Latest paperback releases reviewed.
The Sea by John Banville Picador, £7.99
Let new fame and finance have their day - the real prize for this Man Booker-winning novel is that it will expand the oeuvre's long-term readership. Far from intellectualising the world from a pale and icy distance, even in its single bursts of metaphor and image this seamlessly arranged monologue about a childhood remembered, a wife mourned and an old-age pondered brings closer to the surface than any number of dialogue-driven or plotted novels a precise and almost physical sense of what it is like to be an individual consciousness. In confronting the tender puzzle of remembered youth and the outrageous mystery of death, Banville's stylistic skills give of their very best: emotional honesty, philosophical depth, comic poise, sentences with the wrought yearning of prayer. The Sea is the novel as both superior art form and higher human testament. John Kenny
The Visitor by Maeve Brennan New Ireland, €8.99
Following the death of her runaway mother in Paris, Anastasia returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin. There, the old lady continues to mourn her dead son, Anastasia's father, has never forgiven the young wife who abandoned the marriage and clearly has no interest in welcoming her now grown granddaughter. Some discordant notes, mainly in the dialogue, jar a little but there are impressive sequences such as the opening scene in which the mail train jostles its passengers towards Dublin. Later, in an unexpected turn, Anastasia confirms she is very much her mother's daughter. Posthumously published in 2000, this harshly atmospheric Joycean novella evokes a closed, aspiring, unforgiving, relentlessly Catholic world of accepted behaviour which corrals emotional chaos, rage, grief and self-absorption. Eileen Battersby
The Genius Factory: Unravelling the Mysteries of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank by David Plotz Pocket Books, £7.99
Robert Graham, a multi-millionaire Michigan optometrist who invented the plastic spectacle lens, started to get unhappy and restless in the 1960s: free love, civil rights and societal upheaval meant that men of science like himself were no longer in the vanguard of American thought. Now, plebs and dullards were populating the world. In 1980, Graham opened the Hermann J Muller Repository for Germinal Choice. Soon dubbed the Nobel Sperm Bank by the Press, Graham's operation set out to provide Mensa-standard women with sperm supplied by Nobel Prize winners. Slate.com journalist David Plotz, in a witty, humane and clever book, traces the progeny of genius, and in light of advances in genetics and reproductive technology, looks to a future of human-assisted reproduction and designer babies. Yvonne Nolan
Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography by Claire Harmon Harper Perennial, £9.99
Harmon, already an award-winning biographer, has produced another tour de force, what must be the definitive study of Stevenson (or RLS, as he's known in the trade). A sickly, pampered child, Stevenson eschewed both the family engineering business and its Calvinist ethos and instead spent his short life (he always harboured a sense that he was "doomed") living fast and writing popular classics: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Treasure Island, A Child's Garden of Verses to name just a few. He suffered from writer's block, which he frequently used as an excuse to abandon his work midstream. Harmon uses unpublished material to come at her subject from a fresh perspective in a beautifully written, insightful and sympathetic examination of a complicated man full of contradictions, who was much ahead of his time. Joe Culley
Twilight of Love by Robert Dessaix Scribner, £7.99
During the 1860s the Russian author Ivan Turgenev lived for seven years in the German resort town of Baden Baden. Here he fell in love with a famous soprano, Paula Viardot, who was married and whose husband, Louis, he befriended. The affair was unconsummated and this odd triumvirate were the subject of much gossip amongst the assorted royals and aristocrats who frequented the town's hotels, cafes and casinos. Australian novelist and Russian scholar Dessaix decides to retrace Turgenev's footsteps and goes to Baden Baden to ruminate on his subject. What results is a gruesome mix of biography, autobiography and travelogue, written in an affected literary style. Instead of concentrating on Turgenev (on whom he is very strong), Dessaix meanders off into pointless solipsistic digressions which leaves him open to accusations of pretentiousness. Ken Walshe
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead Vintage Books, £7.99
No more than 2 to 3 per cent of the world's population are international migrants, a level that has not changed over the last 50 years. In fact, refugee numbers are actually falling, from a peak of 19 million in the 1990s to around 12 million today. Yet national governments are spending increasing sums on strengthening their borders to keep these people out. Caroline Moorehead looks beyond bland statistics to examine the human side of migration. Her travels take her from Cairo to Australia, Finland to Afghanistan, to look at both "good" and "bad" migrants, and chronicle harrowing stories of suffering and misery. Written with an air of detachment, the book does not offer any easy answers but is an extraordinary collection of personal testimonies from the sharp end of migration. Eoghan Morrissey