A roundup of this week's paperback releases

A Gate at the Stairs

Lorrie Moore

Faber, £7.99

Anyone familiar with Lorrie Moore's short stories will likely have awaited her third novel with baited breath. Moore is remarkable for the brilliance of her wordplay, her agility with language, her forceful engagement with contemporary culture and her terrifying ability to apply seemingly light prose to explorations of macabre and tragic truths. This novel is a testament to Moore's capacity not only as a storyteller but as a writer willing to engage with the world as it is today. Tassie Keltjin is the modern heroine – the daughter of a potato farmer awakening to notions of race and class as she embarks on her college education in a Mid-Western town. When she takes a part-time job baby-sitting for a couple's biracial adopted toddler, she learns more about life in post 9-11 America than her "Introduction to Sufism" class could ever teach her. Always tender, never sentimental, often heartbreakingly funny, A Gate at the Stairsconfirms Moore as one of the preeminent American writers working today. Emily Firetog

D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

Antony Beevor

Penguin, £16.99

This is a masterful, balanced, warts-and-all account of the D-Day landings and the campaign that followed. The tension and uncertainty that preceded the Allied invasion are created with the novelist's feel for drama, narrative and atmosphere as well as the historian's research and accuracy. It was a remarkable military achievement to land 70,000 soldiers so quickly under such intense German resistance – the Allied bombers had failed to destroy most of the German shore defences. The horrors of war, and the casual savagery it evokes in men, are vividly conveyed from the ordinary soldiers' perspectives. Not forgotten is the huge loss of civilian life – up to 50,000 by the end of the campaign, more than the total toll of combatants. Beevor doesn't spare the commanders but Eisenhower comes out well for his diplomatic skills. In the end, one is left to lament "the pity of war". Brian Maye

When Skateboards Will be Free

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Penguin, £8.99

Some memoirs are stranger than others and playwright Saïd Sayrafiezadeh's tale of his upbringing, in 1970s America, in a family that wholeheartedly renounced the capitalist way of life in favour of the doctrines of the Socialist Workers Party, must certainly rank among the more unusual. With melancholic, deadpan delivery, Sayrafiezadeh recounts the loneliness and confusion of growing up in anticipation of a revolution that was never to arrive. The shadow of his father (permanently absent on an almost comically ineffectual socialist crusade) looms large over Saïd's world as his mother struggles to maintain their self-imposed exile from the unavoidable realities of modern American living. As much a sweet story of skewed perspective as a lament for stolen innocence, the endearing heart of When Skateboards Will be Freeshines through in the gentle clarity of Saïd's narrative voice. His quiet determination to carve out a life of happiness for his adult self, serves as a charming antidote to the hardship of his formative years. Dan Sheehan

Showtime: The Inside Story of Fianna Fáil in Power

Pat Leahy

Penguin £8.99

In 1997, Fianna Fáil faced the daunting task of ousting the incumbent Rainbow coalition in what they knew would be a crucial general election. Failure probably would have meant their consignment to the Opposition benches for a decade and the end of the party's dominance of Irish politics. Instead, thanks in no small part to a slick electoral machine presided over by PJ Mara and the expertise of highly expensive, and then anonymous, US pollsters, the party won the election and presided over an era of unprecedented growth. In this highly readable account of this recent period in Irish politics, Leahy shows how Bertie Ahern took charge of building consensus for Government policy, effectively giving a free hand to Charlie McCreevy and his close ally Mary Harney to run the economy and implement their tax-cutting agenda. Unfortunately, as the author points out, and we have found to our cost, winning power, not using it, was what Ahern's Fianna Fáil were really good at. Tim Fanning

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Alain de Botton

Penguin, 329pp. £10.99

This book purports to be a philosophical treatment of the subject of work and its significance to humanity. It is a vague subject and one to which the author does not succeed in bringing any clarity or insight. The book takes the form of a woolly collection of photo-essays, which detail certain field trips taken by the author to observe other people's jobs. We learn of a Japanese television station's satellite being launched into orbit, meet an artist who paints the same oak tree repeatedly, and have the latent wonders of biscuit manufacture revealed to us. De Botton can't seem to keep himself out of the frame, and he comes across as smug and misanthropic in his attempts to open the eyes of the common man to the mysteries of the mundane. His writing is vapid and full of forced adolescent lyricism and meaningless imagery, and the bland photographs that litter the book evoke nothing but dourness and sterility. Colm Farren