Paperbacks

This week's releases reviewed

Ghost Light

Joseph O’Connor

Vintage, £7.99

Ghost Lightis not a contribution to Synge biography. It is a one-woman show. On stage is Molly Allgood, aka Máire O'Neill, actor extraordinaire in the theatre of life and, so she tells us, devoted lover of John Millington Synge. From her sparkling youth to her drink-sodden old age Molly leads us a merry dance, and her narrative's clever use of letters, lyrics, scraps from early-20th-century guidebooks and even a hilarious "one-act play" in which her bit of posh meets her supposedly senile grandmother present her in three unforgettable dimensions. This is a dream of a novel, beautifully written, the tragedy of a disappointed life wrapped in the chewy crust of indomitable humour. Ghost Lighthas been chosen as Dublin's One City, One Book for 2011, so April will be a month of readings, performances of Synge plays and all sorts of shenanigans. But before that happens take Ghost Lightaway somewhere quiet and listen to its music for yourself. You won't regret it. Arminta Wallace

The Betrayal

Helen Dunmore

Penguin, £7.99

Having survived starvation and German invasion, Leningrad couple Andrei and Anna face one final, particularly nasty purge, that of the "saboteur" doctors. Picking up 10 years on from her work The Siege, Dunmore's The Betrayaldetails the fragile inner life of the couple under Stalin's regime in its dying days. In a society in thrall to poisoned party logic, doctor Andrei is faced with the difficult (and potentially fatal) task of telling the truth to a head of secret police, whose son has cancer. Meanwhile, in their feverishly guarded home life, Andrei and Anna try to conceive a child, attempting to overwrite the scars of history. The central two appear as implausibly stoical and self-sacrificing as Stalinist propaganda would have them, but Dunmore slowly sculpts her characters through trying circumstance. Dunmore's luscious prose glides through this doomy historical romance, settling momentarily on prickly details such as the specifics of osteosarcoma or "conveyor belt" torture at Lubyanka, and building to a moving and bitterly pragmatic finale. Róisín Kiberd

The Unnamed

Joshua Ferris

Penguin, £8.99

Tim Farnsworth, a successful New York lawyer, is plagued by a bizarre physical compulsion: he can't stop walking. As the condition worsens, depleting his body and isolating him from all that he holds dearest, Farnsworth finds himself completely alone, braving the ever-more-apocalyptic American landscape on his doomed odyssey to nowhere. Ferris's narrative is peppered with wry, humorous observations that briefly repel the encroaching darkness, the sense of dread akin, he muses, to that of the illegal immigrant waiting in constant fear of some sinister entity that would "nulify his freedom and dispatch him to sorrow and dust". In a novel of devastating physical suffering, however, the most affecting cruelty perpetrated by this incomprehensible force is the wedge it drives between Tim and his wife, the despair that supplants their unfinished life together. Our glimpses of this fading union, as they hold each other tenderly within the eye of a storm that will ultimately consume them both, are utterly heartbreaking. Dan Sheehan

Through the Language Glass

Guy Deutscher

Arrow, £7.99

Deutscher devotes half of his book to a discussion of the colour blue (for which the ancient Greeks had no word) before he gets to his main contention, which is that language can affect how we perceive the world. He supports the contention with three examples. One is the native Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, which has no "left" or "right" and defines location in terms of the points of the compass; its speakers instinctively know where north, south, east and west are. The second is how the linguistic gender of an object strongly influences speakers' associations, and the third brings us back to blue, illustrated by Russians being faster than English at distinguishing shades of blue because Russian has different words for light blue and dark blue. The anecdotes are fascinating, and the book is a most enjoyable read, but its claims may be overstated. Brian Maye

Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer

Patrick French

Penguin, £14.99

Francis Younghusband was a man of astonishing energy. As a young imperialist he wandered through the most forlorn reaches of the British Empire, adopting a high moral tone with the often bemused locals. In old age, after a joyless marriage, he embarked on a thoroughly requited love affair with Lady Lees, 32 years his junior. In between,he invaded Tibet in 1903-4, entirely without political or moral justification, wrote countless books and hobnobbed with viceroys, mystics, charlatans and, above all, fellow members of the Royal Geographical Society. French's book is full of original, painstaking research. Sir Francis was an original: an aloof, reserved ladies' man and a narrow imperialist turned proselytiser for a new, peaceful world religion. In a book rich in detail, one stands out: the optimistic adventurer with 67 carefully packed shirts and an advance guard of frostbitten sappers and Sikhs camped high in the wind-scorched Tibetan wilderness. Tom Moriarty