Paul Auster: a magician who assembled mosaics of meaning and memory
Author and academic Kevin Power assesses the career of the New Yorker, whose fiction was a game of hide and seek
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett: Superbly observed world framed by crime-caper plot
Novel set in Ballina unfolds around characters who are abandoned, bereaved and trapped by circumstance
Kevin Power on Werner Herzog: A memoir of extremes that goes out of its way to avoid looking in the mirror
Herzog’s life and films dwell in the haunted house of the Third Reich
A Memoir of My Former Self: A Life in Writing by Hilary Mantel
A substantial anthology of Mantel’s non-fiction work, one that would appeal to anyone with an interest in lucid thought
This Plague of Souls by Mike McCormack: creates an utterly distinctive, utterly contemporary mood
Weighing in at a slender 179 pages, McCormack’s quarry is the elusive stuff of consciousness itself
Cahokia Jazz by Francis Spufford: Small-time crooks and big-time bootleggers
There is no clumsy expository dialogue in this gripping, moving story set in an ‘altered America’ of 1922
North Woods by Daniel Mason: A frustrating, involving, virtuoso, sentimental, unconvincing novel
Can you stay glued to a novel if its protagonist is not a human being but a house?
Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction – A critical machete wielded mercilessly
Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel, John Banville and Roddy Doyle might wince at some of the judgments contained within
I live in a child’s world, know all members of Paw Patrol and the words to Let it Go
Kevin Power: I catch myself singing ‘Yes, yes, bedtime’s good for you’. All day. All week
Ruth & Pen by Emilie Pine: a novel full of empathy and goodwill
Author has followed her essays Notes to Self with a contemporary Dublin Mrs Dalloway
Hi. My name is Kevin and I can’t stop buying books
‘You have a problem,’ my wife told me during lockdown. And she’s absolutely right
Young Mungo: Heartfelt book of love in Glasgow marred by cliche
Douglas Stuart’s novel about gay teenager and tenement life in 1990s is let down by language
I will have a lifelong post-Covid allergy: to public parks
Kevin Power: Embracing the banal on canal bank walks kept me sane during lockdown
Freight Dogs: The fate of an ordinary person during Africa’s decade of violence
Book review: Giles Foden is a novelist for whom history is a real presence
Kevin Power: I don’t want my son, as he grows up, to silence his finer feelings
I don’t want him to ‘be a man’. I want him to be something else – but what?