If any review could compel you out to go out and buy a book, it has to be Joseph O'Connor's appreciation of debut novelist Sara Baume's Spill Simmer Falter Wither. The praise is not unconditional but the message is unmistakeable. This is just a flavour: "It's hard to imagine a more exciting debut novel being published this year. Baume proves that the real can still be the province of literature, the only art form to which we can turn, heart in our hands, for an uplifting, consoling and dizzying reminder that language is the most sacred thing we've made."

Other fiction reviews include Eileen Battersby on Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman and Sarah Gilmartin on Over Our Heads, a short story collection by Andrew Fox. Robert Dunbar’s children’s books column turns his attention to classic titles, long-established and more recent, which have returned to publishers’ lists, and Doireann Ní Bhriain celebrates the joys of slow reading. There’s also a new poem by Greg Delanty.

The non-fiction highlight is probably a review by Tim Jarvis, the scientist and explorer who recently re-enacted Ernest Shackleton’s epic polar expedition, of Shackleton: By Endurance We Conquer by Michael Smith. Also on the biography front, John Fleming praises Nick Drake: Remembered For A While by Cally Collomon and Gabrielle Drake while Susan McKay assessess A Delicate Wildness: The Life and Loves of David Thomson by Julian Vignoles.

Readers and commissioning editors could be forgiven for suffering from trench foot by this stage, given the onslaught of first World War tomes. It was clearly never going to be over by Christmas. Still, Myles Dungan salutes Stephen Sandford’s study of the Irish at Gallipoli, Neither Unionist nor Nationalist: the 10th (Irish) Division in the Great War.

Elesewhere, Cambridge historian Eugenio Biagini reviews David Fitzpatrick’s Descendancy: Irish Protestant Histories Since 1795 and Padraig Reidy tackles Joel Simon’s The New Censorship: Inside the Global Battle for Media Freedom.