Our pick of the latest releases
Smut
Alan Bennett
Faber/Profile, £6.99
Smutis subtitled Two Unseemly Stories. Although both are short and self-consciously smutty, Alan Bennett offers a contrast in style and tone. The first story, The Greening of Mrs Donaldson, is very funny. It is replete with scenes and dialogue crafted by the prolific playwright like a jolly theatre farce. Mrs D certainly emerges from her comfort zone, but while behaving inappropriately for a middle-aged widow she still has time to observe that the bedroom carpet could really do with a wash. We see the antics with her intelligent, detached eye. The second story, The Shielding of Mrs Forbes, lacks a central, attractive character such as Mrs D. There's plenty of smut, and everyone sleeps with everyone else, but it's all rather boring. Bennett's style here is different: there's more of the disdainful narrator, and the laughs derive more from authorial cynicism than from comic circumstances. Bennett even, somewhat wearily, refers to an incident as having been included for "narrative tidiness". Tom Moriarty
The Devil’s Mask
Christopher Wakling
Faber and Faber, £7.99
Sometimes we just want to be told a really good story. In The Devil's Mask, Christopher Wakling weaves a yarn that sets the mind aglow with the sights and sounds of Bristol in 1835: the trading port is awash with sailors, merchant venturers and, that most beguiling of mistresses, money. Add to this the hero Inigo Bright's natural inclination towards scrupulously uncovering the truth, despite a distracting artistic streak, and you have a page-turner that transports and delights. The mystery in which Bright becomes embroiled centres on the lately illegal slave trade, but it soon veers into perilous family territory. A sense of fairness adds nothing to the reputation of any man in this Bristol, where the abolition of slavery would be mourned were it not for the fact that the "commodities" were decreasing in value anyway. It's also a very smelly city, and it says something about Wakling's powerful storytelling that the stink lingers in the mind long after the book is closed. Claire Looby
The Philosophical Life: Twelve Great Thinkers and the Search for Wisdom, from Socrates to Nietzsche
James Miller
Oneworld, £14.99
James Miller's book consists of a series of 12 essays on his favourite thinkers. Although each piece can be enjoyed on its own, the collection gives a valuable overview of the development of philosophy from a pursuit of the well-heeled "amateur" to the almost exclusive preserve of a university elite. He does not claim that his list of thinkers is exhaustive, but he hopes that those he has chosen illustrate the search for wisdom. A historian by training, Miller begins with Socrates and ends with Nietzsche but includes thinkers – Diogenes, Montaigne and Emerson – who are "rarely taken seriously by most contemporary philosophers". He makes a good case for them and the rest of the (all-male) cast. The essays are pitch-perfect; Miller writes respectfully, but not uncritically, of the philosophers and gives a broad but intelligent (and intelligible) outline of their thought and influence. His prose is insightful, anecdotal, warm and nuanced. Philosophically speaking, it is a case of "yes, we Kant". Pól Ó Muirí
Between the Sheets
Scarlett O’Kelly
Penguin Ireland, €14.99
Scarlett O'Kelly – which is, she goes to great lengths to assure us, not her real name – sets herself out as a modern-day happy hooker. Pushed into selling her body by her inability to service a mortgage and look after three children, O'Kelly treats the reader to a plethora of sexually explicit tales from her front line. But far from the wit of Belle de Jour, the godmother of the 21st-century hooker genre, O'Kelly's writing is simplistic and meandering. Rather than elicit the thrills the author seems to expect, descriptive passages result in little more than a curling of the lip. It doesn't help that throughout the narrative lies a vein of smug superiority; the heroine of the piece is, of course, O'Kelly herself, who cleverly comes up with a solution to her personal quandary and discharges her duties with skill and prowess. There is also the question of judgment, but O'Kelly may rest assured: no one who reads this book will judge her for her choice of career; they'll be too busy judging her personality, or lack thereof. Rosemary Mac Cabe
Dead Interesting: Stories from the Graveyards of Dublin
Shane MacThomáis
Mercier Press, €12.99
MacThomáis, historian and tour guide at Glasnevin Cemetery, in Dublin, has a great knowledge of graveyards and a great knack for storytelling, to judge by the historical capsules that fill these pages. The book has its share of the macabre – grave-robbers, vivisepultures and ghosts – but most of the stories are miniature accounts of the lives of individuals. The book features many public figures (Michael Collins, Parnell, Brendan Behan, Luke Kelly), but MacThomáis is at his best when telling the stories of unknown or little-known people. He brings historic events to life by attaching them to ordinary lives, such as that of the youngest casualty of the 1916 Rising, Seán Foster, who was caught in crossfire and killed in his pram. The most bizarre story concerns Dan Donnelly, Ireland's first world-champion boxer, and his much-travelled right arm, which was stolen from him after death by grave-robbers and went on to join the circus. Colm Farren
