Greener by Gráinne Murphy (Legend Press, £9.99)
Female friendships are having a moment in contemporary literature. Romance, the turning tide would seem to say, comes and goes, but friendships last forever. Or do they? After 25 years apart, Helen, Annie and Laura are brought back together through the illness of Helen’s elderly father. Can they rekindle what was once an inseparable friendship? What follows is an exploration of care, loneliness and the space required for bonds to flourish (Helen’s family home would appear to be a fourth and essential dynamic in this friendship). The story is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the interiority of life during this period is evident in the dense, detail-orientated prose, where the action holds the weight and airlessness of a bleak period in history. Brigid O’Dea
How to Think Like a Philosopher by Peter Cave (Bloomsbury, £10.99)
If your go-to spot for information and debate is social media and YouTube, rather than reading quality journalism (how very dare you), you’ll have noticed that philosophical arguments, even faux arguments, have not completely disappeared from public discourse. And if getting a sound, informed and succinct outline of various philosophies is important to you, this entertaining book by popular philosophy writer Peter Cave is definitely worth a look. Cave offers an accessible retrospective of philosophers from Lao Tzu to Descartes and de Beauvoir to Iris Murdoch, while not dumbing down the theories, so you’ll need to commit to the reading in order to keep up. The one-line summary at the end of each chapter is handy if you want crib notes, too. Claire Looby
Colm Tóibín’s Long Island is Waterstones Irish Book of the Year
Author Maggie O’Farrell: I had a teacher at school who took the register, called my name and said to me, ‘Are your family in the IRA?’
Gambling Man by Lionel Barber: A lively account of the rollercoaster life of SoftBank’s billionaire founder
My Animals and Other Animals by Bill Bailey: Tales of the comedian’s feathered, furred and scaled friends
Gordon Brewster and his Cartoons by Pól Ó Duibhir (Lettertec, €20)
Gordon Brewster was the long-time cartoonist in the Evening Herald and Sunday Independent. He died suddenly in 1946 while buying sweets in a shop in Howth, Co Dublin, owned by the mother of the author of this short study of his work. The book is based on original drawings of Brewster’s cartoons held in the National Library of Ireland, dating between 1922 and 1932. Many of the cartoons have an international focus, unusual in this period when Irish society was very inward-looking. The book also contains background information on Brewster and his family; his English father was manager and secretary of Independent Newspapers under William Martin Murphy. Felix M Larkin
