Paperbacks

The Absolutist John Boyne Black Swan, £7.99"If you liked Birdsong you'll love this," promises the sticker on the cover. There are, indeed, some surface resemblances between John Boyne's novel and Sebastian Faulks's recently televised first World War tale. Both tell unhappy love stories; both travel fearlessly into the trenches of the Great War; both have episodic structures that shift back and forth in time.

Boyne, however, takes his readers into even muddier ethical territory than does Faulks. The relationship at the centre of this book is a homosexual one between two teenage soldiers, Tristan Sadler and Will Bancroft, while the central dilemma concerns the validity of conscientious objection in wartime: the moral equivalent of a dynamite double whammy at the time. The Absolutist is effortlessly readable and meticulously attuned to its social and linguistic time frame. And it raises a question – how can we be good in the midst of chaos and social breakdown? – that is as difficult to answer now as it has ever been.

Arminta Wallace

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan

Alan Partridge with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan

Harper, £7.99

He interviewed the stars (and shot one of them) on his BBC TV chat show, Knowing Me Knowing You; he made the graveyard slot on Radio Norwich his own; now Steve Coogan’s greatest comic creation has his own book, so sit back, fix yourself a drink and let Alan Gordon Partridge take you on a roller-coaster ride through his career. From his battles with hostile BBC commissioning editors to his run-ins with the staff of the Linton Travel Tavern, where he was forced to live for eight months, and his battles with Toblerone addiction, I, Partridge brings us deep inside the spoof presenter’s psyche as he bares all, exposes himself and tells the naked truth (as he sees it) about his quest to bring good old-fashioned values – and the wonderful music of Wings – back into broadcasting.

Kevin Courtney

Solace

Belinda McKeon

Picador, £7.99

On the surface, Solace, the first novel by the award-winning playwright and Irish Times contributor Belinda McKeon, appears to be a conventional love story. Mark and Joanne meet in the garden of a Dublin pub and immediately fall for each other, but theirs is a romance played out in the shadow of an ominous prologue. When first we meet Mark, his father, a Longford farmer, is helping him care for a baby girl whose mother is mysteriously absent. McKeon’s skill lies in leading the reader back in time as she details the start of Mark and Joanne’s relationship, then forwards as the fractured family tries to make its way in a world that has been forever changed. Solace was the worthy winner of last year’s Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book of the Year Award. McKeon handles the novel’s complex structure with ease, creating both a subtle examination of the tensions within families and an engaging and entertaining portrait of contemporary Irish life.

Freya McClements

Then Again

Diane Keaton

Fourth Estate, £8.99

Keaton is best known for her role in Woody Allen’s classic comedy Annie Hall, a semifictionalised account of their relationship. Her memoir has the same scatty energy and endearing self-effacement, but the surprise is that it is not just an account of her life but also a kind of love letter to her mother. Dorothy Hall had artistic inclinations (photographs of some of her collages are included) but gave them up to become the classic 1950s Californian homemaker. Some of Hall’s diary entries are here too, and they reveal a woman who, despite her intense love for her husband and children, struggled to find a means of self-expression. Rather than being a chronology, the book itself has a collage structure, and, in addition to her family, Keaton writes about her relationships with Allen, Warren Beatty and Al Pacino (she’s old-school discreet) and about the challenges and delights of late motherhood – she adopted two children in her 50s. An unusual celebrity memoir, then, but an enjoyable one.

Cathy Dillon

Unspoken

Gerard Stembridge

Old Street, £9.99

Gerard Stembridge’s third novel is about Ireland under a Fianna Fáil government, during a period of economic growth, but don’t panic: Unspoken isn’t a Celtic Tiger novel. Instead it follows a varied assortment of characters through the turbulent 1960s: the ageing, increasingly blind president, Éamon de Valera; Gavin Bloom, a homosexual floor manager at the new Teilifís Éireann; Baz Molloy, a cameraman; Corman Kiely, an architect; a young and rapacious Charles J Haughey (known as the Lizard); and, most movingly, Dom, or Donogh O’Malley, Limerick man and minister for education under Seán Lemass, who made education free for Irish children. And, representing the plain people of Ireland, there is the Strong family. The book’s length and steadfast devotion to the ordinary make for occasional longueurs, but, throughout, Stembridge is reminding us that the larger moods of history begin in the small moods of individual moments, and he has done an excellent job of capturing both.

Kevin Power