Don't Look at Me Like That
By Diana Athill
Granta Books, £10
The late Diana Athill’s novel is a riveting bildungsroman that has aged like a good wine. First published in 1967, the Granta reissue is sophisticated and bright (complete with a handy bookmark), the novel centres around Meg Bailey, a young illustrator who defies convention when she moves to London in search of things greater than marriage and complacency: “Roxane had accepted something which I had never thought of: that life could be as it ought not to be, and that one still had to live it.”
Meg is stubborn, modern and unfailingly honest as a narrator. When Dick Sherlock arrives in London, she has cause to re-examine her definition of a successful, independent life. Athill's prose is luscious, her themes contemporary and the narrative will entertain the reader until the end. – Mia Colleran
The Manager's Tale: New Irish Chamber Orchestra 1970-1980
By Lindsay Armstrong
Somerville Press, €20/£18.
Lindsay Armstrong's account of the creation of the New Irish Chamber Orchestra is a chronicle of artistic vision and an indispensable record of concert-giving. For anyone who witnessed it, it evokes vivid memories, almost entirely joyful. For those who didn't – look what you missed. John Beckett's Bach cantata series was an unparalleled achievement, while the orchestra's tours to China, the then USSR, the US, Britain and Europe put Irish classical music on the international map. This was music-making at the very highest level by soloists such as James Galway, Victor Malirsh and Mícéal O'Rourke, and the superb orchestra conducted by André Prieur and led impeccably by Mary Gallagher. – Richard Pine
Above Average at Games
By PG Wodehouse
Penguin Books, £25
Above Average at Games brings together celebrated comic novelist PG Wodehouse's writings on sport. These are in the form of short stories and brief discursive essays on cricket, golf, football, rugby and baseball. Wodehouse himself excelled at some and was hopeless at others. He nevertheless writes of them all with great acuity. The golf stories in particular are both hilarious and incisive; Wodehouse brilliantly sends up his own ineptitude (he was an 18 handicap), while managing to write of the sport with keenness of insight. It isn't surprising that Wodehouse, to whom seriousness was anathema, wrote about sports: like life, they are mere games we take too seriously. – Luke Warde
Stories of the Sahara
By Sanmao, translated by Mike Fu
Bloomsbury, £16.99
Sanmao, self-called after a comic-strip character, was born in Taiwan in 1943 and spent the turbulent 1970s in Spanish Sahara (now Western Sahara) befriending the Saharawi people displaced by the brutal occupation of Franco's army. This is a valuable record of a period when though the UN decreed a referendum should be held, 30 years on, the Saharawi people are still waiting. Sanmao's travel memoir was first published in Chinese in 1976 and is now published for the first time in English. Within this story is a personal one: Sanmao's husband was a submarine archaeologist who died following an accident. Widowed at 36, she returned to China where, in 1991, she died by suicide. – Mary Russell
McWatt's flowing, lyrical first-person prose is as close to poetry as prose can be
Through Her Eyes: A New History of Ireland in 21 Women
By Clodagh Finn
Gill, €19.99
This well-researched, informative book looks at Irish history from the Neolithic to the digital era through the lives of 21 women, thus giving an alternative, female perspective. From obscure, prehistoric figures such as the oldest woman in Ireland whose bones were found under the Poulnabrone dolmen, the Celtic goddess Macha and the sixth-century St Dahlin, it moves on to the historical Gormlaith, who was married to Olaf, Norse king of Dublin and later to Brian Boru; Aoife, daughter of Dermot MacMurrough and wife of Strongbow, and so on up to modern times. Standout figures include Lady Sligo, Hester Catherine Browne (1800-1878), who did much to help her tenants during the Great Famine, Letitia (1880-1977) and Naomi (1900-1993) Overend, who left their Airfield farm to the State, and Jemma Redmond (1978-2016), a biotechnologist who 3D-printed human tissue. – Brian Maye
Shame on Me
By Tessa McWatt
Scribe, £14.99
In this stunningly beautiful work, Tessa McWatt draws on her own family narrative, on history and on literature to produce a memoir that is really an intimate and provocative take on the global race debate and its effect on the identities of those who find themselves caught up in it. Her flowing, lyrical first-person prose is as close to poetry as prose can be, deeply evocative and laden with imagery without weighing the narrative down. McWatt moves inwards from the forces that have shaped her culture and upbringing to examine her own body, offering her vulnerability to the reader in a gesture that is both generous and challenging. Deeply compelling and strikingly original, McWatt's retelling of her family's mythology speaks to the universal in the particular, and to the human need to belong. – Becky Long
