Irish Times critics review the latest batch of paperpacks.
The Autograph Man Zadie Smith Penguin, £7.99
The scary thing about coming up with the Next Big Thing is coming up with the Next Big Thing After That. In writing this, the follow-up to the much-praised White Teeth, Zadie Smith seems to have largely - and wisely - ignored the hype and the result is an intriguing, peculiar meditation on fame, family, roots, religion and finding a modicum of stability in this confusing old postmodern world. The hero, Alex-Li Tandem, is a Chinese-Jewish 20something who trades celebrity autographs for a living and is obsessed with a reclusive Golden Age Hollywood star. The action moves from London to New York and back again as Alex learns what is really important to him. Smith is a sharp observer and an impressive prose stylist and though the characters tend to remain a little wan, never quite coming to life, the promise of another zinger of a sentence keeps you reading. - Cathy Dillon
The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Memoir of Afghanistan By Christina Lamb Harper Collins, £7.99
One might imagine that Christina Lamb, a nice young English philosophy graduate with Kipling on her mind, who was entering Afghanistan as it was in the final throes of a bloody jihad against Russian occupation, could have been out of her depth as a cub reporter. But one would be wrong: Lamb grew into an outstanding correspondent. Intermittently between 1988 and the US-led invasion, she travelled with fighters who would later become the Taliban, took the grisly confessions of a Taliban torturer, got to know some of the main players in the conflict and in the process fell in love with Afghanistan. Lamb's courage, insight and generous spirit shine throughout this memoir. Incidentally, the book's title refers to women who used the cover of a sewing circle to study literature in valiant defiance of the Taliban. - John Moran
The Forger's Shadow: How Forgery Changed the Course of Literature By Nick Groom Picador, £8 .99
Most of us have certain assumptions about what constitutes authenticity in art. In The Forger's Shadow, Nick Groom proceeds to knock those assumptions on the head one by one. He looks at some of the most famous "spooks" that haunt literature, putting the poetry back into literary forgery in the process. Forging to Groom is an "extreme of invention" and his book is packed with detailed literary critiques, gossipy anecdotes and philosophical musings as to the nature of the real. Groom revels in paradox of the type whereby plagiarism "inhabits some of the space vacated by the word original, by being an irredeemably corrupt original". This is a challenging read but the author's wryly comic turn of phrase keeps proceedings lively. He does a fine job, shedding new light on the odd, murky underbelly of literary history and the particular type of showmanship that lies at the heart of it. - Fergal Quinn
The Hidden Life of Otto Frank By Carol Ann Lee Penguin, £8.99
This biography delves deep into the life of the father of one of the most iconic figures of the 20th century, revealing him for the first time in his own right. In this sense alone it is fascinating, packed full of precise details of Otto Frank's life, and the life of his family and friends before, during and throughout what became the enduring legacy of the second World War. At the core of this story is Otto's unremitting battle to educate the world about the Holocaust, his daughter's short life, her dreams, her aspirations and her death. Carol Ann Lee meticulously investigates the still-controversial question of the identity of the betrayer of the secret annex, uncovering new information which has led to one person being strongly implicated. This, and the appearance of an until recently hidden associate of Otto Frank's, intertwine, making this an illuminating, moving book. - Sophie MacNeice
The Irish Women's Movement: From Revolution to Devoloution By Linda Connolly Lilliput Press, 17.50
This book is scholarly, quiet and comprehensive. Its focus is sociological which means we get no nostalgia for a time when wild and not-so-wild women took to the trains, the streets and the Dáil in a 10-year series of photocalls - or so one version goes! Neither do we get a philosophy nor a gender ethic. Linda Connolly treats the movement as a sociological phenomenon which spawned a number of different organisations, including Women's Aid, AIM, The Rape Crisis Centre, to name but three. As you might expect from a book destined for the academy, it is rich with telling examples of recent research, and must be essential reading for any student of sociology. Still, it is accessible to anybody interested in Irish feminism and its possible further development. - Kate Bateman
The Poet and the Murderer By Simon Worrall Fourth Estate, £7 .99
Mark Hofmann is a poet, a ventriloquist and a conjuror of ink and paper, or, to put it bluntly, a forger, albeit one of undoubted genius. He is also a murderer and is today serving life in an American prison. Reared in the Mormon religion, he came to despise it for its (perceived) hypocrisy and set out to undermine its tenets. A brilliant researcher, he painstakingly produced a string of meticulously executed forgeries, which he would claim to have "found", including The Salamander Letter. These he sold to the church for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Hofmann's gift lay in his ability to deconstruct Mormon scripture and create fictional texts that fitted seamlessly into the historical record. He also "happened to find" poems by Emily Dickinson. To lend credibility to his "finds", he occasionally created a new forgery to authenticate the old one. Writing in a slightly cynical, though entertaining style, Worrall weaves a web of intrigue around this man. - Owen Dawson