Circles Around the Sun, Molly McCloskey Penguin Ireland, €11.99Documenting the life of her schizophrenic brother, Mike, Molly McCloskey's memoir is at once a moving, deeply personal journey and an intricate investigation of his illness.
McCloskey’s memories of her brother – 14 years her senior – were of a delusional and heavily medicated man, variously occupying the family recreation room or disappearing into the American landscape, another bearded hippy bruised by the acid culture and scalded by his illness. Employing a series of letters between her grandmother and other family members, McCloskey’s memoir is suffused with the optimism of the postwar American dream. It is also awash with the brittle reality of both her own and her brother’s struggle for equilibrium in their very different lives. In this fragile, taut and brutal account, McCloskey never sets her brother and his condition apart; refusing to wallow in the comfort of “us” and “them,” her examination of the delicacy of sanity encompasses us all.
Hilary Fannin
Aleph
Paulo Coelho
HarperCollins, £7.99
Paulo Coelho is a literary superstar, a mystic traveller, and he is vigorously spearheading a campaign to make publications available gratis on the internet. This is not a man you would immediately think of as having a crisis of faith. However, that was the reason behind his journey, in 2006, along the Trans-Siberian railway, from which his new novel springs. In the search for his “kingdom”, Coelho encounters a young Turkish woman, a talented violinist, who becomes central to his spiritual and physical journey, despite being one of the most annoying characters you could share any train journey with. The Aleph of the title is a physical space, a point in the universe that contains past and present, accessible to anyone inclined to find it. Coelho happens upon an Aleph on the Russian train, and is led via this spot to the answers he set out to find. Perhaps there is something, after all, in the axiom that life is a journey, not a destination.
Claire Looby
Among the Fans
Patrick Collins
Wisden Sports Writing, £8.99
The respected sports writer Patrick Collins deserts his eyrie in the press box and mingles with us, the passionate, eccentric, irrational fans. Collins identifies with the ordinary fan, not the corporate fly-by-night. He appreciates those who come to see, not those who come to be seen. His observant journalism captures the bonhomie and good nature of horsey folk at a point-to-point meeting in Sussex and the cheerful, lifelong commitment of dog-racing enthusiasts at Crayford. It’s a pity that he didn’t focus entirely on minority sports or on hopeless causes. His accounts of the drunken but inoffensive fans at the World Cup and Twickenham are entertaining but unsurprising. I enjoyed his lyrical account of the sun-baked Ashes test in Adelaide, but his enthusiasm for the soggy Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor was hard to fathom. Let’s leave the last word to a lady in a bobble hat on a bitterly cold night at the speedway at Eastbourne: “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else on a Thursday night.”
Tom Moriarty
Venetian Navigators
Andrea Di Robilant
Faber and Faber, £9.99
A 16th-century book about the Venetian navigators Nicolò and Antonio Zen’s travels in the north Atlantic and possibly to the coast of North America, more than a century before Columbus got there, sold well for three centuries until, in 1835, a Danish admiral declared it “a tissue of lies”. Andrea Di Robilant knows the writer of the book to have been a respected statesman in Renaissance Venice and cannot believe he would have risked his reputation “for the sake of an elaborate prank”, so he sets out to rescue the Zen brothers’ reputations in this somewhat curious mixture of history and travelogue. The Zens’ map, if genuine, is the earliest representation of the Orkneys, Faroes, Shetland, Iceland, Greenland and the east coast of Canada. Contemporaries believed the map authentic, and one of her advisers used it to convince Elizabeth I to sponsor voyages of exploration. Di Robilant encounters much scepticism as he retraces the Zens’ route, but, thanks to the absorbing and vivid case he makes, we’re inclined to believe in the veracity of the 14th-century Venetian explorers.
Brian Maye
Salvage the Bones
Jesmyn Ward
Bloomsbury, £7.99
This is Jesmyn Ward’s exceptional second novel, a National Book Award winner. Situated in the fictional coastal town of Bois Sauvage, in Mississippi, it recounts the prelude to Hurricane Katrina. The focus of the novel is not on the impending natural disaster; rather, it is on the rite of passage of the pregnant 15-year-old protagonist, Esch. The novel begins with the graphic birthing of a litter of pit bulls: this establishes the solemn tenor of Ward’s story but also shows her aptitude for astonishingly detailed description. Her poetic writing style conjures up the essence of the South. In this fable of human survival, Ward’s characters ripen with spellbinding intensity until their individual worlds collide as Hurricane Katrina strikes.
Lorna O'Neill
