All God’s Creatures by Anthony Gardner (Lightning, £14.99)
Anthony Gardner’s third novel has a fairly complex plot but careers along nicely with the author’s light touch, as his protagonist Ben Fairweather finds his cosy existence as editor of a religious magazine turned upside down by the death of his dog. Ben is soon fighting fundamentalists who have stormed his publication The Cathedral, and is thrust into a world of Russian espionage and oligarchy in England. Along the way he also encounters AI robots, the perils of the social media mob, forgery and murder. It can feel a rather far-fetched romp, but it rattles along nicely with a Wodehousian striving, and Gardner conjures playful synonyms along the way (“Her voice was like a tray of ice cubes being poured into a deep carafe”). NJ McGarrigle
Palestine Minus One: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba, edited by Basma Ghalayini (Comma Press, £11.99)
Some things should never be written, some things need to be written; like the story in memory of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli tanks, in this remarkable collection of Palestinian writing. How can fiction function in the glare of such brutal reality? The writers use speculative devices, such as dreams, dual identities, ghosts and visions, etc, in looking at the original Nakba of 1948 and the new one we have been witnessing with its renewed overwhelming trauma. Like many anthologies, some stories are stronger than others, but this is a thought-provoking work that would make a useful companion to Pluto Press’s Voices of the Nakba - A Living History of Palestine. “My people live their death,” observes one writer. This book helps us understand that standpoint. NJ McGarrigle
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The (Wonderful) Life of Connie Maguire by Domhnall O’Donoghue (Mercier Press, €16.99)
The Wonderful Life of Connie Maguire begins with a tragic incident on the night of the protagonist’s 40th birthday. An event that should have marked new beginnings for a woman whose life to this point, would not readily be described as “wonderful”. Addiction, abandonment, low self-esteem – challenges she pushes through for the sake of her son, Liam, a promising Irish rugby star. Told in dual timeline, the novel shifts between the night that saw lives end, and others rendered unrecognisable, to the present where Connie must reckon with its consequences. More character than plot driven, Connie steals the show in O’Donoghue’s pacy study of the sprawling legacy of intergenerational trauma. Brigid O’Dea
