Between 1917 and 1981, twenty-two Irishmen died on hunger strike. Now, for the first time, the stories of the hunger strikers are chronicled in one book, bringing to light previously hidden histories. From the deaths on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe in 1917 and Terence MacSwiney in 1920, while imprisoned by the British government, to the death in 1981 of Michael Devine, the last republican prisoner to die on hunger strike, Pawns in the Game teases out the tangled mesh of the politics and psychology of those who adopted this radical protest of last resort and those who allowed them to die.

It is a story of fanaticism, pride and injustice, and the indifference of former comrades when power in the Dail beckoned.