root Patricia Craig traces the remarkable stories of her ancestors, weaving the threads of their individual lives into the sweeping panorama of Irish history. From her multiply-great grandmother Katherine Rose, who made her way from Stratford-upon-Avon to Lisburn as part of the Plantation of Ulster, to Benjamin and Rebecca Lett - children at the time - who escaped the massacre at Scullabogue; from her forebear William Blacker who founded the Orange Order, to her great-uncles Frank, Matt, Gerry and Jimmy, who were all active in the IRA in the 1920s, this astonishing cast of characters creates a compelling portrait of a

family and brings Irish history to life.

Patricia Craig is from Belfast. She moved to London in the 1960s but always retained strong links with her native city, returning to live in Northern Ireland in 1999. A leading literary critic and anthologist, she regularly contributes to the Independent, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Irish Times and New Statesman, and has appeared on various television and radio programmes. She has edited many anthologies, including The Rattle of the North (Blackstaff, 1992), The Belfast Anthology (Blackstaff, 1999) and The Ulster Anthology (Blackstaff, 2006), and is the author of two memoirs, Asking for Trouble and A Twisted Root.