Grand Stuff: Label Art from Ireland
by Niall McCormack (Hi Tone Books, €30)
Product labels impart a trove of information – facts about ingredients and place of manufacture populate the print design and brand the goods. Labels’ industrial and marketing functions are also fingerprints of their era, and these convey a rich array of cultural signals. Across 600-plus reproduced examples, Grand Stuff: Label Art from Ireland trawls a century of commercial output. Lean introductions informatively steer your eye through artwork for the likes of Irish mineral drinks, beers, whiskey, tourism, phosphorus matches and pharmacies. Its pages bulge with images of original labels and generic ones with localised overprints; they ooze a nostalgic affection for a simpler analogue consumerism. This world of loose biscuits and hotel-branded baggage labels is cargoed with the coded politics of the emergent State. Niall McCormack’s beautiful compendium for Hi Tone Books is a generous labour of love whose terse, expert paragraphs remind you to look at livery and relish the detail of label design. — John Fleming
Inspector Dreadlock Holmes & Other Stories
by John Agard (Small Axes, £10.99)
This surrealist collection of stories is Guyanese writer John Agard’s first foray into adult fiction. In the title story, Inspector Dreadlock Holmes and his sidekick are sent to a quaint British seaside town as part of a diversity policy. Their first job? To investigate the case of a controversial political figure found unconscious beside a cucumber. In another, a supremely articulate toddler is possessed by the voices of Dr Martin Luther King and Marie Antoinette. For Agard, winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, language trumps plot. His collection encompasses both verse and prose. However, the result is frustrating and distracts from Agard’s otherwise astute racial and cultural observations. The latter lend thought-provoking moments to the collection, notably in one metaphorical story about a collection of spices that threaten to return to their home countries. — Brigid O’Dea
Mercia’s Take
by Daniel Wiles (Swift Press, £12.99)
Immersed in the suffocating mines of the Black Country, Mercia’s Take plunges the reader straight into the industrial blare of the late 1800s. Michael is a miner whose life is soot, phlegm and struggle. He pushes himself onwards in his relentless labour to provide schooling for his son Luke, dreading the idea of him following in his footsteps, chained to the carts of coal like other children, beaten into a life which is brutal and precarious. He discovers a glister of gold in the coal face, and sees hope of escape. But Cain, his sly, volatile workmate, casts menace into the narrative. Asking what lengths you might go to in order to find a better life, the book is suspenseful and magnetic, the language pithy with northern dialect, both harsh and tender; utterly captivating. — Ruth McKee
The Column I Never Wrote
by John Masterson (Harvest Press, €15)
In one sense, academic, journalist and TV producer John Masterson has led a successful life, but “work is a limited measure of human life”. At 19 he married his pregnant girlfriend, only to be told five days later that the baby wasn’t his. That was 50 years ago and, because of the deception, he has always had difficulties with intimacy. “Something in me made me sabotage the happiness that was in front of me.” When a relationship failed, what he felt most was loneliness. This book is his quest to understand, but to do that “you need to understand this adolescent, repressed, sanctimonious, hypocritical, abusive, church-dominated, small-minded, respectability-obsessed, toxic island… where nothing was as it seemed”. More “psychobiography” than memoir, it is searingly honest, sad, funny and beautifully written. — Brian Maye
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The Flames
by Sophie Haydock (Doubleday, £16.99)
Haydock’s historical fiction debut resurrects the lives of four of Egon Schiele’s muses from the footnotes of art history. An Austrian expressionist painter, Schiele was a protege of Gustav Klimt, who became recognised for his radical, intimate portraits and is considered now to be one of the major figurative painters of the early 20th century. Haydock’s ambition was to give voice to four of the women in 1900s Vienna whose bodies were immortalised in his work. Meticulously researched, The Flames has great narrative energy that propels the work forward. A more nuanced introspection of the complexities of the muse-artist relationship from the perspective of these women would have certainly elevated this novel; however, this is an accomplished debut that fans of Paula McLain and Tracy Chevalier are sure to enjoy. — Helen Cullen
Last Resort
by Andrew Lipstein (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99)
Lipstein’s debut has an interesting arc on the creative process. An aspiring writer has success within touching distance, but there’s a problem: his book is based on a story a friend divulged one drunken night. Cue an adrenaline-fuelled, clumsy romp about artistic authorship (I’ve never encountered a novel with so much coffee). There are too many flaws here, forms too fleeting. A small example: the author’s new love mentions her mother, who died of cancer, for the first time approximately 100 pages after their first date. Attempts at humour are stagey (a lawyer, Rupert Paul, “he looked about RuPaul’s age too”). Characters feel one-dimensional, and the protagonist is so self-reflexively highly strung, what should be a delicious tale of sour grapes turns into one long whine. — NJ McGarrigle
