The Salesman, by Joseph O'Connor (Vintage, £5.99 in UK)

This surprisingly subdued novel follows the fortunes of a 49-year-old purveyor of satellite dishes, Billy Sweeney, whose daughter Maeve has been beaten into a coma during a raid on the petrol station where she worked part-time. In a rambling, affectionate, occasionally brutal letter to the comatose Maeve, who will of course never read it (O'Connor is a shrewd observer of the communications skills, or lack of them, of the Irish male), Sweeney juggles a troubled past - courtship of, and marriage to, the feisty Grace, followed by a rapid descent into alcoholism - and a bizarre present dominated by the relationship he has developed with one of the thugs accused of the petrol station robbery. This is O'Connor's fourth novel, and he juggles the various elements of his plot with a fair degree of skill, but there is little evidence in The Salesman of the wacky wit and keen sense of the ridiculous which characterises his non-fiction writing, and the book seems weighed down by an excess of fin de siecle doom and gloom.