A Journey through Palestine

You Can't Hide the Sun

Drawing on his own experiences of the Middle East, John McCarthy travels through Israel to uncover the hidden story of the Palestinian struggle.

A powerful account of the Palestinians of Israeli citizenship as told in their own words. Eloquent and moving, this book is essential reading to understand the full complexity of Palestinian-Israeli relations.

Eugene Rogan, Author of The Arabs: A History

John McCarthy takes us on an unforgettable journey through a tumultuous and complex landscape. His passion and humanity are all the more remarkable in the context of his own brutal experience of the dark side of its political context.

From a man who knows much about human spirit’s refusal to be cowed comes a beautifully written, compassionate and insightful account of Israel’s non-Jewish population. You Can’t Hide The Sun does not just champion a people too long bullied, marginalised and ignored – it drives home that without heeding their voice no long term solution of Israel-Palestine is possible.

John McCarthy’s excellent book focuses in on Palestinian citizens of Israel, who sometimes get ignored as a complexity too far.  McCarthy doesn’t hide his sympathy for the human beings who have been battered by Middle East conflict. Perhaps that’s because he was caught up in it too when he was held hostage in Lebanon for more than five years between 1986 and 1991.  Like Palestinians, and Jews, he longed for the sanctuary of home. McCarthy made it home. But in his journey through Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories he finds Palestinians who are still waiting, hoping and struggling for their homes more than 60 years after Israel was created.  Fascinating and timely, and written with the charm of a man who’s still determined to explore the tempestuous region that for five years was just a dream on the other side of his locked cell door.

As a journalist in television news John McCarthy was sent on his first foreign assignment to Beirut in 1986 aged twenty-nine. His career was abruptly cut short by militiamen who kidnapped and held him captive for five and a half years. 
 
Since his release he has written four books prior to this one - Some Other Rainbow (with Jill Morrell), about his hostage years, Island Race (with Sandi Toksvig), an account of their circumnavigation of Britain, Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), a journey through Chile and his latest, A Ghost Upon Your Path. He continues to work in both radio and television.

“Fascinating and timely” Jeremy Bowen 
 
 
Held hostage for many years by terrorists in Lebanon, John McCarthy is all too familiar with the pain and injustice of being denied your home. Determined to understand the day-to-day complexities of being a Palestian-Arab in modern-day Israel, he embarks on a deeply personal journey from the shores of the Mediterranean to the desert landscape of the Negev. He discovers the hidden stories of the ordinary people who must live out their lives in the shadow of a brutal conflict, and asks the vital question – how does humanity endure under such great oppression?

A Ghost Upon Your Path

'John McCarthy is a good listener, recording with sympathy and humour personal stories as well as Irish history from Celtic times until today. His quest to understand troubled, romantic Ireland and his own relationship with his family has resulted in a beguiling book'

'A lively family history... An engaging and delightful book'

'Much more than a personal travelogue through the spectacular scenery of County Kerry, this is also a perceptive and delicate analysis of the Irish situation, a delightful evocation of the open-hearted locals of his adopted village of Ardcanacht and a lively family history. It's told with real affection for the people and places he comes across'

As a journalist in television news John McCarthy was sent on his first foreign assignment to Beirut in 1986 aged twenty-nine. His career was abruptly cut short by militiamen who kidnapped and held him captive for five and half years. 
 
Since his release he has written four books - Some Other Rainbow (with Jill Morrell), about his hostage years, Island Race (with Sandi Toksvig), an account of their circumnavigation of Britain, and Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), a journey through Chile and his latest, A Ghost Upon Your Path. 
 
John McCarthy continues to work in both radio and television.

We all have a need to belong, to have a place and people we feel tied to: our family, our house, our hometown, our nation. Ever since he first visited Ireland with his family twenty years ago, John McCarthy has felt a strong affinity with its people and landscape. Yet in spite of his Irish name, he never thought of himself as remotely Irish. 
 
When McCarthy sets up home in a wild and isolated corner of County Kerry where his ancestors were living a thousand years before, he realises that he is about to undertake not only a journey into that small rural community but also into his own history and his family. What he discovers there reveals a curious sense of belonging to a place he has never before lived in and peels back the emotional layers of his own fractured past.

Between Extremes

A moving and funny testament to a friendship born out of adversity.

'One of the funniest and most moving testaments to friendship that one is likely to read'

'Such an absorbing subject, so deeply and warmly expressed'

'The best travel book I've read so far this year'

'They take us every step of the way with a wonderfully infectious joie de vivre'

'Such a vivid and inspiring odyssey that captivated readers will be spurred into booking flights to Chile...Fun glows from every page even in wretched times'

'A superb travel book, an amalgam of McCarthy's effortless, laconic style, and Keenan's agonised, brilliantly evocative writing'

Biography for John McCarthy 
 
As a journalist in television news John McCarthy was sent on his first foreign assignment to Beirut in 1986 aged twenty-nine. His career was abruptly cut short by militiamen who kidnapped and held him captive for five and half years. 
 
Since his release he has written four books - Some Other Rainbow (with Jill Morrell), about his hostage years, Island Race (with Sandi Toksvig), an account of their circumnavigation of Britain, and Between Extremes (with Brian Keenan), a journey through Chile and his latest, A Ghost Upon Your Path. 
 
John McCarthy continues to work in both radio and television. 
 
Biography for Brian Keenan</b 
 
Brian Keenan is a writer and poet. AN EVIL CRADLING is the story of his four years' captivity in Beirut and is recognized as a non-fiction classic. He is also the author of a travel book, BETWEEN EXTREMES with John McCarthy, and a novel, TULLOUGH.

In 1986 Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were forced to take a journey without maps. For the next four years they were incarcerated in a Lebanese dungeon. From the blank outlook of a tiny cell, with only each other and a few volumes of an ancient American encyclopaedia to sustain them, they could only wander the wide open spaces of their imagination. To displace the ugly confines of their existence, they envisaged walking in the High Andes and across the wastes of Patagonia. 
 
Five years after their return Brian and John chose to travel together again to see how the reality of Chile matched their imagination and to revisit their past experiences. They journeyed by every means available through vast empty deserts, verdant plains and barren tundra. Between Extremes is the story of that journey which once more found them far from home, in an unfamiliar landscape, but which for the first time allowed them to live by their own rules.

John McCarthy

Jill Morrell

'Compelling and moving...A beautiful story'

'An astonishing achievement: while often wildly funny, it is also humbling, draining, exhausting and ultimately exhilarating to read'

'A riveting, penetrating tale of adventure'

'Enthralling...You do not want to put it down'

On 17 April 1986 John McCarthy was kidnapped in Beirut. For the next five years he was cut off from everything and everybody he knew and loved, from family, friends, and, perhaps above all, from Jill Morrell, the girl he was going to marry. 
 
For five years, John McCarthy had to endure the deprivation - both physical and psychological - of captivity; the filth and squalor of the cells in which he was kept; the agony of isolation and repeated self-examination; and the pain of ignorance, of not knowing if those he loved even realized he was alive. 
 
For Jill Morrell, the five years of John's captivity were a different kind of hell: the initial shock and disbelief; the gradual acceptance that John had been taken and that her life had changed irrevocably, that all their plans had been shattered. 
 
But Jill refused to give up hope. For five years she and a group of friends worked ceaselessly on behalf of John and all British hostages in the Middle East, until the extraordinary day in August 1991 when John McCarthy stepped down from an aeroplane at RAF Lyneham. A day when they could begin again. 
 
This is their story, a remarkable account of courage, endurance, hope and love.

John McCarthy

Praise for Some Other Rainbow

'Compelling and moving...A beautiful story'

'An astonishing achievement: while often wildly funny, it is also humbling, draining, exhausting and ultimately exhilarating to read'

'A riveting, penetrating tale of adventure'

'Compelling and moving...A beautiful story'

'An astonishing achievement: while often wildly funny, it is also humbling, draining, exhausting and ultimately exhilarating to read'

'A riveting, penetrating tale of adventure'

'Compelling and moving...A beautiful story'

'An astonishing achievement: while often wildly funny, it is also humbling, draining, exhausting and ultimately exhilarating to read'

'A riveting, penetrating tale of adventure'

Books by John McCarthy

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