The latest titles reviewed
Heaven Lies About Us Eugene McCabe Vintage, £6.99
McCabe's work deals both rationally and viscerally with the actualities of the Irish borderlands. Intent on allowing his native locales germinate slowly into story, he has remained laudably aloof of accelerated career paces and fashions, and this new gathering of almost all his prose pieces, written over 30 years, perhaps best displays his steadiness and integrity of vision. Rooted in a social rather than environmental anti-pastoralism, these 12 stories are populated in 19th- and 20th-century geo-political settings by ferocious Christians with a cancerous heritage of terror and murder and hunger. McCabe explores the primitive forces that can explode within private and public lives, and by the end the title assumes a formidable double meaning. Humans are vicious, anguished, potentially unredeemable, and our idea of heaven may be a lie about us. John Kenny
The Black Angel John Connolly Hodder, £6.99
Private eye Charlie Parker joins with his best friend, the gay black assassin Louis, to find Louis's missing junkie prostitute cousin in New York. Their search leads them to cultists obsessed with unearthing hellish sculptures made from human bones. The yarn careers (and occasionally wobbles) from New York to Arizona to the Czech Republic, from present day Maine back to second World War France. Connolly has toned down the hardened violence a bit for his fifth Parker page-turner, but delivers the goods with a repulsive villain in the ageless Mr Brightwell, who may or may not be a fallen angel, and a crew of bad-to-the-bone sadists and psychopaths. This is the most overtly supernatural of the Parker series, and if all the Old Testament mumbo-jumbo recalls The Da Vinci Code, The Black Angel is still five times as suspenseful and at least 10 times as compelling. Kevin Sweeney
Forty Years Behind the Lens at RTÉ Godfrey Graham Ashfield Press, €22.50
For the first time, after a 40-year career with RTÉ, lighting cameraman supreme and leg spinner extraordinaire, Godfrey Graham has seen fit to put himself in the picture with this stroll down his and Montrose's collective memory lane. Blessed with a sensible mother, he got an early break when she, realising academia wasn't for her son, secured his release from Blackrock College. A lucky escape for Godfrey and for the fledgling station, where his art would soon blossom. During a globetrotting career, taking in current affairs, documentaries and drama, he worked with some of the icons of the 20th century, including John F Kennedy, Lauren Bacall and Nelson Mandela, and still had time to shine as an international cricketer - for 49 years he held the record for the youngest player ever to play for Ireland. One hopes the cricketer in Godfrey is aware of the follow-on. Martin Noonan
Tell Me Your Secret Deirdre Purcell Hodder Headline Ireland, €13.99
At the age of 16 Violet Shine is imprisoned in the attic of her family's house on the coast of North Co Dublin. It's the 1940s and she's incurred her parents' wrath by daring to fall in love with young Coley Quinn from the village. The relative serenity with which Violet accepts her life-long fate reflects another, crueler era. Sixty years later, Claudine Armstrong is drawn to the now-abandoned house, at a time when she is wondering about her modern life and marriage. Unwittingly she becomes a catalyst in the lives of the now elderly, star-crossed lovers. This book spans not only two generations - but two apparently different countries, such are the changes that have taken place in Ireland. It is a pleasure to surrender to a sweeping love story, even if it ends as a tear-jerker. Here is an Irish storyteller in full stride, gracing her genre with exemplary skill. Claire Looby
The History of Love Nicole Krauss Penguin £7.99
So entrancing is Nicole Krauss's style, you'll be 100 pages in without having taken stock of the story unwinding before you. It is an exciting and demanding work full of wonderful relationships, both factual and fictional, in a two-part structure. The two main pairs are a damaged brother and sister who despite having lost their father are determined to gain a sense of family before they brave their teens, and a crotchety pair of octogenarian gents trying to cheat death one day at a time. Unbeknownst to any of them, they and all the characters are linked by a book of undetermined origins called The History of Love. It is hard to imagine how the overwhelming sadness that drifts through the stories could act as a romantic impetus, but Krauss's imaginative revelation of the power of love put in writing is beautiful. You won't have read anything quite like it. Nora Mahony
Phoenix Park: A History and Guidebook Brendan Nolan Liffey Press, €18.95
Phoenix Park has been the location of some of the brightest and blackest moments in Irish history, since the boundary wall was first erected by a shoddy builder, Dodson, in 1663. Focal point of the visits of John F Kennedy and John Paul II, it was also the scene of murders by the revolutionary Invincibles in 1882, and by Malcolm MacArthur 100 years later. As a child, Winston Churchill rode a donkey there, when it was home to the three top British administrators. After independence, three new dignitaries moved in: the Irish President, the US Ambassador, and the Papal Nuncio. Nolan sets well-known events in the Park's history beside accounts of its buildings and institutions, as well as obscure subjects like park rangers' uniform regulations. A chapter of walking trails encourages readers to explore for themselves. Ralph Benson