Brian Boru is chiefly remembered as the man who drove the Vikings from Ireland, and who died at the Battle of Clontarf on Good Friday 1014. But there was far more to his life than that. The youngest son of an obscure king from the kingdom of Thomond, he came closer than any other Irishman has to uniting Ireland.

He tamed the Danes of Limerick and the Norsemen of Dublin, overthrew the six-century monopoly of the Uí Néill on the throne of Ireland and became one of the few high kings to invest that throne with any real authority. An able administrator and a patron of the church and of learning, he fully deserved the title 'Emperor of the Irish' accorded him by an admirer.

Brian Boru, King of Ireland explores the life and times of this remarkable man, attempts to distil reality from myth and shows what might have happened in Irish history had the events of Easter 1014 not taken place.