Irish Times writers review the latest paperbacks
The Darkness of Wallis Simpson by Rose Tremain Vintage, £7.99
Never having been that drawn to Tremain's cool, rather stately novels, this adroit collection with its echoes of Saki, Somerset Maugham and VS Pritchett was a revelation. A black iconoclastic streak undercuts the stronger pieces, as do convincing tone shifts, while the title work is a brilliantly sustained re-imagining of the finals days of the Duchess of Windsor. Far removed from the glamour and notoriety of her celebrity existence, the dying woman, floats in and out of consciousness, in a darkened bedroom in Paris. Written in the present tense, the narrative develops into a study of a fading memory as Wallis experiences a slide show of the life she lived, and the people she knew. Elsewhere, Tremain plays with voice and social class. It is a collection which celebrates the offbeat and the outsider, the misplaced and the overlooked. Eileen Battersby
Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom by Roger Pearson Bloomsbury, £8.99
A stylish, sparkling narrative that examines Voltaire's story with a vivacity and wit that would make the man himself proud. Pearson handles his subject with sensitivity and insight, a leavening irony, and a touch of whimsy. His breezy, almost conversational tone and delightfully turned phrases ensure a lightness that does nothing to disguise the solidity of his research or the pithiness of his analysis. Voltaire emerges from the pages in all his paradoxical glory: the restless, irreverent champion of the Enlightenment, he could be childishly capricious, yet deeply brilliant , capable of great largesse and nobility of spirit. What emerges most strikingly is the man's extraordinary energy, - with characteristic defiance of tradition, Voltaire demonstrates that dying young is not obligatory to ensure a legacy of unabated brilliance. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Booking Passage by Thomas Lynch Vintage, £7.99
After his thematically tight first volume of essays, The Undertaking (1997), Lynch loosened up for Bodies in Motion and at Rest (2000), and now this poet's favoured prose form is even more literally essayistic in action. Booking Passage, while steering close to Lynch's established autobiographical mode, is a collection of "Fits and Starts", "Bits & Pieces" and "Odds & Ends", all of which make various essays at understanding the contemporary world through personal reflections. Lynch has made "thirty-
some crossings in thirty-some years" between Michigan and his ancestral cottage in Clare, and the rituals of his returns form the core of pieces that emphasise by turn both cultures of the Irish-American axis. While as robustly stoical and funny as ever, Lynch deploys an elegiac mood that knows no fear of cultural pride. John Kenny
Constitutional by Helen Simpson Vintage, £7.99
A book of short stories in which death is the underlying theme doesn't sound like the most promising proposition, but this is a real treat. Simpson's serves up rich and evocative stories in a plain narrative style, all set in familiar territory with dialogue that is sharp and funny - from the tragi-comic Every Third Thought, where panic sweeps among mothers at the school gates as stories of cancer and death pile up daily, to the touching Early One Morning, where a mother savours the time on the school run alone in the car with her nine-year-old son, knowing that in a short while he'll begin moving away from her and out of his childhood. The last story, which gives the book its title, is a subtle examination of the power of the life force, explored through the musings of a middle-aged science teacher, unexpectedly pregnant by her married lover. Another dazzling collection from the British writer. Bernice Harrison
Two Lives by Vikram SethAbacus, £8.99
Vikram Seth well knows how to luxuriate in telling a good tale, as his A Suitable Boy testifies. And he recognised that, in recounting the story of his uncle and aunt, he would be able not only to present a history of these two very different individuals, but also an account of war, love and displacement in the very turbulent 20th century. Seth's Shanti Uncle (as he calls him) left India to study dentistry in Berlin, where he lived as a boarder with the family of Henny, or Henriette Caro. He ended up serving in the second World War, in which he lost his right arm, while Henny fled to London - and lost her mother and sister in the Holocaust.
The detailed insight into their lives and times, the pertinent and revealing minutiae Seth weaves into this Persian carpet of a biography, make reading it by turns a pleasurable and astonishing experience. Christine Madden
Charlotte by Kathryn Shevelow Bloomsbury, £9.99
Charlotte Charke's outlandish and insouciant lifestyle would today make her a noteworthy eccentric; in the 18th century, she was roguish at best, and at worst, a dissolute moral reprobate. Born to the stage, by family and disposition, Charlotte became a headstrong attention-seeker, as theatrical off the boards as on. A rebel from an early age, Charlotte began to adopt - not only on stage - men's dress and a male persona, thereby gaining freedom but incurring much censure. Although clever and enterprising, unlucky Charlotte seems to have compounded misfortune with a disarming but fateful lack of prudence or worldly wisdom. Shevelow's account reveals the radical transition in our cultural understanding of sexual mores and women's roles, as well as painting a perceptive portrait of a highly idiosyncratic figure. Claire Anderson-Wheeler