Heatseeker Reviews

A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif

2008-08-17T12:27:00.002+01:00

Jonathan Cape

KRAIT venom is a deadly neurotoxin that kills seven out of 10 victims.
But that's not what laundryman Uncle Starchy tells Under Officer Ali Shigri in A Case of Exploding Mangoes.
It's a stoner, he says. It's only deadly if it touches metal. Then it will kill an elephant. First the elephant dances, then he drags his feet, then he dies.
Shigri has reason to be venomous. His father, Pakistan president General Zia Ul-Haq's sidekick and security boss, committed suicide.
Like a lot of Zia's friends who got a little too powerful, Shigri senior died suddenly.
In this tremendously entertaining novel, depiction of the fictional Zia steers close to his real-life counterpart, though perhaps more loveable.
A religious maniac who decides that there should be no name for God but Allah, Zia bans all other names, even the pet names mothers use in children's prayers.
He's been collecting enemies throughout his career, since he hanged his predecessor, prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
His generals bug his rooms. The US ambassador can't stand him. But his most dangerous enemy is a mild-mannered blind woman, awaiting stoning to death (because she can't identify her rapists, so she's obviously an adulteress).
The Maoist head of the mango producers' union is cursing him from his jail deep underground. And like every assassin, Zia is paranoid of his apprentices.
Even God is out to get him, sending him messages through the Koran.
Young Shigri, his camp friend Baby O and a CIA man brought in to teach them the famous Silent Drill are all too innocent.
As A Case of Exploding Mangoes opens, we already know that we're looking at a bunch of dead guys. Hanif's consummate skill is in showing us how the guys got dead, and making us laugh the whole way to the kill.

The Secret Shopper's Revenge by Kate Harrison

2008-08-17T12:20:00.002+01:00

Orion
IT'S chicklit of the best sort, and it's a bildungsroman too.
Emily is a single mother. She never intended to be, but her up-and-coming businessman husband up and went. Now he's in Switzerland with lover Heidi, and Emily's subsisting on subsistence payments with baby Freddie.
Sandie is the corporate woman. Her toe is on the threshold of the boardroom, she coaches her Lord Dim boss in strategy and figures, and he brings her for cosy suppers.
Grazia is a redundant muse - the artist she inspired and adored and nursed has died and left her with no purpose in life.
But the fate that brings these three together changes every one of them. Not to mention serving up the most satisfying comeuppance to the baddies who do them down.
There are great villains: Emily's ex, slimy little Duncan; the horrid Marsha, who patronises her customers and cheats her bosses; Grazia's anonymous phone-caller.
At the start, Emily is a child, still in thrall to the creepy boy-next-door she married, who calls her Chubster and Piglet. And Sandie and Grazia? They have their secrets and their insecurities.
As the three become mystery shoppers, turning their cameras on shops and businesses to find out who's caring for customers and who's walking all over them, they grow and change.
This is a Cinderella story - three Cinderellas, really - and as yummy and comforting as a big box of liqueur-filled chocolates.
If the sun is shining, take it to the beach. If the day feels as if someone opened a zip in a water-filled sky, curl up beside a turf fire with the duvet around you, good music and a box of Lily O'Brien's chocs, and sink into that chicky enjoyment.

Cromwell, An Honourable Enemy by Tom Reilly

2008-08-14T22:50:00.004+01:00

DID Oliver Cromwell's soldiers commit an outrage in Drogheda, killing, raping and looting?
Tom Reilly - born in Drogheda, and an admirer of Cromwell - says it was an act of war, and there is no proof that any civilians were killed.
In his detailed and argumentative account of Cromwell in Ireland, Reilly finds no credible evidence by the Puritan besiegers, and only propaganda by Catholics and royalists, to show a general massacre.
Cromwell himself is quoted as saying that the defending officers were 'knocked on the head', while the troops were decimated, every tenth man killed and the other nine sent to Barbados (that is, into slavery).
It's a fascinating book, despite occasional minor blunders (referring to General David Leslie's troops at Dunbar in September 1650 as Highlanders, when in fact the ungodly Highlanders had been excluded by the Act of Classes prior to that; giving Charles I four children at the time of his death, when he had six).
But back to Drogheda. We know from modern sieges - Srebenica, Leningrad - what happens. The rich get out, leaving their servants, the poor, the troops and the idealists to defend the besieged city.
When the besiegers burst in, there's mass looting, rape and destruction.
Reilly is on a bit of a sticky wicket insisting that the New Model Army's soldiers were different. They were famous in England for their looting in Ireland. (A contemporary drawing shows one draped with ducks, links of sausages and a roast bird on a spit, cups and glasses dangling off his bandolier, a tureen helmet and a roasting-dish as a shield.)
Slow to start, this boots up into a fascinating book, especially worth reading for the contemporary accounts.

Disguise by Hugo Hamilton

2008-08-14T22:44:00.002+01:00

4th Estate
YOU can't live your life on a hunch, Gregor's best friend tells him; but that's what he does.
Gregor lives in disguise from the day when a black market dealer hands the child over to a woman whose own child has been blown to smithereens in the bombing of Berlin.
The dealer is the woman's father, Emil, a man with contacts and lovers from Poland to Alsace, himself soon to disappear in the explosion that is the world war.
Gregor grows up thinking he's the woman's son. His 'father' comes home from the war obsessed with hunting and survival, and teaches him how to find the right mushrooms and berries, how to live in the woods when you have nothing.
Then one day Uncle Max - who may or may not have betrayed Emil to the Gestapo under torture - lets the secret out.
Gregor becomes convinced that he's a Jewish child, smuggled out, one of the saved, one of the Chosen.
Jew: it's a word that causes its own explosions in a Germany trying to forget its guilt.
His best friend, Martin, says "Welcome to the club" - he's the son of a Russian officer - perhaps the child of rape. Forget it, you can't let the past devour your life, he pleads.
But Gregor can't stop travelling, trying to unravel the truth or leave it behind. His own son grows up, and people remark that he's the spit of Emil.
Hugo Hamilton's new novel starts, literally, with a bang, but strays a little in its examination of identity, nationality, ancestral guilt, race memory and other big questions.
They're questions that beg for an answer, even a wrong answer, but here they can get only thought.

Love Lies Bleeding by Kate Thompson

2008-08-09T16:56:00.002+01:00

New Island Books
SLAPPED down by her publishers, Kate Thompson bounced right back.
She was almost finished her new book, Love Lies Bleeding, when her publisher called her and said sorry, kid, it's time for us to part.
With the help of her writer friends - including Marian Keyes and Cathy Kelly - Kate put a notice up on her popular blog, and started selling her book online.
She sent the first part of the book off for free, and requests flooded in to buy the rest of the book, nicely produced by local businesses around Camden Street.
And she kept writing. Now Kate has a new publisher, and Love Lies Bleeding is in the shops in an official, non-online version
Love Lies Bleeding is the finest Thompson fare: writers, artists and film stars living glam lives between California, Ireland and France. Love and misunderstandings. Death and infidelity. Basically nice people getting all twisted up.
Screenwriter Deirdre O'Dare and her sexy film star husband Rory McDonagh are passionately in love. She's certainly not jealous of Corinne, the beautiful body double with whom he simulates sex for professional reasons. Oh no.
Greta O'Flaherty (who's also the body double Corinne, working under a pseudonym, just to confuse us a bit) is looking for a new life.
Luckily, Deirdre and Rory are looking for a nanny with the cúpla focal, so Greta gets a job minding the bábóga.
Then director's wife Dannie Palmer, jealous and sad and desperate for a baby, starts her "brilliant career as a home-wrecker, morale annihilator and mind-body-spirit terminator".
For those who love a cosy page-turner, this is the perfect beach book.
Love, death, betrayal, misunderstandings - everything that makes a great story.
Not to mention hysterical take-offs of very recognisable Irish stars of stage, screen and page.
Our Kate's done it again.

The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts

2008-08-09T16:45:00.002+01:00

Serpent's Tail

WEALTHY and arty, Peggy Guggenheim slept with her many lovers (though perhaps not at the same time) in a bed with a silver bedhead by Calder.
Her parents had been supremely wealthy, but when her father went down with the Titanic she had a lot less money than her billionairish cousins, poor mite.
In the way of the bottom rung of richy-rich-land, she hung out with artists, and bought their work, and slept with them as she and they fancied.
Lovers included Samuel Beckett and Max Ernst (she married Ernst), and she bought the work of Picasso, Magritte, Calder, Miró, Jackson Pollock, et al.
In The Good Plain Cook Bethan Roberts riffs on a little-known time when Guggenheim and her daughter Pegeen lived in Sussex with one of her lovers, the Communist poet Douglas Garman, between 1934 and 1937.
Kitty, her heroine, lies her way into a job as a cook with the unorthodox family based on Guggenheim's - 'Ellen Steinberg', her daughter 'Geenie' and the poet 'George Crane'.
Kitty is gobsmacked by their sexy, undisciplined life, but more worried about how to cook what they want. Quiche: would that be a kind of egg-and-bacon pie, she wonders.
George gurns in the writing studio at the end of the garden, staring hopelessly at his typewriter. Geena, Ellen's feral daughter, tries to get her mother's attention by being fey. Ellen makes raucous love and talks about art.
Kitty fancies the gardener, the conservative Arthur, who is suspicious of George's attempts to convert him to communism.
It's several disasters waiting to happen. The only trouble with The Good Plain Cook is that they wait a little too long.
As Europe teeters on the edge of mass murder and red war, these self-indulgent people play with their political and personal ideas.
It's sensual and atmospheric, and it's awfully English and pre-war. Lovely style, though.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

2008-07-28T20:00:00.002+01:00

(Fourth Estate €15.99)

CLEAR away a block of time. Get flu if you have to. Anything to be able to devote total attention to this extraordinary book.
Early in The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, the young dog Almondine hears a whispery rasp from the baby sleeping in its mother's arms. She puzzles over the sound, and realises that it is the shriek of a child who can make no sound.
Almondine rises and crosses to where the mother sleeps with the child in her arms. "She became in that moment, and was ever after, a cautious dog," writes David Wroblewski.
Hamlet crossed with The Jungle Book, this is a stupendous work.
The story: the Sawtelle family have been breeding dogs for three generations. They're breeding for power and beauty, but also for heroism, finding dogs that have done extraordinary things and crossing them into their breed, the Sawtelle Dogs.
They don't sell pups. They sell yearling dogs, which have gone through an intensive education, training for creativity and intelligence.
The dream is to breed the 'next dog' - which will replace dogs in the evolutionary chain, as the wolf replaced the extinct Dire Wolf, and the dog replaced the wolf.
Into this dreamland steps an evil man, who loves to do harm just because he can.
Fourteen-year-old Edgar, born mute but super-intelligent, using Sign Language both with his family and friends and with his dogs, faces this well-armed wheedler with the skills that he has: the skill of the wolf for laying an ambush and the skill of an innocent for seeking the truth.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle has a ghost made of rain, spooky neighbours, corrupted innocents, ruminations about evolution and selection. And the writing! Writing that makes your teeth water with reality, but is never self-consciously writerly.

The Beach House by Jane Green

2008-07-28T19:52:00.002+01:00

Penguin €14.99

SECRETS are in the air in Nantucket. The island, once the world focus for whaling, is now trendyland, flocking with wealthy Manhattanites on their holidays.
Decrepit femme fatale Nan, a local eccentric who lives in one of the few beautiful old houses untouched by the gobbling developers, has run into money trouble.
She's sitting on a house that could realise $10m, but the last thing she wants is to have a developer tear it down.
Long ago Nan's husband, Everett, disappeared. He left his clothes on the beach, and left her to face a mountain of gambling debts.
Nan made a go of it then; now her financial adviser is telling her that she really is in trouble as the markets plunge.
She knows there must be some way of making money from her assets. But a sale of the valuable antique furniture and heritage clothes and jewellery fails to bring in the expected thousands.
So she opens the house up for paying guests. Of course I'm going to give them breakfast, she says - I'd feel embarrassed not to feed people.
As the house fills up with the lovelorn and lost, everyone cooks and gardens together, and relationships start to form between the tenants, their children, spouses, lovers, friends and parents.
That's before the secrets start to come out. As does the gay man who's never been able to tell those closest to him.
And the broken girl who shoplifts for the thrill that replaces love. And the wife astonished and hurt by her husband's failure.
Nan's healing power gets to work on her own son - haunted by an ill-judged affair - and on step-children and lovers and matches made in heaven.
With simple writing, likeable characters, and plot twists that are just about believable, The Beach House is a lovely, cosy read. You can practically smell the healing sea air off it.

Addition by Toni Jordan

2008-07-22T15:39:00.002+01:00

Sceptre €11.95

THERE’S safety in numbers, and for Grace Vandenburg, everything counts.
Although Grace lives in modern Australia and he died long ago in New York, she’s in love with Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio (Marconi stole his idea) and discoverer of the uses of electricity, magnetism, the AC motor, robotics and radar.
Like Grace, Nikola counted everything: staying only in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by 3, he ate every night at 8pm with 18 napkins folded beside him, mentally calculating the cubic volume of each forkful.
Grace hasn’t worked since she froze one day in the schoolyard and was carted off to hospital. She wakes every morning at 5.55 exactly, and rises at 6am, ready to brush her teeth with 160 brushstrokes.
It doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but this is a book that causes snorts of laughter.
Grace’s sister, for instance, is happily married - “stuck in wedded purgatory with that Blackberry-wielding ferret. He’s got the sex appeal of a hard drive.”
Her niece Larry (short for Hilary) is Grace’s favourite person, the one who finally explains that there’s a difference between average, median and mode.
When Grace meets Seamus Joseph O’Reilly, they fall madly (of course) in love.
Seamus is Mr Average. “Medium looks, works at the box office, likes football and barbecues.”
Soon he starts gently trying to save her from the numbers. Within 3.33 seconds she’s in behavioural therapy with a bunch of germophobe obsessives and Francine, their therapist (who dips apples in toilets and eats them to prove it’s ok).
Under the influence of all the normalising pills, Grace’s brain divides into a squabbling pair.
Her story ends happily, with every reader cheering and laughing to the finale.
A bizarre, quirky book, you wouldn’t imagine you’d love this, but it’s the kind of thing that gets passed from reader to reader with enthusiastic recommendations.

No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay

2008-07-22T15:33:00.003+01:00

Orion €11.95

CYNTHIA wakes up alone in the house, the night after her first drunken binge with a bad boy. Her family are gone without a trace.
Her father came last night and dragged her out of the car where she was canoodling with Vince Fleming, son of a local criminal.
Now, as she stands in the kitchen and wonders where everyone’s gone, she begins to be frightened.
It’s a great beginning to a story that rattles along at speed.
Years later, Cynthia goes on TV, taking part in an unsolved mysteries programme, in the forlorn hope that she might hear some news of the lost ones.
But it’s as if she’s thrust a stick into a pool full of alligators. There’s a message saying her parents forgive them. A car appears, following Cynthia’s little girl to school at walking pace.
And the aunt who brought her up tells a long-kept secret to Cynthia’s husband.
They hire a detective, who turns up some news of his own.
Cynthia’s father is a man of mystery. No driver’s licence picture, no social security records. Can he have been an FBI agent? On a witness protection programme? A spy?
All this is great. But it gets to the point where you want to echo the character who wails “How long is this going to go on?” – or words to that effect.
The story has a belly like a poisoned pup. Somewhere in the middle, when the family haven’t turned up, clue after clue keeps appearing, and every few chapters there’s a sinister dialogue by unidentified people, you get the itch to skip to the end.
But it’s worth it for the buildup. And while the end isn’t that satisfying – the solution works technically, but not emotionally – it all wraps up.
A great book for waiting for the airport to fix their radar, though. Long enough and exciting enough that it’ll last you for the few days.

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee by Rebecca Miller

2008-07-15T21:25:00.002+01:00

Canongate

SKIP immediately to Part 2. I’ll tell you what happens in Part 1. You can go back and read it later.
Pippa Lee is a madonna, the calm and competent wife of Herb Lee, America’s most famous publisher.
Pippa – still in her 50s – and Herb, who’s now in his 80s, have moved to a wealthy retirement estate known locally as Wrinkle Village.
Their friends Sam (great novelist) and his partner Moira (greatish poet on the lookout for a nicer but still famous man) are their constant companions.
OK, that’s it.
Now for the good stuff, as you turn hastily to page 61, where it goes into the voice of Pippa herself, and plunges into her chaotic, desperate youth.
Hilarious and stunningly sad – you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll say “Oh, shit, no!” – it’s a roller-coaster ride through the bohemia of the mid-century.
And Rebecca Miller should know her stuff. Daughter of Death of a Salesman playwright Arthur Miller, wife of Daniel Day-Lewis, daughter-in-law of poet Cecil Day-Lewis, she must have spent her youth mobbed up with the literary aristocracy.
Not just literary – heavens, before she was born, her dad had been married to Marilyn Monroe!
So with jaw open, as you’re whizzing through the book laughing and crying, you’re also saying “Who is that?” and coming up with crazed theories.
From the stagey suicide of Herb’s gorgeous first wife to Pippa’s dealings with her speed-freak mother (still giving her baby-bottles at 16). Hmm, hm. Who can this be?
It’s a book that could sadly go unnoticed until it’s filmed – already on the cards, starring Robin Wright Penn, Keanu Reeves and Winona Rider – and then take off. Make sure you’re in before the crowd; you’ll be passing it to your friends.
But skip that first part.

Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich

2008-07-15T21:20:00.002+01:00

Headline €15.99

ACE detective Stephanie Plum’s got the blues. At least, she has, along with her colleagues, after they open a briefcase booby-trapped with blue dye, which explodes all over them.
The ditsy but still ace skip-tracer is off on another off-centre adventure with ex-’ho Lula by her side, and Plum’s complex love life providing the salsa.
In the fourteenth of the series, they’re on the trail of $9 million in stolen money. As always in Plum’s New Jersey homeland, everyone’s a cousin.
As she climbs out of another window, leaving another dead guy behind her, she muses that it’s lucky the cop answering her call is Eddie Gazarra. “We’d grown up together and he’d married my cousin, Shirley the Whiner.”
There are plenty of side issues to spice up her life. Lula has decided that Tank, her giant ex-special-forces sweetie, has proposed, and is planning the wedding. Tank is crashing down in a faint.
Schoolkid Mario (in the game Minionfire he’s Zook, a major mage who’s stalking the griefer (say what?) and watching out for the wood elves) is in Plum’s care, because his mom has skipped bail after robbing a liquor store.
Dom Rizzi, Zook’s anger-management-troubled uncle, is out to get Plum’s sweetie, Joe Morelli, because Joe may be Zook’s real father.
Plum’s grandma joins Zook in Minionfire to seek the griefer, then along come her aged pals, plus Mooner, Plum’s stoner former schoolmate.
After that it gets complicated.
As funny as a barrel of monkeys – oh yes, there’s a monkey in there too, as well as a country rock star turned TV investigator – this is a triumph for Evanovich.
If your best pal has broken up with her sweetiepie and needs some cheering, go straight to the bookshop and buy this book for her.

People of 1916

2008-07-15T21:14:00.002+01:00

“THEY ALL died well, but MacDonagh died like a prince,” one of those present said of the executed leaders of the 1916 Rising – a flashy thing to say, but there may be a story behind it.

Soldiers gossip, and this account drifted back to the family. Apparently my grandfather walked out, that May 3, 1916 at 3.30am, and said to the men of the firing squad something like “I know this is a lousy job, but you’re doing your duty – I don’t hold it against you.”

He shared around his Woodbines and they all smoked, then he gave his silver cigarette case to the officer, saying “I won’t be needing this, would you like to have it?” Then he walked up and they shot him.

Apart from Thomas Clarke and James Connolly, the friends who were the 1916 leaders were young; Pádraig Pearse was 36, for instance, my grandfather 38, Joe Plunkett 29, Seán Heuston and Ned Daly just 25.

My grandfather had worked in Pearse’s Montessori-inspired school, St Enda’s. As a secondary teacher, when this had about the status of a TEFL teacher now, he helped to found the ASTI union.

He seems to have been a wonderful teacher. His pupils said he would call a boy aside over some spectacular ill-behaviour, and start: “Like you, I find I have a problem with...” and talk him quietly through what was happening.

“The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there” – and the occupied Ireland of 1916 is scarcely imaginable to us – senior civil servants going home to England for holidays, Irish papers running lists of officers killed in France on the front page, tense distaste between Protestant and Catholic.

My grandfather wrote to a friend of his engagement: "Muriel and I are of the same religion, which is neither Catholic or Protestant nor any other form of dogmatic creed; neither of us ever go to church or chapel."

We have a family snapshot of a cosy newlyweds’ dinner party, the dog sitting up on someone’s knee, and over the mantelpiece a banner embroidered “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” and a “Votes for Women” poster.

Now he was lecturing in English literature at UCD. His second book of criticism, Literature in Ireland, would soon be published. He and Muriel, married four years, were buying a nice house in Ranelagh. My mother, Barbara, was a year old, and her brother Donagh was three.

My great-aunts Nellie and Kay used to tell me at Christmas dinner (invariably, the conversation started “Katy, do you remember the Christmas we were in jail?”) that Tomás actually did his share of the housework – yes, I know, it’s hard to believe, but they swore it was true!

The night before he was shot, my grandfather started to write a political statement and settle his finances. Then he was told he could write only one letter. It turned into a love letter – “I have only one trouble in leaving life – leaving you so...”

The next night his friend Joe Plunkett would be married to my grandmother’s sister Grace in the prison chapel, before himself being shot.

My grandmother’s finances were in a hames now. Muriel, a widow with two young children, couldn’t possibly pay the mortgage and they lost the house.

She went to visit her mother, Isabella, who said the whole business had been very ill-advised, and offered her a fiver. Muriel said no thank you, and left.

I’ve always wondered what happened to the dogs, Tomás’s gruff terrier Maravaun and Muriel’s fluffy, pointy-nosed Flip.

Some time that awful year, Muriel and the two children were brought to Switzer’s for photos to be taken to raise campaign money in America.

Four-year-old Donagh climbed on the banisters, fell and injured his back on the marble staircase. In hospital, no visits were allowed.

Grace, worried sick about Muriel, who was, like herself, stunned by grief, persuaded her to bring Barbara to Skerries on a seaside break for 1916’s widows and orphans.

At 4.30pm on July 9, 1917, Muriel collected pretty shells with two-year-old Barbara. Then she thought she’d have a swim. She swam out, turned, waving. She seemed to try to swim further, then disappeared.

Leaving Barbara with James Connolly’s teenage daughter, Grace and other widows ran to the house of one Sir John Griffith to try to get a boat. His servants wouldn’t give Grace the oars.

Muriel’s body was found on the shore next morning after an all-night search – dead from heart failure due to exhaustion, the inquest heard.

After a bitter custody battle, Barbara and Donagh were placed in fosterage, where they suffered severely.

Before the trials, General Sir John Maxwell told a Capuchin he deplored the Rising’s loss of life, and said: “Oh, but we will make those beggars pay for it.” The bodies were kept from the families, for fear that “Irish sentimentality will turn these graves into martyrs’ shrines”.

No doubt the British theorised that the shocking executions would end all thought of Irish self-determination. They did not, and all the deaths sent pain resounding out through families and friends for generations – it is always so.

My grandfather was happy and proud to have set his country on the road to freedom. And to Muriel he wrote: “Goodbye my love, till we meet in heaven. I have a sure faith in our union there. I kiss this paper that goes to you... I return the darlings’ photographs.”

© Lucille Redmond

The Absent Wife by Karen Gillece

2008-07-15T21:11:00.002+01:00

Hachette
A GIRL with a lovely name: Star Anise Quick. She never knew who her father was – her mother, Jean, told her Africa was her father, and all the children of Africa were her brothers and sisters.
When Jean is dying, though, she finally tells Star that her father is Leo Quick, an Irish portrait painter.
Star makes her way to Dalkey, and everything changes.
Leo has brought up his two children, Silvia and James. He didn’t know Jean was pregnant when she left, and when Star phones, he’s just had a stroke.
He’s been eaten away for years by a secret he can’t unravel: why did Jean leave him and their children?
James is a TV celeb who’s trying to get all the wealth he can generate up his nose.
Silvia is the good girl who minds her dad as he needs it, but has her mother’s addictive liking for uncommitted sex.
Gillece’s delicate writing unfolds all these layers of stories, dancing back and forth between past and present.
She layers in current news stories – Natascha Kampusch and the British teacher who was jailed for calling a teddy bear Muhammad make appearances – and drops in luscious scents and flavours.
As the family reclaim the daughter and sister they didn’t know about, they’re also reclaiming the wife and mother who disappeared.
For Star, and for Leo’s close friend Hugh, it’s another reclamation, of the wrong that couldn’t be righted, and the bond that couldn’t be broken.
Gillece gets better with every book. She’s finding her style as a writer of contemplative, incisive novels, but she hasn’t hit her pace quite yet.
This is a book for the bedside, to be savoured and talked about with friends.

The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty

2008-07-15T21:07:00.002+01:00

Serpent’s Tail
IT’S such a great idea – a thriller based on Ulysses.
And it starts out well: “State LY Plum P Buck Mulligan” reads the note handed to the hotel shamus.
It translates thus: “In stateroom LY (that is, the fiftieth floor, suite Y), a Plum (in other words, a drunk American) named Mr P Buck was creating a Mulligan (ie a disturbance).
And it ends well, in Joycean tradition, with that trailing sibilant “Yes.”
The middle is more problematic. Michael Forsyth, McKinty’s hero, is the kind of Northerner who wears crossed Union Jack and Red Hand in the fanlight of his little mind, and absolutely hates all things Irish.
“In my eyes the Garda Síochána was only a notch or two above the Irish Army and, as an ex-member of the British Army, I had nothing but contempt for that body,” he writes.
“Any squaddie worth his salt would join the Irish Guards in London; any peeler up to scuds would get into one of the big metropolitan police forces across the water. Irish coppers and soldiers were second-rate.”
Not, perhaps, the perfect note to strike if you’re aiming to lure Joyceans, who adore Dublin, Ireland and all about the country.
Between ‘plump Buck Mulligan’ and ‘yes’, it’s an orgy of killing, interspersed with paranoid ravings, self-hatred and a bit more killing.
The effect is curiously anaesthetic. After a while the reader stops bothering to notice new characters – after all, Mike’s going to kill them in a minute.
Reading, you get the feeling that McKinty is ‘writing away from’ his subject – that he really wants to write about something else. From the wrongness of his take on the IRA characters (hellfire and respectability), I suspect that he wants to be writing about the UDA.
If you like thrillers with a high body count, this is for you.

The Likeness by Tana French

2008-07-01T00:15:00.003+01:00

Hachette Books Ireland

PROPERTY and identity: the two main reasons for murder.
Many the soon-to-be widower screams “You’re not who I thought you were” as he grabs up the knife.
And the division of the home and the savings is eased by about-to-be widows who kill to inherit all rather than half.
In Tana French’s second novel, it’s more complicated.
Detective Cassie Maddox – one of the central characters in French’s first book, the magnificent In the Woods – discovers that she’s a victim of identity theft.
Or rather that ‘Lexie Madison’, a fake persona Cassie was using when working undercover, is now the identity being used by another woman.
And that woman has been found dead in a ruined cottage in the wilds of Wicklow.
Spookily, she’s been stabbed, just as Cassie was stabbed by a speed freak when she was using the ‘Lexie’ identity to work undercover.
Cassie is sent in to take the dead woman’s place – she didn’t really die, they tell friends of ‘Lexie’, she was in a coma.
She finds herself in a complex household, almost a commune, shared by students in a stunning half-ruined Georgian house in the mountains that one has inherited.
The Likeness has a bit of the second book syndrome about it. It’s draggy at times, with slow narration and not enough happening.
But a writer with French’s power can still bring the reader along, with scary details and mystery within mystery.
As Cassie becomes ‘Lexie’ and her involvement with Lexie’s friends grows, she’s living two lives. In one, she’s a detective acquiring inside knowledge – ‘Lexie’ was pregnant – and in the other she’s living with Lexie’s friends, not knowing who may be the killer.
Fascinating and terrifying; don’t put the lights out after closing this.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

2008-07-01T00:06:00.003+01:00

Sceptre

RUSSIA has been invaded by the Nazi armies, and Leningrad is surrounded by German troops.
Two teenagers, Lev and Kolya, are sent on an impossible quest – a dozen eggs for the wedding of a Party official’s daughter.
Lev’s been caught looting when he should have been on fire patrol. Kolya is a deserter.
Lev is a shy virgin, cracked about chess, and about his cello-playing neighbour. Kolya’s a sex-mad boy with a talent for talking his way out of trouble.
They’re sentenced to death, but the quest for the eggs is offered as an alternative.
They try in the city first. But this is a town where they’re melting down the glue in library books to sell as food.
The two boys escape from cannibals, track a legendary old man who’s supposed to be guarding a hen-coop on the roof of an apartment block.
Finally they escape the city – Piter, as it’s nicknamed by its inhabitants – knowing of the rumours that the peasants are living fat while Leningrad starves.
They discover a Nazi brothel full of plump girls held as slaves. They fall in with partisans – the most deadly of whom is a skinny girl sniper.
Kolya talks about all the sex he’s had, and adds endless literary criticism, especially of the great unknown novel The Courtyard Hound.
When he discovers that Lev’s father was a poet murdered by Stalin, their friendship is sealed.
Screenwriter Benioff uses his grandfather’s stories of life in wartime Russia to make a quirky and enticing novel.
From the cosy grandparents with their sinister history to the appealing Kolya and Lev, it’s a book to make you laugh when you’re not flinching.
Much better than his screenplays (Benioff worked on Troy and The Kite Runner), it’s touching and gritty.

Whose Life is it Anyway? by Sinéad Moriarty

2008-06-22T13:54:00.002+01:00

Penguin Ireland
PIERRE is only gorgeous. Tall, dark and handsome, a professor, nice, considerate, kindly. The perfect man.
But not if your family are traditional London Irish racists. Because Pierre is really dark – in fact, he’s from the Caribbean, brought up in France.
Sinéad Moriarty’s latest – undoubtedly – bestseller-to-be starts off with a bang.
Then it all gets dull (at least for this reader) for a great chunk of the book. Moriarty decides to have a big fat sneer at everything Irish.
Niamh, her heroine, spends most of her childhood loathing Ireland and all things green. Her family are caricature patriots, with a doorbell that plays Danny Boy, green leprechaun gnomes in the garden and the girls dollied up in ringlets and curtain-like dresses to enter Irish dancing contests.
This is possibly meant affectionately, but it doesn’t come across like that.
And the odd thing is that it’s set in the 1980s, when the IRA were bombing England and Irish people were looked on with deep suspicion by most English people, and especially by officialdom of all kinds.
But there’s not a mention of the Troubles.
But it’s all cosy fun, with Niamh getting her family on side to learn to accept Pierre. And trying to get his suave parents to learn to love their raw new daughter-in-law.
Niamh writes a fluffy newspaper column, and Pierre introduces her to his parents by laughing about the time she wrote an article on who gets to sleep on the wet patch after sex.
Her own parents already had to face the horror of her big sister getting pregnant at 17, and going on to become a materfamilias with five (Irish-dancing) daughters.
There are a few guffaw moments in here, and it’s a grand page-turner for the journey.

South of the Border by James Ryan

2008-06-22T13:51:00.002+01:00

Lilliput

AUTUMN 1942, a young teacher on his first posting in the midlands, and his principal is gobsmacked by his brilliant Irish.
Can you translate a radio programme in Irish, the principal asks the teacher, surprised to find a Dubliner so fluent. I’m not from Dublin, the boy explains, I’m from Balbriggan.
But when he arrives at the house he’s directed to, he’s sent to a shed with a radio aerial twining through the trees, where a man crouches to hear a broadcast from Germany. In Irish.
He furiously denies stories of a Tan massacre in Balbriggan – I’m from there, I’d know – and later discovers that this was concealed from him at home, to keep him apolitical.
The teacher is furious at being dragged into politics, but his fury is muted by his passion for a mysterious girl.
Mysterious because she might be Protestant, an important distinction then.
This should be a brilliant novel. The writing is delicate, plain, absolutely beautiful.
But the plot gets lost in winding stories that don’t have any real thematic thread to hold them together.
Yet that writing – years later, at the funeral of Dixie Coll, the brother of the mystery woman, he sees her again. Beside her are her two aunts, now old women.
One has cropped white hair, but a marquisette hairband, “a tiara of sorts”, and two coats, one bedecked with several heavy costume brooches.
The other “was in full mourning garb, black hat, scarf and coat, all sabotaged by the gold-and-violet sequinned evening bag she was clutching”.
It’s moments like this that make you catch your breath.
The central story – a Luftwaffe pilot shot down, sheltered, betrayed, dying – gets a little lost in the middle of the tentative love story.
A very interesting novel about neutrality and revolution and the mutable nature of politics.

Final Theory by Mark Alpert

2008-06-22T13:46:00.002+01:00

Simon & Schuster

EINSTEIN’S colleagues, now ancient, are being killed off one by one, found dead under suspicious circumstances in their baths.
The reason? The mathematical maestro’s mythic Unified Field Theory – a theory of everything long rumoured to have been expressed by the genius.
But Einstein – in this thriller, anyway – suppressed his Einheitliche Feldtheorie because he feared its world-destroying power.
The implications of his theory are such that it could be used for power that would end world energy shortages and wipe out the need for oil and coal.
Unfortunately, it also makes it possible for any freelance Osama (not to mention any bullying government) to squish cities and countries with the push of a button.
Alpert doesn’t get into any difficult philosophical questions like “why should they, if there’s free power out there”, but instead gets into a galloping yarn full of fun and violence.
There are moments of hilarity too – the vicious Russian torturer who’s chasing the old lads is shocked, I tell you, shocked, when he sees the waste of taxpayers’ money in inept security around an FBI centre.
Alpert’s hero is a science journalist like the author, who teams up with a gorgeous black scientist and Einstein’s autistic great-grandson to flee and then fight the bad guys and save the world.
Off they go, helped by conveniently credulous yokels from a rattlesnake-handling church, and pursued by a granny from the FBI and the Russian killer.
Tremendous fun.
It comes this near to being a new Da Vinci Code, but the ending loses pace a bit. But Alpert is definitely a writer to watch, and this is the perfect book for taking your mind off the real threats to the world.

Two Days in Biarritz by Michelle Jackson

2008-06-22T13:43:00.002+01:00

Poolbeg
MOUSY mouse Annabel was always the follower, and glamorous Kate the leader and the one who had the fun, in Michelle Jackson’s first book.
When Annabel gets langered (in both senses) on a holiday in Biarritz and tells Kate about her long-ago one-night stand with Kate’s dad, that’s the end of that friendship.
The two friends part, and the action strays back and forth through their lives, tracking the events from the day they met.
Predictably, Annabel has married a controlling man who suits his own sweet self, while Kate flitted from one man to another and lived from her art.
But now that they’ve separated, both women have to find their real selves. For Annabel, it’s the career she always wanted. This time, she’s determined, her husband can’t put his foot down.
For Kate, life presents immediate and desperate horror: her mother is dying of cancer and her own marriage is disintegrating. There’s one upside, though - an old love is back in the offing.
This is art teacher Jackson’s debut novel, and her inexperience shows in the often awkward writing.
But it is a heartwarming story of women who find their own strength, and readers like it enough to have it selling well all over Ireland.
Colin, Annabel’s husband, is a satisfyingly creepy chicklit villain. He’s bone selfish, nagging his son into a near-breakdown and trying to edit him to be a copy of Dad.
But we know that there’s a happy ending waiting out there. Domestic bliss and career success are sure to be on the cards for our girls.
There are sexy surfers and alcohol-rich seductions, misunderstandings and huffs and reconciliations over wine or coffee.
There’s even a climactic childbirth scene to close the action. Typical Poolbeg.

Leaving Ardglass by William King

2008-06-22T12:29:00.002+01:00

Lilliput

‘A DREADFUL cry pierces the air; a cry that still, on occasions, works its way into my dreams, and causes me to start up in the bed.
‘”Maaaam!”’
It’s the pivotal moment in William Hill’s novel of brown envelopes and priests and tribunals.
The narrator is working on his brother’s building sites in London. This brother is MJ Galvin, later to face accusations of offshore bank accounts and unethical relations with government ministers.
The book starts with the murmuring confidences of Monsignor Thomas Galvin, then dives backwards into 1950s London, when young Tomasín leaves Kerry to join his brother.
He works on the building of roads and suburbs and infrastructure. After he’s roughened his hands, MJ puts him to paying the truckers: get an invoice for £120, pay out £100 with a wink.
There are dead men working on the sites: the builder gets a contract for 40 men and employs 35, putting the wages of the five ‘dead men’ in his pocket.
Galvin’s friend is Deano, a kid who came from nothing and is studying to be a vet, working summers on the sites. “The brass plate on the front door this time next year,” Deano gloats.
But the brass plate is on his coffin after he plunges from the scaffolding when some fool removes a plank from under the tarp.
King, who is himself a priest in Dublin, then lays in a long dull account of a brilliant student for the priesthood, the road to the bishop’s palace, the prize stolen at the last moment by a sleeveen.
But in the opening half of the novel - those dark London stories lit by the chiarascuro of corruption and bitterness - this is a vivid story.

The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch with Jeffrey Zaslow

2008-06-22T12:24:00.002+01:00

Hodder & Stoughton

‘LAST lectures’ are talks in which noted professors consider their demise and ruminate on what matters most to them.
But when Carnegie Mellon lecturer Randy Pausch, a virtual reality guru who was the inspiration to the people who made Star Wars and the Disneyland sets, gave his, he was dying of pancreatic cancer.
Students and admirers packed the hall, among them Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow, whose column and video on wsj.com spread from website to website across the world.
Zaslow and Pausch then wrote the book of the lecture together, and it’s now a worldwide bestseller.
Pausch sounds like fun. On his first day of term, teaching ‘user interface’ classes, he used to bring in a VCR, put it on the table, then smash it up with a sledgehammer.
“When we make something hard to make, people get upset,” he’d point out. “They become so angry that they want to destroy it. We don’t want to create things that people want to destroy.”
Pausch shares the wisdom he’s earned in a life where he “won the parent lottery”, a sunlit life with an adored wife and three darling children.
As he doles out granddad-ish advice – be honest, it’s simpler; take risks if you want to win; send handwritten thank-you notes – the reader knows that the tips come with a whiff of afterlife wisdom.
There are funny sections, like the one where he teaches his students how to apologise: 1) What I did was wrong; 2) I feel badly that I hurt you; 3) How do I make this better? “I’m sorry that you feel hurt by what I’ve done” isn’t an apology, he points out with a sharp little nip; wanting an apology back isn’t either!
It’s an incredibly brave book, sad and wise and even useful.

Michaelmas Tribute by Cora Harrison

2008-06-22T12:19:00.002+01:00

Macmillan

BREHON Mara is back on the case in the sunlit Ireland of the 16th century.
In England, Henry VIII is king, and English fashions are seeping into Clare from those shoneens in Galway. But in the Burren, it’s still emphatically a Gaelic society.
So when Mara investigates two murders in rapid succession, it’s the Brehon laws that are applied, not the English law that will soon wipe out ‘Irish ways and Irish laws’.
The mystery story has its technical problems. There are too many, and too similar, characters, and it’s a bit blurry for the reader to keep them all in focus.
At the centre are the MacNamaras, who are collecting their annual tribute at the Michaelmas fair. But Garrett, the new taoiseach of the MacNamaras, has made an astonishing change.
Instead of gracefully accepting the tribute everyone reckons they should give, he’s demanded a specific amount from each farmer or miller or blacksmith.
The root of the problem seems to be his sexy Galway wife and her interior decorating ambitions, which have to be paid for by his clansmen.
When Garrett’s unpopular steward is found dead after the fair, and the bag of silver he’s collected has been cut from his belt, Mara’s hunt begins. Meanwhile, she’s being courted by the King of Munster, Turlough, whose own son and likely heir is an English lackey.
Suspects for the murder of Ragnall, the steward, and a miller who has left his own inheritance in a state of utter confusion, include Ragnall’s petal-pretty daughter, the son of a neighbouring taoiseach, the miller’s simple son, and a host of others.
Harrison enjoys exploring the difference between Brehon and English law, and the politics of Tudor Ireland.
A cosy read for fans of the series.

If Not Now… by Denyse Devlin

2008-06-22T12:06:00.003+01:00

Penguin Ireland

MARINA ffrench has resigned herself to being single, but would love to find love. She meets the ‘deeply, provocatively attractive’ Luke on holiday in Morocco, and falls like a ton of bricks.
But the problem with Irishmen is the mammy, and Luke is on holiday with his elderly mother, who seems slightly batty.
The relationship between widow Marina and Luke seems to progress, but Luke is strangely uncommitted, blowing hot and cold. Is he wildly in love? Is he only playing? Is he gay?
Marina has her own complications. An uncentred plot brings in problems to solve for family and friends, lost teenagers to be put right, stories about the past, lots of conversations about relationship.
Things go slowly with Luke and his busybody of a ma, and Carlotta, an elegant Italian who hangs around Luke with a proprietary air.
But this reader, at least, felt an urge to boot Marina, with her constant selflessness and self-questioning. She’s a born martyr.
Gradually the secrets behind Luke’s involvement with Carlotta are revealed, and Luke and Marina start to trust each other and approach the dilemmas of a shared family together.
But with multiple relationships as convoluted as the Lisbon Treaty, it’s not an easy ride.
No one reaches 40 without having plenty of baggage. Luckily, Luke’s includes a lovely villa on a lake in Italy. Unluckily, his son is engaged to Carlotta’s daughter – but falling in love with Marina’s daughter.
Devlin’s multigenerational saga isn’t one to pick up unless you’re in it for the long haul. It’s a holiday read for those long airport waits.