White Debt by Thomas Harding (W&N, £20)
The author is emphatic about why this book is about Britain’s appalling role in the slave trade — as opposed to the more familiar American variety. His need to write this book was underlined when he learned his mother had made money from the slave system. His relatives were not slaveholders but like millions of others — bankers, shipbuilders, sugar dealers, cotton mill workers — they were part of a broader economy that profited from slavery. Britain’s role in slavery is not only black history, it is also white history. Although Harding, as a child, was taught Britain had been the first nation to abolish slavery, research quickly showed him how little he really knew. This, then, is the story of everyday industrialised cruelty, the story of a group of almost exclusively white people who benefited from this system of slavery and whose wealth, economic and cultural, continues to be enjoyed today. He points an accusing finger at Britain’s national amnesia and asks questions about its legacy — cultural, political, moral. Owen Dawson
The Ballycotton Job by Tom Mahon (Mercier Press, €14.99)
The British warship Upnor was carrying huge quantities of arms and ammunition from Cobh (then Queenstown) to Woolwich in March 1922 and its capture by the anti-Treaty IRA was masterminded by Seán O’Hegarty, commandant Cork No 1 Brigade. His men commandeered a Royal Navy tugboat from Cobh, while simultaneously hijacking more than 80 trucks and lorries all over Cork. The tugboat towed Upnor into Ballycotton, where the munitions were loaded on to the waiting lorries, which distributed them to secret arms dumps. The daring venture supplied much of the weaponry used by the anti-Treaty IRA during the Civil War, thus significantly affecting that conflict. The pacy narrative, conveyed mainly from the perspectives of O’Hegarty and Admiral Sir Ernest Gaunt (head of the Royal Navy in Ireland), is a great read. Brian Maye
Left On Tenth by Delia Ephron (Doubleday, £16.99)
Delivered in Delia Ephron’s unmistakable charismatic and touching style, Left On Tenth is a memoir with a magical storybook quality. The charm that laced her fiction and non-fiction — as well as her screenwriting work with sister Nora on cherished hits such as You’ve Got Mail — wraps itself around Ephron’s story of dealing with the death of her husband of 35 years, discovering she has cancer and finding love late in life after reconnecting with a college sweetheart. Left On Tenth is a memoir full of life and love, a deeply heartfelt exploration of the most vulnerable and beautiful parts of us as humans. It reads with the same cinematic glow that will surely see it transition to the big screen soon. Emma Flynn
Reverse Engineering, feat Jon McGregor et al (Scratch Books, £9.99)
Wordsworth suggested that we “murder to dissect” — that our drive to analyse might extinguish a beautiful form. The reverse is true of this anthology, which will inject writers with creative adrenaline and provide short story readers with a new slant of light into the craft. Seven exceptional stories from writers such as Sarah Hall, Joseph O’Neill and Jessie Greengrass are followed by interviews with the authors about their process and inspiration, each as unique and nourishing as the narratives themselves. Jon McGregor offers revealing insights into writing towards a listener, how the beginning must insinuate its way into someone who might only be paying half-attention; he does this beautifully in the first line of his arresting story in the collection: “The first punch is a shock.” Ruth McKee
A Provincial Death by Eoghan Smith (Dedalus Books, £9.99)
A dark, courageous novel for those who like their fiction experimental, no chaser. Smyth, too prone to be called a protagonist, is an academic who awakens one day to find himself injured and stranded on a rock in the Irish Sea. What follows is an ineffable fragmentary flow of consciousness and memory unspooled by switches in narrative voice, with lots of literary references (Arendt, Beckett, Rilke, etc), and Camus-flavoured discourses as Smyth clings to his rock, rather than roll one uphill. Smith is a fine writer, imbued with the gothic and metaphysical. This is his second book following The Failing Heart, and he possesses a lapidary style; a ruminative voice that echoes in the mind. He fables with a flourish on life’s futility, and our failings. NJ McGarrigle
The Premonitions Bureau by Sam Knight (Faber, £14.99)
Near the end of The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight explores an idea advanced by Socrates: “Our actions are both an expression of our distinctive character, our ethos, and a divine force that plays on us, our daimon.” An account of a paranormal collaboration between a psychiatrist, John Barker, and the Evening Standard, The Premonitions Bureau brings this ancient conflict between fatalism and free will to 1960s Britain, where the bureau collected visions, intuitions, omens and dreams from the public by mail. Barker was its conflicted champion, a doctor who kept a crystal ball on his desk. Knight walks a line here, masterfully, between science and superstition, contextualising Barker and his subjects in a discussion of time, our perception of it, and fate. The subject matter is so engrossing, so spectacularly eerie that to read it is to experience something like the instincts it describes; a sense of inchoate revelation; a deeper meaning, yet to be unveiled. Roisin Kiberd
