Our pick of the latest releases
A Woman in Berlin
Anonymous
Virago, £8.99
When it was first published, in 1954, this fascinating, often terrifying account of life during war was met with hostility and controversy in Germany. The authenticity of the narrator, a 34-year-old journalist, was questioned, and she decided not to let the book be published again until after she died, in 2001. Although her name was revealed by a journalist in 2003, doubts about the diary's integrity have been fully investigated and dismissed, and this personal, intelligent piece of writing is now widely regarded as a revealing piece of social history. She describes the hunger, the air raids, the fears of women as Russian troops approach, and the mass rape that ensues. It is a hard read at times, but it is made more memorable by the courage and humour of its narrator and, overall, the quality of her writing. Sorcha Hamilton
Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Fourth Estate, £8.99
One of the consequences of hype is that, in some quarters, it almost demands a backlash to temper the echoing cacophony of plaudits. Unfortunately for those eager to condemn Freedomas a pale imitation of Franzen's epoch-defining behemoth, The Corrections(2001), this, his long-awaited fourth novel, is easily as accomplished as its predecessor. Once again the author has created a fractured family of richly drawn, layered characters, the Berglunds, who rail against each other in a desperate attempt to gain a foothold in a world that suddenly seems so difficult to be at ease in. When their cold, right-wing boy, Joey, moves in with the Republican parents of his doting neighbourhood girlfriend, Walter and Patty's marriage starts to fall apart. As her son strays into the murky, profiteering side of the Iraq war, and her husband loses himself in an environmental conservation crusade, the return of an old flame destabilises Patty's entire existence. A Bush-era parable of epic proportions. Dan Sheehan
The Stray Sod Country
Patrick McCabe
Bloomsbury, £7.99
"Somehow everyone got along together" in the Border town of Cullymore, home to an equal number of Protestants and Catholics. Until, that is, the feud between the parish priest and James A Reilly, the town misfit, who lives in a hovel with a fox, is known to shout abuse at Mass-goers and once urinated in the baptismal font. Then there's Golly, the barber's wife, who has fantasised about her neighbour, the excruciatingly superior and more beautiful Blossom Foster, being disfigured in a car crash. And sometimes Fr Hand thinks about kicking Fr Peyton's teeth in. They are all part of the general wackery of The Stray Sod Country, McCabe's vivid and hilarious tale about a small town in crisis – watch out for the cracker lines about Imperial Leather soap. Sorcha Hamilton
The Man Who Recorded the World: A Biography of Alan Lomax
John Szwed
Arrow Books, £8.99
When Alan Lomax began collecting folk songs, in the 1930s, it was just a summer job helping out his dad, John Lomax, an archivist for the Library of Congress. But it soon became a vocation, and Lomax spent much of his life travelling the highways and byways of the US and beyond, recording the songs of sharecroppers, labourers and even prisoners. Among others, he discovered Leadbelly, Muddy Waters and Woody Guthrie, thus opening the door for the likes of Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. He also came to Ireland and made recordings of the Queen of the Tinkers, Margaret Barry. This fine biography tracks Lomax's life journey from radical Harvard student to renowned ethnomusicologist, riding shotgun on his endless forays into the backwoods of the US and showing that his sense of justice and cultural preservation remained of the highest order. Kevin Courtney
Best European Fiction 2011
Edited by Aleksander Hemon, preface by Colum McCann
Dalkey Archive, €13.99
This collection of short stories ranges from the comfortingly familiar voice of Hilary Mantel to that of the less obvious Blaze Minevski, and this tension lends itself well to the overall thesis of the book, which Hemon partly explains as breathing "with the lungs of common humanity". There is the dangerous, hilarious world of Doctor Sot, by Kevin Barry, nestling among the surrealist sadness of Olga Tokarczuk's The Ugliest Woman in the World, and many of the eastern European writers breathe new life into old folk traditions, as in Russia's Andrei Gelasimov with The Evil Eye. The preoccupations vary as widely as the diversity of the nations – male desire ( Hotel By a Railroad), literary theory ( Professional Behaviour) and violence ( Trespasses) – but, in exploring their own nation's psyches, the writers create a document of a distinct European literary sensibility: exciting, tormented and curious, with nothing lost in translation. Siobhán Kane
