The latest paperbacks reviewed
Havoc in its Third Year by Ronan Bennett Review, £7.99
John Brigge is a farmer and part-time coroner who wants only to live quietly with his wife and newborn baby. But in his northern English town in the 1640s, quiet is not an option. The town is seething with suspicion and moral outrage; barbarians, its puritanical governors insist, lurk at the gates while inside the walls disorder and licentiousness threaten to drown decent folk in a sea of sin. Sound familiar? It should, for Bennett's beautiful fourth novel is a powerful parable for our own fearful times, combining the momentum of a murder mystery with the immediacy of a historical drama. In fact, it's one of the most perfect books you're ever likely to read.
Arminta Wallace
The Little Book of Philosophy by André Comte-Sponville Vintage, £7.99
Comte-Sponville, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne and author of A Short Treatise on the Great Virtues, again attempts to make the big issues accessible in The Little Book of Philosophy. Broken into 12 chapters devoted to concepts such as "Death", "Art", "God" and "Time", the book tries to illustrate the day-to-day applicability of philosophical reasoning. So far, so Alain de Botton. Unfortunately, the concision implied by the title isn't in much evidence. - The chapters are not long, but Comte-Sponville's arguments meander and are frequently repetitious, with lines such as,"To exist is to resist; to think is to create; to live is to act." While certain chapters are provocative, particularly the essays on God and atheism, this book lacks the clarity and focus that would make it a truly illuminating guide to the "big questions" of our lives.
Davin O'Dwyer
Brunelleschi's Dome by Ross King Pimlico, £7.99
The truly fascinating thing about Brunelleschi's Dome is just how the magnificent dome of Florence Cathedral was ever completed given the nature of the times in which it was built: plagues, wars, feuds etc. On top of all this, the man at the centre of the book, Filippo Brunelleschi, could hardly be described as reliable. He was deeply paranoid, obsessively competitive, useless with money and prone to acts of skulduggery (he stitched up his main rival, the equally brilliant Ghiberti). He first trained as a goldsmith before turning his hand to poetry, painting, engineering, sculpture and architecture. After spending 15 mysterious years away from Florence, when he wandered around the ruins of Rome with Donatello and may even have made it as far as Persia in pursuit of architectural secrets, he came back to design, engineer and build the biggest, grandest dome the world has ever seen. They just don't make them like they used to.
Ken Walshe
The Arrival of Fergal Flynn by Brian Kennedy Hodder Headline Ireland
Fergal Flynn's life is one of under-loving domestic hardship and tough schooling in 1970s West Belfast, among house raids and hunger strikes. Fergal finds his only sanctuary by going to live with his ailing grandmother. Blessed with an extraordinary singing voice, Fergal is shown a way out of his depressing world by Fr MacManus, with whom he has more in common than he realises. Written with a close understanding of the difficulties of growing up in a society that has little or no tolerance of homosexuality, this story sets wicked parents and siblings alongside characters so good that they appear saint-like. Something of a fable, Kennedy's story reflects the black-and-white of juvenile fiction inhabited by mostly unambiguous characters who are seen in terms of being on Fergal's side or against him.
Claire Looby
Nell by Nell McCafferty Penguin, £7.99
We've become so accustomed to the new Ireland that we've all but forgotten what the old one was like. Well, here's Nell McCafferty to bring it all back - and, boy, does she bring it on. Much of the narrative is devoted to battles of one kind or another, from civil rights struggles on the streets of Derry in the Sixties through the fight to legalise contraception on this side of the Border in the Seventies to a gay love affair whose bitter denouement is recounted with extraordinary frankness. The book's great strength, however, is the strong women whose portraits populate its pages, from McCafferty's mother Lily through Bernadette Devlin to Mary Robinson, Mary Holland and a host of others whose names deserve to be written into the pages of Irish social history. McCafferty is both a wry observer of human nature and an activist who invariably plunges in up to her elbows, which makes her perspective unique - and this book a sizzler.
Arminta Wallace
A Death In Brazil by Peter Robb Bloomsbury, £8.99
Images of Brazil are superficially familiar - Copacabana beach, the towering statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio's carnival, rainforests, missionaries, "futuristic" Brasilia, plastic surgery and soccer wizardry - but this vast former Portuguese colony is a profoundly exotic country. Its prototypical multiracial society is riven by grotesque inequality with a dizzily rich elite and impoverished teeming favelas. Robb, an Australian writer in search of a genre, best known for an indigestible "factional" life of Caravaggio, attempts a national portrait. Touted as "unorthodox" travel writing, the resulting medley of personal encounters, history, politics and culture fails to gel and the book lacks coherence and perspective. An eclectic canvas ranges from the rampant concupiscence investigated by an aghast visiting Inquisition to the atrocities on Amazonian rubber plantations uncovered by British consul Roger Casement whose affection for the "natives" would later cost him dearly.
Michael Parson