A selection of paperbacks reviewed
The Emigrant's Farewell Bloomsbury, by Liam Browne £7.99
Grief is a difficult subject. It tends to produce dreadful books - schmaltz of the stickiest kind. Which is perhaps not surprising, for how do you write about the accidental death of a child - and the devastation it wreaks on a young married couple - without resorting to sentimentality? Well, Liam Browne makes a fine job of it in this tender debut novel set in contemporary Derry. His protagonists cope, to begin with, by fleeing; the child's mother back to her own parental home, where she curls into a foetal ball and refuses to come out. The father, the narrator, flees to an obscure corner of Derry's shipbuilding past, where he recreates John Franklin's lost Arctic expedition in a vivid new way. Browne delves deep into Derry's history to tell a story which is steeped in the past yet firmly rooted in a post-peace-process present. And it's a page-turner, too. Arminta Wallace
How To Read Joyce by Derek Attridge Granta, £6.99
This remarkable book manages in the space of 105 pages to provide more assistance in "how to read" Joyce's work than many a larger and more portentous volume. In keeping with the series of which it is part, it offers readings of various passages as exemplary or illustrative of the author's larger purposes. The passages are selected from the four major works - Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulyssesand Finnegans Wake- so the full range of Joyce's oeuvre is represented. The author, professor of English at York University and a distinguished Joyce scholar, combines an enviable clarity of exposition with an ability to keep track of nuances and discriminations - which are perhaps the most crucial element in learning "how to read" Joyce. There is a sense of someone distilling a great deal of knowledge into a compact, accessible form. Highly recommended. Terence Killeen
The Observations by Jane Harris Faber and Faber, £7.99
A young Irish maid is the cheeky, mischievous narrator of this novel. She has just begun a new job at a grand country house in Scotland. Never short of sharp, quick-witted remarks, Bessy is nonetheless eager to please her new "missus", the beautiful Arabella. Her working life becomes a little unconventional, however, as Arabella begins to demand strange tasks of her new maid. And as Bessy slowly uncovers the dark secrets that lurk in the large Castle Haivers estate, her own past begins to catch up on her. Becoming inextricably linked to the endangered circumstances of her mistress, Bessy grows more devoted to Arabella - the antithesis of her own drunken, debauched mother. Harris explores a complex, at times uncomfortable relationship between mistress and servant - intercut with the curious and often hilarious diary entries of the barely literate Bessy - in a tragic, meandering tale of unequals. Sorcha Hamilton
Beating Them at Their Own Game by Patrick West Liberties Press, €14.99
Subtitled "How the Irish Conquered English Soccer", this is an examination of how Irish players have had - as the author sees it - a disproportionate influence on the game across the Irish Sea, from the post-war era to the present. The book consists of a series of profiles of Irish players divided into such subsections as United Irishmen (Irish players at Manchester United) and The Gunners and the Reds. It's a quick read, and full of amusing anecdotes. Large sections, particularly on players from the 1990s onwards, will already be familiar to Irish fans. For this reason, profiles of the older generation of players - such as Con Martin, Tommy Eglinton and Danny Blanchflower - are more interesting. The biggest problem is the proliferation of typos, which, along with some factual errors, undermine the reader's confidence in the book generally. Ciaran Murray
Men That God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland by Derek Lundy Vintage, £8.99
"I never thought I'd be shaking the hand of someone called "Lundy" in Derry," John Hume joked to the author upon being introduced. The Lundy to whom he was referring was, of course, the infamous Robert, the military governor who tried to offer the city to the besieging forces of King James II in 1689, and, more importantly, the arch-traitor of Loyalist memory. Robert may or may not have been an ancestor of the author, but the Presbyterian preacher and United Irishman William Steel Dickson was a forebear on his mother's side, while Derek's grandfather, Billy Lundy, was a riveter in the Belfast shipyards. The author, who left Belfast as an infant for England, then Canada, uses these three figures from the past to explore the power of myth and memory in Northern Ireland in this interesting study. Tim Fanning
A Night At The Majestic: Proust and the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 by Richard Davenport-Hines Faber & Faber, £8.99
If somebody offered me a biography of Marcel Proust, I'd smile in a politely panicky sort of way and put it at the bottom of the "must read - some day" pile. Richard Davenport-Hines, author of a much-praised biography of WH Auden and award-winning social histories of gothic literature and drugs, is a smart guy. He knows this. So he begins by saying, "C'm here - did you ever hear about the night the millionaire Jewish financier gave a dinner party at a posh hotel in Paris and invited Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso and Proust?" And before you know it, you're hooked. Eventually, of course, the story of the dinner- party does turn into a biography of Proust; but by the time you realise that, you won't be able to put it down. A treat, even for those of us who have never read Proust, and probably never will. Arminta Wallace