Winterland, Alan Glynn, Faber, £7.99
A young thug called Noel Rafferty is shot at point-blank range. Later the same night his uncle – also called Noel, but a successful and oh-so-respectable engineer – is killed in a car crash. Where others see coincidence, young Gina Rafferty sees conspiracy – and sets off to investigate. She runs straight into a brick wall of bad guys: a property developer so bent he doesn’t know which way is up; a Minister for Enterprise whose own political career is his most enterprising creation; and an ex-IRA man turned security consultant who, by comparison with the other two, looks almost benign. Gina has so many narrow escapes she could be our own Colleen with the Dragon Tattoo, but the real heroine of Winterland is 21st-century Dublin, her glittering skyline presiding over a city haunted by moral as well as financial bankruptcy. Glynn has a terrific ear for dialogue; his chapters are short, his pace fast; the result is an intelligent thriller which entertains from beginning to end.
Arminta Wallace
Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice
Ruth Dudley Edwards
Vintage, £8.99
If you have tears, prepare to shed them over this book. The first chapter briefly describes 13 of the victims, ranging in age from one to 60. Anyone would weep at such tragic loss – how then must their loved ones grieve. Adding to that grief has been the long frustrating fight for justice which may now have been finally exhausted. But the eight-year campaign to take a civil case came to fruition in June 2009 and Dudley Edwards was an intrinsic part of it. She writes movingly and passionately and her mastery of the small human detail is one of her great strengths. After the judgement, one who knew Michael Gallagher, a leading campaigner whose 21-year-old son Aiden was one of the victims, said it was the first time she had seen him truly smile. "For once that terrible pain that you always saw in Michael's face was – temporarily at least – gone." Brian Maye
Black Rock
Amanda Smyth
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99
Celia is the inquisitive, sometimes reckless character at the centre of this first novel by Irish-Trinidadian author Amanda Smyth. Set in the Carribean of the 1950s, with its lush tropical landscape of frangipani trees and hibiscus flowers, the story follows Celia's attempts to uncover details about her family, in particular her dead mother and her missing father, an Englishman living in Southampton. Constantly hounding her aunt, Tassi, with questions, Celia grows increasingly restless in her small-town existence. And when Aunt Tassi remarries, to Roman, "a man so sly he could crawl under a snake's belly on stilts", Celia runs away to Trinidad looking for a new life. Questions about her background begin to resurface as Celia struggles to find her way alone, working for a doctor and his English wife. This is a coming-of-age story written in a lyrical, atmospheric prose with an arresting simplicity that will grip you from page one. Sorcha Hamilton
Wars, Guns and Votes; Democracy in Dangerous Places
Paul Collier
Vintage, £9.99
Paul Collier, Oxford professor of economics, here focuses a concerned and practical eye on the deadlocks that maintain a hellish scenario for the countries that are home to the "bottom billion", the world's poorest people. Asserting that "rising prosperity must be harnessed to secure the prize of global peace", Collier attempts to dismantle the impasses that maintain cycles of violence, corruption and political unaccountability, and that keep the world's most impoverished states from becoming safe and legitimate democracies. His tool is acute and fastidious statistical analysis. Collier is not afraid to confront difficult truths, and he forms his arguments and proposed solutions based on statistical evidence. For all the emphasis on numbers, extrapolation and reverse causality, however, he manages to keep the book readable and passionate. Far from being a cold, abstract treatise, this is a sympathetic and hopeful work by a brilliant and compassionate scholar. Colm Farren
Waiting for the Evening News
Stories of the Deep South
Tim Gautreaux
Sceptre, £8.99
Gautreaux's measured narrative voice pulses steadily through each of the 22 short stories in this collection, capturing with humour and compassion the melancholic nature of the Deep South. Through his often solitary and contemplative protagonists (the grandfather figure in the wonderful The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc is a particularly poignant creation), the author reflects the despair, but also the hope (and often the absurdity), to be found within the struggles of the everyday. Stories such as Died and Gone to Vegas, in which a group of misfit card players attempt to outdo each other's tall tales, deftly balance a sense of humour and sadness throughout. However, perhaps the most pleasurable aspect of this collection is Gautreaux's richly evocative depiction of the dialect and spirituality of Cajun Louisiana, which serves as a unique and ultimately redemptive force for many of its fictional inhabitants. Dan Sheehan
