The Magical Realm - An Irish Childhood, by Kathleen Coyle (Wolfhound, £8.99)

"The Irish memoir" is rapidly developing into an extremely cool genre - and some day, no doubt, academics will dissect it and analyse it and discuss its salient features in scholarly journals and summer schools. Kathleen Coyle, like many - what? "memoir istes"? autobiographers? - possessed an alcoholic father whose drinking set the pace the rest of the family was obliged to follow; unlike most, though, her childhood in a Big House in turn-of-the-century Derry was marked by the presence of an influential mother figure who, though she took to her bed at the slightest opportunity, still contrived to run things with a reasonable degree of competence. While she can bring a lump to the throat with the best of them, at its best Coyle's prose is distinguished by a detached watchfulness and a wry sense of perspective: "The family I happened to join was in a Cherry Orchard condition. It was losing. It was walking upon water . . . Its indications were tidal - and the tide was going out."