Paperbacks

Irish Times writers review a selection of this week's paperback releases

Occupied City

David Peace

Faber Faber, £7.99

The second novel in David Peace's Tokyo trilogy is a hallucinatory dystopia of postwar Japan. If you can deal with the metronomic repetitions, chapters of italics, capital letters, crossed-out sentences, and the multiple, non-linear narrators, there is the chilling story of the notorious 1948 Teikoku Bank massacre. A man, dressed as a government medical official from the occupying forces, pretends to administer a dysentery vaccine to 16 bank employees, but instead poisons them, killing 12. An artist, Hirasawa Sadamichi, was convicted of the crime, but conspiracy theories abound as to who the real killer is, including one accusing a member of Unit 731, Japan's infamous covert biological warfare research unit. Though the textual variants are at times a struggle and may prove too obliquely experimental for some, there is a raw power to Peace's prose, so much so that even the complex nature of the story's trajectory becomes enticing. Emily Firetog

Great Irish Lives

Edited by Charles Lysaght

Times Books, £8.99

From Henry Grattan, who died in 1820, to Nuala O'Faolain, who died last year, this collection of obituaries from the London Timesincludes most of the political and literary figures you'd expect, but not the 1916 leaders and other "traitors" such as Roger Casement, although Erskine Childers is included – as well as some who were well-known in their day but are now almost forgotten. Lord Morris of Spiddal's wit is celebrated, for instance, but not that of Oscar Wilde, who died around the same time "broken in health and bankrupt in fame and fortune". Charles Lysaght (author of many of the Times's recent Irish obituaries) has picked the contemporary verdicts well: full of pithy phrases, they are generally well-judged and as fascinating for filling in details often left out of official Irish versions as for the insights into the times (in both senses) in which they were published. A wonderful collection and a perfect book for dipping into. Joe Joyce

The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs

Charles D Ellis

Penguin, 753pp. £10.99

Charles D Ellis’s history of Goldman Sachs is extremely thorough. The firm’s rise took many a twist in fortune, and Ellis analyses the people and events which turned the family business, founded by Marcus Goldman in 1869, into the authoritative financial powerhouse it is. The credit lies with figures such as Gus Levy, John Whitehead and Sidney Weinberg, who, as well as being head of the firm for 39 years, was a director of numerous other companies and an advisor to President Franklin D Roosevelt.

Goldman Sachs carved out its unique position by emphasising innovation and team-work, and by being more flexible in its methods than its competitors, as well as more conniving and ruthless (or resourceful and driven as the author might put it). Ellis can't be faulted for the rigour and detail of his chronicle, but his cliquey relish for his subject, combined with his dry writing style, make this a book more for the cognoscenti than the interested novice. Colm Farren

Oscar’s Books

Thomas Wright

Vintage, £8.99

What better way to compose a biography of a great lover and collector of books than to chart his life through his voluminous reading? The poet, playwright, essayist and aesthete Oscar Wilde "regarded his library as a chapel dedicated to beauty", as author Thomas Wright states in Oscar's Books. The biography journeys through the Irish folk and fairy stories Wilde's eccentric poetess mother Speranza liked to declaim, through his extensive studies and exhaustive knowledge of classical Greek works, to his enormous collection of beautiful volumes and special printings of his own plays and poems. Wilde revelled in the pleasure of literature – which perhaps even eclipsed Bosie as his greatest love. The insensitively, ignorantly managed sale of Wilde's library upon his conviction for homosexuality was tantamount to butchery – and something Wilde never got over. In suitably lyrical language, Wright presents a portrait of this artist painted with the extensive palette of European literature – a colourful, sensitive and lavish image with which any bibliophile could empathise. Christine Madden

Shutter Island

Dennis Lehane

Bantam Books,£7.99

Readers who are of the opinion that the book is generally better than the film should seek out a copy of the recently reissued film tie-in version of Dennis Lehane's gritty and gripping psychological thriller, Shutter Island,first published in 2003.

In 1954 US Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule are summoned to Shutter Island, location of the notorious Ashcliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a dangerous patient, ostensibly from a locked room. When a hurricane cuts all communication between the island and the mainland and the men are unable to leave the facility, Daniels begins to suspect a conspiracy is afoot to undermine his investigation and his sanity. An utterly compelling narrative coupled with Lehane's characteristically masterful building of almost unbearable suspense results in an enthralling single-sitting read. The haunting denouement of this taut, contemporary-gothic novel is not easily forgotten. Eleanor Fitzsimons