Nymph, by Stephanie LaCava (Verso, €11.99)
Fans of LaCava’s last novel, I Fear My Pain Interests You, will find much similar terrain to enjoy her newest offering. A strangely incantatory thriller which continues LaCava’s interest in gruelling body horror and tricky interpersonal relationships, Nymph deals with violence, absence and the ways the ghosts of our childhoods get entangled into our present.
The novel follows Bathory, an assassin who has been raised in a family of the same, as she navigates her way through being sensitive, young and female in a world shaped by violence. It’s also an unusual, refreshingly uncliched love story. Like all LaCava’s novels, Nymph sometimes bears more in common with cinema than literature. It’s an enjoyably weird book full of harrowing images that will linger. Maija Makela
Artists and Pirates: Satirical Prints in Georgian London and Dublin, edited by Silvia Beltrametti and William Laffan (Churchill House Press, €30)
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The period from the 1780s to c.1820 was a golden age of visual satire in London. The cartoons of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank are still much admired today. There was a parallel trade in single-sheet cartoons in Dublin at this time, though the images were often pirated from London.
Dublin printers exploited a gap in copyright law. This book focuses mainly on the cartoons produced in Dublin and is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Irish Architectural Archive. It has 76 colour plates, plus four masterly essays. One of the essays examines the depiction of the Irish in the London cartoons of the period. Felix M Larkin
Books: A Manifesto or How to Build a Library, by Ian Patterson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)
Poet, academic and former second-hand bookshop owner Ian Patterson is a lifelong lover of books, and not just for the stories and ideas they hold; for their feel, their smell, the memories they evoke. Not a convert to the e-reader, Patterson extolls the virtues of collecting, organising and displaying physical books, so you can pick them up whenever you want and delve into the wonders within.
While providing an excellent set of excuses for bibliophiles everywhere to convince their families that their book-buying is not just understandable but ethically sound, Patterson also argues that our e-driven society has become morally and culturally impoverished. In a series of fascinating essays, Patterson explains his love of detective fiction, muses on the meaning of culture, gives a masterclass on how to appreciate poetry and draws a line from Evelyn Waugh to Brexit via Philip Larkin. The perfect present for the bookworm in your life. John Walshe
