Irish Timesreviwers on the latest works in soft cover.
Walk the Blue Fields
Claire Keegan
Faber, £7.99
A wedding gathering waits and "a thrill of doubt" begins to spread through the pews. The priest looks on in misery, the bride had been his great passion. Elsewhere, a distracted woman comes to live in her dead cousin's house; he had been a priest, and fathered her baby (who had later died). A young girl prepares to leave home for America, and bids farewell to the father who had regularly, with the compliance of her mother, sexually abused her. Some of the themes are familiar, as is the local gossip. Keegan, with her stately, rhythmic, always physical prose, adds the timing of her masters, McGahern and Trevor to her imaginative realist's art. She has a wickedly crafted assurance, subversive wit, an awareness of enduring customs and superstition, and a sense of place. Surrenderpays homage to McGahern, while in The Long and Painful Death, a writer, interrupted during a carefully planned writing stay at the Böll House on Achill, responds with gleeful revenge.
Eileen Battersby
Francis Crick, Discoverer of the Genetic Code
Matt Ridley
Atlas Books, £7.99
A challenging read, this, unless one is fortunate enough to have a good understanding of science. The going can get a bit tough when one is challenged by the occasional incomprehensible sentence ("nuclein was renamed desoxyribose nueleic and later deoxyribonucleic, or DNA"), It is worth persevering. In his early days Crick was a garrulous man with an irritating presence, given, as a colleague put it, to "doing other people's crosswords". He improved with age - becoming "ebullient, loquacious, charming, sceptical, tenacious". Seemingly, he needed to. He was also utterly devoted to his scientific research and finally achieved his goal - and the world's gratitude - when he discovered the genetic code. Initially a very mediocre researcher, he trained himself to solve nature's puzzles using logic. He declined a knighthood but accepted the Nobel Prize in 1962. The author rates Crick's achievements with those of Galileo, Darwin, and Einstein. Far-fetched? Perhaps not. This book includes a surprisingly large amount of science, yet holds our attention, thanks to its gentle wit and good pace.
Owen Dawson
Engleby
Sebastian Faulks
Vintage, £7.99
From the start, the reader is drawn in by the voice of Michael Engleby, a working-class student on a scholarship to Cambridge. He has an arresting take on life: merciless, acidic, hilarious. However, it soon becomes clear that this novel is more than just the social commentary of brilliant, disaffected youth. Engleby's narrative flicks back and forth through his childhood, student days, and career, all the while anchored in a single, life-changing event: the disappearance of Jennifer Arkland, one of his university peers. Unease grows as Faulks moves into darker regions of the human psyche, but so compelling is the antihero and so crisp the prose, the reader simply follows. As the story becomes more sinister, we lose much of the humour that characterises the first half; the depth and sharpness of the writing, though, never wane. This is an ambitious novel, carried off with great conviction.
Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Zugzwang
Ronan Bennett
Bloomsbury, £7.99
The term "zugzwang" will be familiar to chess players: an endgame in which you must move, but with every move your situation gets worse. It's a good metaphor for the situation in which thriller narrators tend to find themselves, and the narrator of this one has more problems than most. A Jewish psychotherapist working in St Petersburg in 1914, Otto Spethmann doesn't want to get involved in politics - but when his daughter is implicated in the killing of a liberal newspaper editor, the real-life game is on. Bennett assembles an intriguing cast of characters - enigmatic detective, Tony Soprano-like thug, eccentric chess genius, Bolshevik idealist - and the scene is set for an explosive tale. Sadly, Zugzwangis more of a damp squib. Its cartoon-gothic atmosphere and short chapters don't sit easily with the kind of moral ambivalence the book sets out to explore, and as a guide Spethmann is tooth-grindingly irritating, saddled not only with acute moral paralysis, but a seedy sexual obsession with the awful Anna. Very disappointing.
Arminta Wallace
Two Caravans
Marina Lewycka
Penguin, £7.99
In a field in Kent stand two caravans. Over the strawberry season, they will be the homes of a disparate group of immigrants from all over the world: men and women of all ages from Ukraine, Poland, Malawi, China - to say nothing of the ever-present dog, who also lives on the farm. Among the new arrivals to Britain is young Ukrainian Irina, who arrives in "the land of my dreams" only to have her passport taken from her by Russian would-be gangster Vulk, who has more than farm work on his mind. And when he abducts Irina, her fellow strawberry picker Andriy heads off to get her back. Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Marina Lewycka's follow-up to her best-selling debut A Short History of Tractorsin Ukrainian offers a funny, touching and insightful glimpse into the lives of recent immigrants in Britain.
Anna Carey