Cádiz: The Story of Europe’s Oldest City
By Helen Crisp & Jules Stewart
Hurst, £25
It has excited travellers for centuries and the multicultural history of this proud Andalusian port is traced in an insightful chronicle. Founded by the Phoenicians in around 1100 BC, Cádiz is western Europe’s oldest continuously inhabited city, but is often disregarded. The authors weave in Roman and Moorish rule, maritime warfare, and Spain’s ‘Golden Age’ of empire when it dominated trade with the New World. While not a guidebook, this study includes a 32-page listings section highlighting notable sights. There is information on where to find the most authentic flamenco show and the story of Café Royalty, an early 20th century cafeteria with sumptuous decor reopened in 2012 after seven decades of closure. And who knew that the Spanish demonym for people from Cádiz is Gaditanos? Paul Clements
It Comes From the River
By Rachel Bower
Bloomsbury, £16.99
Rachel Bower’s background as a poet is evident in her debut novel. Her sentences are compressed and imagistic. She is skilled at evoking the emotional charge of a single moment, but these sketches never quite come together into a coherent novel. The narrative moves quickly between the perspectives of three women whose lives are thrown off kilter by the same man, Paul. His mother, his wife, his mistress. Each is isolated and desperate, looking to him to rescue them from the problems he has created. Though the plot is initially compelling, Bower’s novel feels stretched well beyond its natural length, and the uncomplicated, cartoonish villainy of the character of Paul makes it difficult to sustain an extended interest. Ruby Eastwood
Web of Betrayal: Murder in Ireland’s Brutal Gangland
By Nicola Tallant
Eriu, £16.99
The murder of Dublin drug dealer Robbie Lawlor in the heart of north Belfast’s republican enclave of Ardoyne in April 2020 begins and ends this catalogue of the sordid deaths and double-crosses that have characterised cocaine distribution in Ireland in recent decades. Crime journalist Nicola Tallant expertly traces the exponential growth of cocaine supply from Irish criminals in southern Spain to the sprawling housing estates of Dublin, Limerick and Drogheda and she shows how neither the Border nor the strict Covid lockdown hindered the killers of Lawlor, who had amassed 125 criminal convictions by the age of 31 and who had avoided conviction for murders gardaí believed he had committed. Ray Burke
