A round-up of the latest paperback releases
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, Sceptre, £6.99
No one could accuse David Mitchell of shortchanging his reader. In this funny, absorbing, entertaining and award-winning novel there are six stories with very different narrative voices, each written in a distinctive literary genre. The reader breaks off from a yarn about a 19th-century sea voyage and plunges straight into a tale of a mid-20th-century musical rivalry told through the letters of a despicable-sounding character called Frobisher to his old college friend. That friend turns up later as an ageing scientist with secrets to tell about a nuclear power plant in California. Not all the narratives - novellas, really - interlink but when they do, it makes the novel even more engaging. If at times Cloud Atlas seems a bit too clever, it's still difficult to put down because of its humour, narrative flourishes and the unusual experience of discovering six books in one.
Bernice Harrison
Going Buddhist: Panic and Emptiness, the Buddha and Me by Peter J. Conradi, Short Books, £7.99
Twenty years ago, at a time when he was suffering terrifying panic attacks, Peter Conradi began practising Tibetan Buddhism, prompted by being unable to answer his friend and mentor Iris Murdoch's question: "Are you religious?" His "self-help book for cynics" outlines the basic tenets of the faith, covering retreats, meditation, Buddhism's introduction to the West, teachings such as the Four Noble Truths and "positive emptiness". It is substantive and detailed yet approaches the subject in a light-hearted and lucid manner (of reincarnation, he says: "being born once seems to me a sufficient delight"). Occasionally long-winded and verging on the pretentious, this is, nevertheless, a stimulating, comprehensive book, suiting both those well-versed in Buddhism and those looking for an introduction to the dharma.
Eoghan Morrissey
Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century by Tzvetan Todorov, translated by David Bellos, Atlantic Books, £12.99
In an easy-to-read investigation that mixes philosophy and history, Todorov examines 20th-century European totalitarianism amid the failure of democracy and the rise and fall of the inhumanity of its two main protagonists: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Between the chapters dissecting the birth, doctrine and kernel of ideologies that suppressed "the grammar of humanism", the memories and introspections of prominent concentration-camp survivors (some of both regimes) are discussed, including Vasily Grossman, Margarete Buber-Neumann, Primo Levi and Germaine Tillion. In essence, this is an advocacy of the view that the philosophy of history is written neither by perpetrator nor victim but from the dispassion of distance and time and expressed a-la-Ricoeur, between the hegemony of memory and constraints of oblivion.
Paul O'Doherty
The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall, Faber and Faber, £7.99
A straightforward coming-of-age piece in its construction, The Electric Michelangelo has received endless praise from critics and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004. Though tedious in its exposition of Cy Parks's unlikely development into a Coney Island tattoo artist from his early years alone with his self-sufficient mother in a British seaside resort, the real enjoyment of the novel is found in Hall's talent for description. She captures the seedy, tatty world of the seaside resort, complete with its cast of sailors lost at sea, suffragettes, consumptives, carneys, backstreet abortionists and blowsy barmaids in a style both unromantic and non-judgmental. When Hall makes pointed reference to the two world wars and the women's movement, it is to little end, for this is an atmospheric piece that does its job admirably and should be appreciated as such.
Nora Mahony
The Alhambra by Robert Irwin, Profile, £8.99
Postcards from sunstruck Costa del Sol tourists proclaim: "Hotel grand, food awful, weather hot, beer cheap, Granada tomorrow." Why do they bother? Spain's most famous architectural landmark, best visited out of season, is a stunning reminder of the bygone Caliphate's geographic reach. The sumptuous palace, built by Muslim invaders, fell into gradual decline after the Catholic Reconquista. It was "rediscovered" by 19th-century travellers and arabesque entered the popular imagination through design, literature and, eventually, Hollywood. Incidentally, Ireland's first music hall, which opened in Belfast in 1872, was called the Alhambra. If your day trip from Marbella has prompted a desire to know more, Irwin's worthy book will answer most questions. But it is marred by mediocre black-and-white photographs which may cause readers to wonder "why all the fuss?".
Michael Parsons
The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens, Penguin, £6.99
Sharon Owens's characters are believable, likeable and in need of help. She sets her story in Belfast and from the outset there is a warm, cosy familiarity about each of the individuals who form the network of people who stop at the tea house on Mulberry Street for a coffee or a sandwich - from the high-powered editor to the estate agent to the Crawley sisters , who uncover a family secret which changes their world-view completely. The stories race along as each person we encounter deals with problems of betrayal, greed, snobbery, boredom or lust, but by the end all the crises have been resolved. This is a kind of fairy-tale for grown-ups. Although there are no wands or fairies, wishes do come true, problems are sorted and the owners of the coffee shop and the majority of their customers get to live happily ever after.
Catherine Foley