James Carroll Books in Order

An IRA assassin arrives in Washington targeting a British Catholic diplomat, while a young priest gets pulled into the danger around her. Politics, church ceremony, and personal crisis collide in Carroll's debut novel.

Colman Brady moves from the Irish upheavals of the 1920s to Boston's rough political world in this large, multigenerational novel. Carroll follows ambition, exile, and family cost across decades of conflict.

A Vietnam draft resister comes home after years in exile and finds that the past has not stayed put. Guilt, grief, and old betrayals pull several damaged lives toward a single confrontation.

Professor Jake MacVeagh, son of a powerful CIA man, is pulled into an espionage mission tied to his defecting uncle. Family history and Cold War intrigue tangle together as old loyalties start to crack.

Michael Maguire survives a Korean War prison camp and enters the priesthood hoping to serve something better. Then Vietnam and church politics force him to choose between obedience, conscience, and the meaning of peace.

Set against World War I and the Easter Rising, this novel follows Douglas Tyrrell and an Anglo-Irish family caught between empire and rebellion. Carroll turns political conflict into a very personal story of divided loyalties.

In 1949, young FBI agent Chris Malone is drawn into a mission to steal a Soviet code book after the atomic spy panic erupts. What starts as patriotic duty turns into a maze of deception and moral compromise.

Sean Dillon claws his way out of the Chicago stockyards, joins the FBI, and rises into the world of military intelligence. As the years pass, public ambition and private conscience collide, especially when Vietnam reaches his own family.

Set in Boston from 1960 to 1984, this novel follows brothers Nick and Terry Doyle as they chase different ways out of Charlestown. Politics, crime, family loyalty, and the city's shifting power lines keep pulling them together.

In this memoir, Carroll writes about his father, his Catholic upbringing, and the Vietnam era that split their family. It is intimate and political at once, tracing how faith, patriotism, and conscience collided.

This wide-ranging history examines how Christian anti-Judaism took shape across centuries and helped poison Jewish-Christian relations. Carroll weaves scholarship and personal reflection into a hard, often unsettling reckoning.

Written in the wake of the abuse crisis, this book lays out Carroll's case for deep reform inside Catholicism. He argues that the Church needs honesty, structural change, and a wider sharing of authority.

Set during the Berlin crisis of 1961, this novel begins when three teenagers cross into East Berlin and are detained. The rescue effort pulls parents and children into Cold War secrets, old loyalties, and a painful reckoning with the past.

Gathering Carroll's writings on the Iraq War and the war on terror, this book tracks how fear, religion, and politics fed each other after 9/11. It is urgent, argumentative, and grounded in history.

Carroll tells the story of the Pentagon from World War II to Iraq, mixing political history with family memory. The result is a sharp look at how military power grew, and what that growth cost.

Part memoir and part religious history, this book follows Carroll's life alongside the changing Catholic Church in America. He writes with both affection and frustration about faith, reform, beauty, and failure.

This sweeping history asks how one city came to sit at the center of so much religious longing and violence. Carroll traces Jerusalem's pull on Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the modern political imagination.

Carroll reconsiders Jesus for a secular age, reading the Gospels in the shadow of the Holocaust and modern doubt. It is a personal, searching book about what can still be believed, and why.

At the end of World War II, David Warburg arrives in Rome to help Jewish survivors and quickly finds a city full of fugitives, secrets, and double games. His search for justice leads straight toward the Vatican ratline.

This warm memoir follows veterinary friends Anthony Bennett and James Carroll from university days to their busy practice in coastal New South Wales. Expect animal emergencies, small-town characters, and plenty of behind-the-scenes chaos.

In these true stories from country Australia, two young vets race from calving emergencies to near-impossible pet rescues. The chaos is messy, funny, and often genuinely moving.

This layered novel links the love story of Abelard and Heloise with Nazi-occupied Paris and postwar New York. A priest, a Jewish refugee, and a buried past drive a searching story about faith, guilt, and repair.

Part memoir and part church history, this book follows Carroll's long struggle with Catholic belief. He argues that clerical power, especially around the abuse crisis, pulled the Church away from the teachings he still cares about.