Winter People by Gráinne Murphy (Legend Press, £8.99)
One of the central characters in Gráinne Murphy’s latest work made their debut in a 2017 short story, Further West. Sis Cotter, a widow facing the repossession of her house following her husband’s death is spiky and stubborn. It’s easy to see why Murphy asked her to stick around. In Winter People, Sis’s story becomes intertwined with those of her neighbour Lydia and Peter, the sheriff who will repossess her house, each as alone as the other in the midst of their own lives. This isn’t a novel about Covid, but the isolation and grief experienced during the pandemic resonate within the stories of these winter people, sharpening the focus on Murphy’s central question: how can we keep the ones we love close, when our solitary natures pull us away. BECKY LONG
The Trial of Lotta Rae by Siobhan MacGowan (Welbeck, €14.99)
Lotta Rae has a ghostly, disarming voice that deepens to a savage clarity, pulling you into this gripping story of injustice, intrigue and revenge set at the turn of the 20th century. Lotta is brutally attacked at a Halloween party by a “gentleman”, a successful businessman with friends in government. In the Old Bailey, her reputation as a “woman of good fame” is as much on trial as her rapist. Her barrister William Linden urges her to trust him entirely but lies, greed and self-interest see her faith in justice crushed, and a worm of guilt hatched in William’s heart. With a fatalistic pulse and a haunting atmosphere, the novel encompasses the suffragette movement and the first World War, the wider spirit of revolution mirroring its own intimate, interior plea for freedom. RUTH McKEE
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Doomed Inheritance by Bill Power (Scriptorum Mulberry, €30)
Bill Power loves Mitchelstown, Co Cork, and has been fascinated by its castle, constructed by the third earl of Kingston for a king – George IV – who never visited it. The castle was the largest neo-Gothic house in Ireland, representing landlord power at its apogee in the early 19th century. Power sets it in its historical and family context, and the book has many hitherto unseen illustrations. It was burnt down in August 1922, just another victim of Liam Lynch’s order to “burn out and clear out”. The book contains a controversial exploration of the aftermath, in which the castle was systematically looted of its contents, many of which resurfaced in local houses. Power rightly laments that which a judge called “an act of wanton destruction”. IAN D’ALTON
The Longest Winter: A Season with England’s Worst Ever Football Team by Mark Hodkinson (Pitch Publishing, £16.99)
Mark Hodkinson affectionately documents Rochdale’s dire 1973/74 season – winning twice in 46 league games – with a team considered the worst to play in the Football League. But this book is as much a love letter to his hometown as to his hometown team. The subject seems niche but the writer stretches the story smartly. We are on the familiar terrain of strikes over pay and crippling inflation, troubled race-relations, irresponsible industrialists, and despicable politicians, like Rochadale’s Liberal MP, paedophile Cyril Smith. Hodkinson adds plenty of cultural colour too, and evokes what a game on a Saturday can mean to a town trudging through life’s grey travails. Through a story of inglorious losers on the pitch, he shows that ordinary, decent people will not be defeated off it. NJ McGARRIGLE
Who Killed Patricia Curran? by Kieran Fagan (Self-Published, £12)
Retired journalist Kieran Fagan would have made a super-sleuth. His previous book on Harry Gleeson exposed the real guilty parties and here he tackles the murder of Patricia Curran in Whiteabbey, Co Antrim, in November 1952. Her father was a unionist Stormont MP, high court judge and former Northern Ireland attorney-general. Iain Gordon, a vulnerable young Scottish airman doing national service at a nearby RAF base, was bullied into confessing to the murder. Fagan sets out the background clearly and succinctly, reports on the trial comprehensively and shows how the quest to prove Gordon’s innocence threw up some unlikely heroes, especially Quaker Dorothy Turtle. Gordon was released in 1960 but, shamefully, it took nearly 50 years before his guilty verdict was quashed. This thoroughly researched account names the real killer. BRIAN MAYE
Hotel Splendide by Ludwig Bemelmans (Pushkin Press, £9.99)
“The tender plant that is morality does not thrive in a grand hotel, and withers altogether in its private rooms.” Thus Bemelmans deftly summarises the thrust of Hotel Splendide, a seemingly light-hearted yet deceptively dark memoir of his time working in a luxury hotel in 1920s New York. A gently flowing, delightfully gossipy read, I could easily picture the entirety shot in black-and-white vignettes, Woody Allen style. Yet, at its close, we’re offered an unexpected hint of that obscured morality through the character of the older, embittered waiter Mespoulets. His hysterical scream of protest illuminates the truth of this closed world of indulgence, in which the rich are spoiled and cosseted, the poor their slaves, and the worst, as always, fill the roles of middle management. LUCY SWEENEY BYRNE
