Paperbacks

Our pick of the latest releases

The Path of Minor Planets

Andrew Sean Greer

Faber and Faber, £7.99

Andrew Sean Greer's name has blazed brightly on the US literary scene for a while: his 2004 novel, The Confessions of Max Tivoli, was compared by John Updike to Proust and Nabokov. T he Path of Minor Planetsis an earlier book, reissued to capitalise on that critical success. It opens with a group of astronomers and their students – a bitchy, competitive, eminently dislikable lot – assembling on an island in the South China Sea to await the return of a comet. Comets, like people, are gloriously unpredictable: they always come back exactly on time, except when they veer off into space and disappear. This makes a fine structural metaphor for Greer, who meanders and jumps through time to check on his characters as their lives whirl around in space. Sadly, or perhaps deliberately, the concerns of his human figures come across as bland and pointless against such a grand cosmic background. Arminta Wallace

The Boys

Michael Harnett

Hark Press, €10

This is a charming and sensitive story that centres on the escapades of four boys who are coming of age in Drumcondra, in Dublin, in the 1960s. It opens with the pubescent pupils hiding excitedly down a back lane to check out a rumour that a beautiful woman disrobes at a window every night at 10pm, and progresses to a nervous first love for one boy that causes tensions in the group. Other highlights include a moving account of the effects of a father's sudden death on a building site in England and a common enough dilemma of the day for two of the boys: whether to leave school after the Inter Cert and go to Belfast to enlist in the British army. The Boyswill be of special interest to readers for whom Charles Atlas, Capstan cigarettes and the Animal Gang bring back memories, but it should also interest other readers, because it is a particularly well written and finely observed account of a Dublin working-class boyhood of the day. John Moran

Getting Somalia Wrong?: Faith, War and Hope in a Shattered State

Mary Harper

Zed Books, £12.99

Have we got Somalia wrong? Is it not, after all, a "failed state", ungovernable and overrun by radical Islamists and pirates? Is it not prone to famine, war and foreign invasion and without a functioning government since the overthrow of President Siad Barre's dictatorship, in 1991? Mary Harper, a BBC journalist who has reported on Somalia since then, when civil war broke out, describes a country of proud, self-sufficient nomads who excel at business and, in the midst of chaos, have created one of the cheapest and most reliable mobile-phone services in Africa. Harper, desperately searching for optimism, stresses the stability of the semi-independent area of Somaliland, in northern Somalia, and the brief order, based on Sharia law, imposed on southern Somalia by the Union of Islamic Courts in 2006. It's not convincing: her honest journalism reinforces our grim image of Somalia. This succinct and factual book is part of the interesting African Arguments series of short books about Africa today. Tom Moriarty

The Meeting Point

Lucy Caldwell

Faber and Faber, £7.99

Ruth Armstrong's husband, Euan, is a would-be John the Baptist, determined to preach his Christian doctrine to the souls in the deserts, so he wrenches his wife and little daughter away from their verdant Irish home, transplanting them into a dusty purgatory in Bahrain. Increasingly, Ruth loses faith in the religion that has been the backbone of her life, and, perhaps as a symptom of the pressure her marriage has been put under, she begins an affair with a young Bahraini, Farid. As Ruth befriends Noor, Farid's cousin, she is unaware that the girl has become dangerously obsessed with the little Irish family that she sees as embodying the love her own life has lacked. Caldwell's skills as a playwright keep the narrative moving with a breathless intensity, and her analysis of the nature of belief and the places, people and situations from which it springs, and through which it might also perish, is sharply perceptive and moving. Claire Looby

Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War

John Stubbs

Penguin, £9.99

"Cavalier" entered common parlance as civil war loomed in England, and was applied to the royalist side generally. It was "a byword for impractical heroics, dash, disdain and debauchery". Although many royalists were, in actuality, reserved and devout, the two colourful figues to whom this book gives most attention, John Suckling and William Davenant, were loose-living dandies with a thirst for adventure. They were also minor poets whose verse Stubbs skilfully uses to reveal the shenanigans at court. Suckling dreamed of great things but lacked the personality to achieve them. Davenant was luckier, more humorous and resourceful, not allowing the loss of his nose because of treatment for syphilis to hold him back. He played an important role in the civil war, managed to survive Cromwell's Commonwealth and engineered a renaissance in English drama. Stubbs seamlessly combines literary, social and political history in this rollicking tale. Brian Maye