Paperbacks

Our pick of this week's releases

Enough is Enough: How to Build a New Republic

Fintan O’Toole

Faber, £8.99

When Fintan O'Toole's manifesto for a new republic appeared in 2010, it was an unambiguous response to the public mood of despair amid spiralling debt and the connivance of those thought responsible for it. The plain citizens of the Republic of Ireland were told they would have to pay. Yet a true republic – the res publica – based on notions of citizenship and the public good, can hardly prevail under the conditions of inequality existing then – and now – in Ireland. While O'Toole debunks the myths of the supposed Republic, his style is refreshing in the substance that he provides and his avoidance of mere ire. He elaborates the decencies that the state can provide and outlines a 50-point action plan for reform. As transformation is not likely "to be created by a mere change of government", this continues to make compelling reading as much in the age of austerity as after the collapse of so-called wealth. Enough is still enough. Sarah McMonagle

Monsieur Pain

Roberto Bolaño

Picador, £7.99

First published in Spain in 1999, this open homage to Edgar Allan Poe by the singular Chilean literary maverick, who died at 50 in 2003, is a brilliant comic salvo. Set in an atmospheric Paris that admittedly seems more 19th century than 1938, the story is told by the sympathetic, vaguely tragic loner Pierre Pain, who has been summoned to the bedside of a dying man by a woman who is friendly with the patient's wife. That the first woman, the beautiful Madame Reynaud, should call Pain is touching as he had been unable to heal her husband. She informs the still-besotted Pain that her friend's husband, an obscure poet, has been stricken by chronic hiccupping. Within hours, the narrator has received a large bribe intended to make him abandon the case. It is very funny. Bolaño's major novels are iconic, crazy and wonderful, but don't miss out on his short fiction – this little romp is essential reading. Eileen Battersby

Jewish Ireland: A Social History

Ray Rivlin

History Press Ireland, €16.99

The author said her aim was threefold in writing this part- social history, part-communal memoir: to give some understanding of Jewish customs to non-Jewish Irish people, to put on record the contribution Jews have made to Ireland and to recreate for posterity a way of life very peculiar to Jewry. She succeeds admirably in all three goals. Her opening chapter vividly recreates Dublin's Clanbrassil St in its heyday – a thriving Jewish enclave of kosher butchers, fishmongers, grocers, etc. Much of the book lists the achievements in all walks of life of Irish Jews, one of the most interesting and courageous of whom was solicitor Michael Noyk, who defended some of those who fought in the Rising and the War of Independence and helped many prisoners to escape. From a high of around 5,000 just after the second World War, the population of Irish Jews shrank to 2,000 by the end of the 20th century but Rivlin is optimistic for the future of Irish Jewry. Brian Maye

Lives Like Loaded Guns

Lyndall Gordon

Virago, £9.99

In this unusual biography, Gordon explores the lesser-known aspects of Emily Dickinson's life, through the unravelling of the tight-knit family and friends she surrounded herself with. In doing this she shatters long-held imaginings of Dickinson as a reclusive poet; fragile and disappointed, instead restoring a sense of her as an independent woman and creative, completely in control of her talent. Gordon persuasively shows Dickinson as being in possession of a sensuous fire, "a soul at White Heat", that thrived, rather than faded, in the face of her family, whose own lives, conduct and feud (that lasted well beyond the writer's death) read like a rather scandalous novel. This is part of the biography's success, since Gordon weaves together academic research and criticism of Dickinson's poetry with a sense of being led by a literary messenger who eavesdrops at the doors of the poet's homestead on Main Street, thereby brilliantly reappraising everything about one of the world's greatest poets and her legacy. Siobhán Kane

Coco Chanel :The Legend and the Life

Justine Picardie

Harper Collins, £14.99

Coco Chanel's is a story we know, albeit in snippets: we know she was a French couturier, a rumoured Nazi sympathiser, an orphan and a singer. To retell it in a way that commands the reader's attention is no small feat, but Justine Picardie pulls it off, bringing the spectre of the grand dame of the Paris Ritz to life. Picardie's strength lies not only in her powers of description but in her formidable restraint; where blanks remain, she resists the urge to editorialise, so the story becomes all the more mysterious. And oh, what a story! The intricacies of Chanel's life are woven into depictions of a time gone by. The photographs reproduced reveal a bygone era of yachting and lounging, war and peace, activism and apathy. Picardie's triumph is not only in engaging the reader in this well-known story, but in rendering it new, in full technicolour. Rosemary Mac Cabe