This week's paperback releases reviewed

Dark Times in the City

Gene Kerrigan

Vintage, £7.99

You’re having a quiet drink in your local pub when two thugs roar up on a motorbike and start waving a gun around. What do you do? Plead instant incontinence would be my plan. Danny Callaghan, however, is made of sterner stuff: he jumps in and saves the life of the intended victim. Alas, said victim is himself a petty criminal, so Callaghan’s intervention gets him mixed up in a vicious struggle between rival gangs. Gene Kerrigan’s third novel, following

Little Criminals

and

The Midnight Choir

, is another intelligent, highly readable instalment of the kind of urban neo-noir that is fast making Dublin as recognisable to readers of crime fiction worldwide as is Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Kerrigan makes clever use of the crime device of having characters turn up from one book to the next – think of Ed McBain and Joseph Wambaugh, except with a Dublin accent. His style is taut and his dialogue pings and fizzes. I just have one question. When’s the next instalment due?

Arminta Wallace

The Truth About Love

Josephine Hart

Virago, £7.99

A small town in the 1960s Irish midlands is shocked by an explosion in which Tom and Sissy O'Hara lose a teenage son, their second child to die. The cause of the unnamed youngster's horrific death is made ambiguous by the politics of the time and his shining schoolboy nationalism. Told in a series of first-person narratives, this is a challenging but mesmerising tale of grief and of love's many forms. Hart's captivating style reveals her sincere love of lyricism, and the Beckettian dialogue illustrates how the Irish "live in a world of words", as Tom tells his German neighbour. Could such a simple phrase describe the Irish psyche? Sissy O'Hara's internal monologue punctuates the psychiatric treatment she endures for the self-imposed silence of her grief, leading on to her daughter Olivia's musings, decades later, on the events that shaped the family. Claire Looby

Cutting for Stone

Abraham Verghese

Vintage £7.99

It is both surprising and not to learn that the author of Cutting for Stoneis a doctor – currently a professor of medicine at Stanford. Intimate knowledge of medical procedures aside, the novel is a love story to medicine. The science and art of the profession are treated with such reverence that the reader is inspired by the humility and nobility of the best doctors. Yet Verghese's skilful storytelling and fluid prose suggest a born writer. A tale of love, redemption and the cost of human engagement, this is the story of twin brothers growing up in Ethiopia in the 1960s. The action centres on Missing, the mission hospital where the boys' adopted parents are doctors, and where they are born in dramatic circumstances. Marion, who narrates, is forced out of Ethiopia to the hospitals of New York, while Shiva stays on to become famous at Missing. Verghese's characters are almost uniformly well drawn. Eimear Nolan

Beautiful as Yesterday

Fan Wu

Picador, £7.99

Across two generations and two continents, a mother and her daughters deal with the tensions of identity and the pressures of family. Guo-Mei, the dutiful older daughter, lives in sunny Californian suburbia: married with one child, she is a nine-to-five church regular with a stout moral conscience. Her younger sister, Guo-Ying, is a flighty, bohemian New Yorker. Their mother – a widow; a hesitant woman old before her time – embarks on a six-month holiday to visit them, leaving China for the first time to meet her only grandson. As the narrative rotates between the three women over the six months, each engages with some difficult questions and home truths. There are new experiences to assimilate; the personas they have built for each other, and for themselves, will be challenged. An instructive read on China's complex present and the long arm of its past, but the book would benefit from a more purposeful narrative and more challenging characterisation. Claire Anderson-Wheeler