Paperbacks

This week's releases reviewed

The Pleasure Seekers

Tishani Doshi

Bloomsbury, £7.99

The Indian poet Tishani Doshi takes forbidden love as the central theme in her generous, astute and unsentimental debut. Her energy, lightness of touch, sharp dialogue and feel for an original image carry the story, spanning more than 30 years through a lively family saga about a clash of cultures. There are no heroes; her characters are real, a mixed bunch, divided into those who aspire to the impossible and those who actually attempt it. The feats in question are not enormous, but they are significant, even life-changing. Babo is the adored eldest son who achieves the impossible when his father elects to let him leave home in Chennai and travel to London to complete his education. But he falls in love with a Welsh girl. Deservedly longlisted for this year's Orange Prize, this underrated narrative is superior to Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things(1997) and Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss(2006), both of which won the Booker. Eileen Battersby

Charles Dickens

Michael Slater

Yale University Press, £12.99

Michael Slater's life of Charles Dickens has the dual effect of making the reader feel idle while also inspiring him. Slater's intimate knowledge of all Dickens's writing, not just the novels, adds greatly to this masterful account of his life and work. Dickens emerges as a man of conviction, imagination and determination with an incredible capacity for work and an insatiable zest for life. Slater gives nuanced portraits of the important figures in Dickens's life, including his parents, sister Fanny and wife, Catherine, who bore Dickens 10 children but failed to hold his romantic imagination. Dickens's relationship with London is brilliantly drawn: his encyclopaedic knowledge of the city and its role as the lifeblood of his novels. His tireless support of social causes, his keen sense of theatre and its relationship to fiction, and his enduring love affair with his public are brought vividly to life in this indispensable biography. Eimear Frances Nolan

Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Vintage, £8.99

This is the childhood memoir of a writer who grew up in Kenya in the 1940s and 1950s. Set against the backdrop of the Mau Mau uprising and the ensuing state of emergency, it is the story of a boy's quest for education and freedom, and how one unlocks the other. It is also a story about stories. In the opening pages Ngugi professes to love listening more than telling, but his gift for storytelling suffuses the book with warmth and spirit. The memoir offers insights into the way language and community inform identity, especially colonial identity, and how language can be a tool of oppression as well as a means of escape. The text is peppered with the author's native Kikuyu, which the colonial teachers try to stamp out when they take over the African schools, and students are taught that "white people brought medicine, progress, peace". But thirst for learning triumphs as he leaves for High School, fulfilling his pact with his mother always to do the best he can do. He recounts the past, but his narrative feels present and immediate. Suffused with childhood verve and wonder, it is a vibrant story full of life and language. Eimear Frances Nolan

Manufacturing Depression

Gary Greenberg

Bloomsbury, £9.99

Gary Greenberg's argument that antidepressant drugs are overprescribed in the western world and that the incidence of depression as a "disease" may be overstated by the "Big Pharma" drug companies is hardly original or surprising. But this worthwhile book provides a thorough history of psychiatry and psychotherapy from the 19th century to the present, interleaved with an account of his own persistent struggle with depression. Greenberg is a practising psychotherapist, who questions accepted psychiatric methods in the light of his experiences, including a personal story of his temporary escape from depression by taking ecstasy rather than an antidepressant. Greenberg is sceptical of the idea that depression is simply a biological state caused by chemical imbalances in the brain; he feels that, within reason, depression or melancholia is an appropriate and perhaps necessary response to the modern world. Tom Moriarty

Friends of the National Library

Dónall Ó Luanaigh

Associated Editions, €14.95

This is the story of the National Library of Ireland Society, which was formed in October 1969 and was the brainchild of Patrick Henchy, director of the library from 1967 to 1976. He saw the need for a support group because the inadequate funding of successive governments left the library's facilities trailing those of national libraries in the UK and Europe. The society's role has been mainly an informative one, arranging public lectures and films, rather than purchasing items for presentation to the library. The society, comprising academics, authors and ordinary users of the library, soon had a membership of 500, and the figure currently stands at 550. A constant refrain of the society's correspondence with government from the 1970s through to the 1990s was the underfunding of the library. The period 2000-08 saw great improvements, but there have been severe cutbacks in recent years. Ó Luanaigh's story will appeal to all who are interested in Irish research and learning. Brian Maye