Paperback of the week

The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

Glenn Patterson

Faber and Faber, £7.99

On Christmas Day 1897, 85-year-old Gilbert Rice recalls his first job, as a clerk at the Belfast Ballast Board, and his first, life-changing love affair with a beautiful Polish exile called Maria. Gilbert's voice seduces the reader in the opening pages, with his dryly humorous account of his housekeeper's panic over the ringing of that infernal new-fangled instrument the telephone. As we make our way through a series of small but beautifully crafted set pieces – the highlight is an evocative trip along the River Lagan with a visiting English surveyor and a nervous young Gilbert, who has never been in a boat before, at the oars – we realise that the real love story here is Patterson's passion for Belfast and its history. Inspired by real people and places, this novel offers a view of the city that most Dubliners will never have seen before, and it's a sight for sore eyes, and a joy besides. - ARMINTA WALLACE

In the Orchard, the Swallows

Peter Hobbs

Faber and Faber, £7.99

In rural Pakistan a 14-year-old boy is found at daybreak under the fruit-laden branches of a pomegranate tree with the daughter of one of the village's most prominent men. The innocent night they spent talking and watching for dawn over the austere mountains leads not to a romance story but to 15 years of torture and imprisonment for the boy and the doom of a young love. Hobbs's prose is achingly beautiful, and the simple storytelling of the unnamed young, broken man is a touching counterpoint to the harsh landscape and social conditions under which the people of the region live. As he pours out his story in a diary to his unseen beloved, the central tenet of his existence that "we are granted only one life, and one life is enough". Prison has not dimmed his ability to love or receive love. And, like the swallows in the orchard, he realises he can simply just live. - CLAIRE LOOBY

A More Perfect Heaven

Dava Sobel

Bloomsbury, £8.99

In about 1510 the Polish priest Copernicus "re-envisioned the cosmos with the Sun, rather than the Earth, at its hub", but he concealed his theory, fearing ridicule, for nearly 40 years. It was a German mathematician called Rheticus who somehow persuaded him to publish his manuscript. It took months to talk Copernicus into this, and Rheticus stayed with him for two years, preparing for the publication. Sobel's two-act play, dramatising the Copernicus-Rheticus interaction, forms the centrepiece of A More Perfect Heaven. It is fascinating in its own right, but, set in the context of Copernicus's life, as it is here, it is even more intriguing. The nonfiction narrative that sandwiches the play skilfully sketches in the historical background of a religiously divided Europe. How Copernicus reached his conclusion about a heliocentric universe isn't really explained, because no one knows how, but his recalibration has enormously expanded human horizons. - BRIAN MAYE

Christianophobia: A Faith Under Attack

Rupert Shortt

Rider Books, £12.99

Shortt's book deals with the intolerance faced by many Christians trying to practise their religion in countries where they are in a minority. Christians are still being killed today, he says, because of their faith. The religious editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Shortt looks at a range of countries – India, Burma, Turkey, Syria – and offers a crafted argument as to why Christians are attacked and who is responsible. A further aim of the book is to show how little is written about this violence. Shortt argues that too many in the media have a blind spot about attacks on Christians, a sort of well-what-did-they-expect-to-happen-going-out-there view that fails to recognise that Christianity has been part of the world's religious fabric for a very long time. - PÓL Ó MUIRÍ

The Lifeboat

Charlotte Rogan

Virago, £7.99

In 1914 the transatlantic liner Empress Alexander has plunged into the depths with the loss of many lives. Even those who have managed to scramble into lifeboats are far from safe: the seas are rough, the boats overcrowded, potential rescuers unforthcoming. If you've ever wondered what it might be like to spend time in such a boat, wonder no more. Charlotte Rogan's debut novel puts you right in there alongside her narrator Grace Winter, bailing and bickering and shivering and holding her own as the internal currents in the lifeboat – class and gender struggles and the battle between sanity and madness – rise and fall, as dangerous as the waves that threaten to engulf the tiny craft. Grace is by no means as disingenuous as her first-person narration makes out, and The Lifeboat can be read as a disturbing new spin on the phrase "survival of the fittest". It's not an easy book to like, but it's even more difficult to put down. - ARMINTA WALLACE