This week's paperbacks
The Hare with Amber Eyes
Edmund de Waal
Vintage, £8.99
The British potter Edmund de Waal inherited 264 miniature carvings he had first encountered during visits to his Uncle Iggie in Tokyo. It was this collection, initially purchased in Paris in the 1870s by the art critic Charles Ephrussi, a cousin of de Waal's great grandfather, that led him to explore his family's history. Ephrussi, on whom Proust modelled his Charles Swann, had bought the collection when Japanese art was fashionable in Paris. He later gave the figurines to his cousin Viktor, a wealthy Viennese banker. De Waal tells his 2010 Costa biography-award winner as a skilled investigator with a flair for narrative and an emerging interest in Joseph Roth. This is an incredible journey, not only for several generations of a Jewish merchant family from Odessa who moved on to Vienna as well as Paris and beyond, to poverty and exile because of the war, but also for de Waal, whose personal odyssey has created an elegiac, philosophical, many-layered masterpiece. Eileen Battersby
Unreliable Sources: How the 20th Century Was Reported
John Simpson,
Pan Books, £9.99
A book about the way journalists reported the 20th century, says Simpson, "is likely to be a detailed study of human inadequacies". He found that most reporters he examined were, like himself, "just limited human beings trying to find their way through a dense forest of uncertainty, with the light fading and a deadline approaching fast". The book covers the major events of the last century, from the Boer War to the invasion of Iraq. Although Simpson is admirably clear on the obligation to truth in journalism, he also makes clear that the way stories are structured involves selection, interpretation and perspective. He is also very aware of the malign influence of vested interests. What prevents the book from becoming tedious at times is the cast of characters it introduces, such as the Manchester Guardian's JB Atkins, the Daily Mail's GW Steevens and HW Nevinson of the News Chronicle. Of special interest to Irish readers will be the chapters on the Black and Tans and on Northern Ireland. This book informs, amuses and, at times, shocks. Brian Maye
Wartime Notebooks
Marguerite Duras
MacLehose Press, £9.99
A thought that terrified Margeurite Duras was that she would gradually forget her past if she did not write it down. Between 1943 and 1949, before she became a best-selling avant-garde novelist, film director and playwright, she poured her recollections into notebooks and stashed them in a cupboard. Reproduced in this volume for the first time, the words are sultry, visceral and sometimes devilishly comic. The context is wartime France, but Duras revisits brutal childhood experiences in the former colony of Indo-China, especially bankruptcy and her teenage affair with a wealthy Chinese businessman she found repulsive. Her work in the French Resistance and Communist Party and her husband's traumatic release from Dachau concentration camp are described with the same cool detachment that subjects such as pregnancy, motherhood and eating are. These are, however, only fragments of stories and autobiography. They have the flaws and discontinuities of first drafts and read more as archive material than as a finished work. Maggie Armstrong
Buille Marfach
Anna Heussaff
Cló Iar-Chonnacht, €12
Anna Heussaff has thrown herself into writing with an energy one can only admire. Buille Marfach is her fourth book since 2004, and with it she returns to the detective-story genre in which she debuted as a writer. Other works – all worth reading – were aimed at adults or teenagers, but Buille Marfach takes the reader back to the good, reliable and well-written whodunnit, in which murder and subterfuge rub shoulders. Heussaff worked in RTÉ radio and television before turning her hand to the pen, and her training in broadcast media stands her in good stead. Each chapter is clearly scripted; the characters' dialogue is sharp and the narrative clear and concise. Heussaff's ability to present modern life in Irish is masterful. Buille Marfach is a polished example of its genre, and an engaging read. Pól Ó Muirí
Lesley Blanch
Anne Boston
John Murray, £9.99
The list of illustrations for this biography gives you a feel for just how cosmopolitan the author and one-time Vogue features editor Lesley Blanch was: Romain Gary, the papal nuncio, the shahbanou of Iran, Jean Seberg and Imam Shamyl of Daghestan are but a few of the astonishing array of people who crossed Blanch's path during her 102-plus years. Any five-year period in her life seems to have differed wildly from the next, as she covered London, Sofia, Berne, New York, LA, Persia, Nepal, France and beyond. She worked for TS Eliot at Faber, went on assignment with Lee Miller, met Laurence Olivier in Hollywood, rented Marguerite Duras's flat "above a throbbing nightclub" in Paris, drank with the duke and duchess of Windsor and set up home after magnificent home in her inimitable orientalist style. Exhaustive and exhausting, this is a worthy tribute to a phenomenal woman whose energy, talent and joie de vivre are a lesson to us all. Nora Mahony
