The daily news from Northern Ireland in the early 1990s was dominated by failed political initiatives and brutal but routine killing and destruction. It was a time of little apparent hope.
Republicans tried to interest the press in their new rhetoric, which regularly called for a peace strategy and hinted at flexibility. Off the record, some senior republicans were more forthcoming, saying that they were indeed looking for a political road. Some reporters disbelieved the talk of flexibility. Others came to believe that there was indeed something interesting going on within the republican movement, but found it difficult to say this - or be believed - against a background of relentless IRA violence.
We now know that since the late 1980s, secret talks and contacts were taking place behind the scenes that would lead to the transformation of politics in the North. A flaw in daily journalism is that tomorrow is often too early to tell today's story. It is fitting that two of the North's finest daily news reporters get to tell this story now.
Endgame in Ireland is the product of a near-perfect journalistic collaboration for the purposes of this story.
Its raw material consists of the full unedited interviews conducted with all the main players in the peace process for the television series, Endgame in Ireland, which was broadcast on RT╔ and BBC in June and July this year. The material was given to journalists Eamonn Mallie and David McKittrick to write a book. They are the perfect combination: for close to a quarter of a century Mallie has been the North's highest profile and most trusted news reporter, while McKittrick has been the most consistently reliable and clear analyst of the conflict.
And the book is a very fine piece of journalism - this despite the fact that there is almost nothing in it that hasn't been written or said somewhere before. Its triumph is bringing it all together into one narrative with a beginning, middle and, well, a sort of an end.
It is proof too that journalism is at its best doing the basic thing: telling people what happened, and putting it in a context so the reader might understand why. Everyone in the book gets to describe what happened in their own words, so vividly that the reader may feel his or her mouth drying up as Mrs Thatcher describes the grit in her teeth as she tried to make her way through the cement and dust of the bombed Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984.
And if you don't know why Irish republicans ended up trying to kill a British Cabinet, the authors give us about 500 years of history to provide the context. 500 years, that is, in seven pages, without a necessary detail or nuance missing. Historians please note. Just as you can almost feel the grit in Mrs Thatcher's teeth, so do the matter-of-fact prose style and the eye-witness testimonies allow the horror of the hunger strike period emerge without being mediated by a pro or anti hunger strike narrator getting in the way. There is remarkable and chilling testimony from Michael Stone on how and why he attacked republican funerals at Milltown Cemetery, killing two mourners, and from one of the men who went into the Rising Sun Bar in Greysteel and opened fire on drinkers.
The most fascinating political material from the earlier stages comes from Denis Bradley and the Rev Alex Reid, two men who played such important roles in bringing people together. Bradley's lengthy account in particular adds both insight and drama, in particular through the account of the trip of a British MI6 man - known as "Fred" - to arrive unannounced and without security protection at Martin McGuinness's Bogside home to open contact well before there was any public talk of a ceasefire.
The final dramatic 24 hours before the signing of the Belfast Agreement on Good Friday 1998 is pieced together through the accounts of most of the key participants. The all-night session; the dramatic confrontation outside Castle Buildings between Dr Paisley and Billy Hutchinson of the PUP; the Taoiseach's return to the talks from his mother's funeral; the repeated rescuing of the talks from imminent collapse and the unionist divisions over decommissioning make this a truly extraordinary political event.
Above all, the book is an account of more than a decade of intensive human engagement between politicians, many of whom couldn't stand each other's guts. The story of the peace process is the story that shows that politics works, that as politicians fail and disappoint and look to their own interest, so too can they make history.
It disproves the canard that in relation to news from Northern Ireland, nothing changes. The book is one of several telling what may be the most thrilling Irish political story of our lifetimes. And if you don't think it is, you haven't been paying attention to the news over the past decade. This book will set you straight.
Mark Brennock is Political Correspondent of The Irish Times and was Northern Editor from 1990 to 1993