Dublin 2010: Neil, twenty-six, unemployed, disaffected and disillusioned with Ireland, plans to emigrate and join his girlfriend in Canada. But having deferred his flight to attend his grandfather's funeral, he stays behind to aid his grieving grandmother.

Dublin 1916: Harry Colley is a Pathe Newsreel cameraman, recently back from London, with a Cinemachine and four newsreels ready to capture the events of Easter Week. This is his life's work: to chronicle the Irish struggle for independence and share it with the world. Neil accepts her grandmother's request to read her father's memoir. As he reads the reminiscences, he realizes that the newsreels spoken of in the text still exist. After viewing the reels, he sets off on a journey that will change his life, and the lives of all those around him, forever.

A timeless story of lost love and broken dreams that brilliantly counterpoints today's globalized generation with Ireland's nationalist revolutionaries of 1916, Citizens creates a conversation across a century in a unique novel that has echoes of Don DeLillo's Libra and Transatlantic by Colum McCann.