Paperbacks

The Plantation of Ulster: The British Colonisation of the North of Ireland in the 17th Century

Jonathan Bardon

Gill & Macmillan, €16.99

Bardon devotes almost 350 pages to one of the most important developments in Irish history, the plantation of Ulster in the 17th century, but writes so engagingly that the reader is swept along by the pitiless events. The English often joke about their own country that “it’s grim up north”. Up north in Ireland is more than grim; it is grisly, brutal and bloody. Bardon appeals for a more nuanced understanding of the plantation by placing the colonisation in a wider Irish context – touching on the plantation of Munster – and shining a light on the ambitions of English and Spanish royalty. Equally important, he explores the vices and vanities of their courtiers and the effect they had on the project. The political machinations can read like a spy novel but there is no doubting the real and lasting effects of the plantation, which Bardon addresses in a concluding chapter. The planter and the Gael haven’t gone away, you know. Pól Ó Muirí

The Outlaw Album

Daniel Woodrell

Sceptre, £8.99

I know someone who, having gorged on Stephen King horrors, avoids Maine. Well, I’ve read two of Daniel Woodrell’s books (the acclaimed novel Winter’s Bone and this collection of short stories), and I now pray I’ll go to my grave without ever setting foot in the Missouri Ozarks. Woodrell’s hillbilly fiction is well wrought, but his characters are trying, what with all the rape, murder, theft, assault, battle trauma and so on. All human life is here, other than well-adjusted people simply getting on with their lives. And don’t trust the landscape: “The road is skinny and curvy, with no shoulder and deep gullies alongside, and plenty of people die alone in those severe gullies, impaled, twisted awry in their bones, bleeding out in slow drips, wondering why none of the kids in back is making a sound.” Yikes. Brilliant writing, but grim. Mary Feely

Enigma: A New Life of Charles Stewart Parnell

Paul Bew

Gill & Macmillan, €14.99

Despite being a landlord and a poor public speaker and having an extremely reserved personality, Parnell was the undisputed leader of Irish nationalism from the late 1870s to 1891. He put Ireland centre stage in British politics and convinced Gladstone, arguably Britain’s greatest 19th-century political leader, of the need to grant Ireland self-government. He is difficult for biographers because all that survives of him are his public speeches, which are tailored to suit his audiences, so he was that elusive creature, all things to all men. In this concise, clear and superbly written biography, Bew shows how Parnell united all strands of Irish nationalism and harnessed the power of the land issue to drive the political question of Home Rule forward, at the same time mastering, and even setting, the rules of the parliamentary game at Westminster. That Parnell was “a conservative, constitutional nationalist with a radical tinge” sums up Bew’s solution to the enigma, and it’s a conclusion with which it would be hard to quibble. Brian Maye