News Letter political editor Sam McBride’s bestseller Burned becomes a lockdown audiobook

Burned: The Inside Story of the Cash for Ash Scandal and Northern Ireland’s Secretive New Elite, which has been shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, became a Sunday Times bestseller in the UK and an Irish Times bestseller in the Republic and has been reprinted eight times since its release last October.

The audiobook is published by Whole Story QUEST, an imprint of WF Howes, the largest independent publisher of audiobooks.

However, plans to record the audio book in a studio had to be abandoned in May due of the pandemic. Instead, the entire book was recorded from the journalist’s garden office at his Belfast home, sitting in a makeshift tent of blankets at the desk where the book was written last year.

Mr McBride said: “I trust this format allows more people to hear the truth about what some of the most powerful people in Northern Ireland did with their money in the belief that their secretive methods would forever prevent their actions being revealed.”