This deceptively simple, if shrewd, pastoral chronicles a full year's turning in a small lakeside community.
That They May Face the Rising Sun
John McGahern Faber, £7.99
It also observes the decline of a traditional rural way of life. McGahern possesses absolute understanding of the rituals of God and of nature; of birth, death and family; of the social and political nuances governing behaviour. He remains alert to the power of the unspoken. For all the easy chat and banter, the often cruel gossip, and the element of robust scandal afoot, the narrative revolves on the always telling power of the unspoken and ancient slights that fester. Joe, a quasi "blow in" and wife Kate are witnesses in a core group of middle-aged to elderly characters for whom fear, loss, memory and happiness replace the more usual McGahern themes of sex and guilt. As ever in his fiction truths emerge, but it is a kindly work with a strongly lyric awareness of the lakeside landscape and of time itself. The paperback jacket is also an improvement on the original. - Eileen Battersby
La Diva Nicotina
Iain Gately Scribner, £7.99
Non-smokers or even anti-smokers should not quickly dismiss this pacy and sharply written tale of the not-so-humble tobacco plant. Even allowing for the author's subtle bias in favour of smoking, his narrative is chock-full of fascinating information and enjoyable trivia. The Mayans and later the Aztecs sniffed it, chewed it, drunk it, used it as enemas and as a help "for them that are short of wind". The list of its perceived curative powers was endless - it is astonishing to realise that up to 50 years ago it was still believed to cure cancer. By 1949, a staggering 81 per cent of men in England were smoking. Iain Gately also trawls through some of the ongoing battles between tobacco manufacturers and various Western governments. The author believes people should be left to make up their own minds on the pleasures of smoking without government interference. Others will vehemently disagree. Either way this is a thoroughly enjoyable read. - Owen Dawson
Iris Murdoch: A Life
Peter J. Conradi Harper Collins, £9.99
This book is so obviously a labour of love that its main use for Murdoch devotees will be as an exhaustive source of reference to the bric-a-brac of her life. And it is filled with inconsequential annotation that will both infuriate cut-to-the-chase readers and leave the more than averagely inquisitive unsatisfied. This will impinge less on Irish readers for the first 30 or so pages, however, which are taken up with a dialectic on Murdoch's Irishness. Iris as enigma remains intact throughout - she would have liked it that way - butthere is much that is notable about the effect she had on friends, lovers and intellectual rivals. Conradi's biography is a useful introduction to Murdoch as ethical philosopher, the alter ego used to such good effect in her novels. To put this in context, when last year the publishing house, Routledge, re-issued its 30 most important books of the 20th century as Routledge Classics, while the Germans and French (in that order) were winners in the battle of ideas, Murdoch's philosophical writing was among the best in the English category. She is well worth reading for herself. -Colman Cassidy
Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood
Oliver Sacks Picador, £6.99
As a child, Oliver Sacks had an obsession with metals - their shininess, smoothness, coolness, hardness, weight, why they bent and didn't break and so on. One of the delights of his childhood was visiting his "Uncle Tungsten", his maternal Uncle Dave whose firm manufactured lightbulbs with filaments of fine tungsten wire. He introduced the young Sacks to many metals and discussed their unique qualities with him. When he first saw the periodic table of elements, he was overwhelmed by the achievement of Mendeleev, who first perceived valence as the principle uniting and relating all the elements. "And this gave me, for the first time, a sense of the transcendent power of the human mind, and the fact that it might be equipped to discover or decipher the deepest secrets of nature, to read the mind of God." The various discourses on the fathers of chemistry and their achievements will greatly interest lovers of that subject, but for me the most impressive and moving parts of the book are the pen-portraits of various members of the extraordinary Sacks family. - Brian Maye
The Virgin Blue
Tracy Chevalier Harper Collins £6.99
There's a sense of light, colour and sunshine throughout this novel, set in southern France. The characters - from the heartless Hannah to the chatty Mathilde, are all vividly alive and real. It's just a pity the central characters - Ella Tournier and Isabelle du Moulin - are such victims. Ella, who suffers from seriously low self-esteem, is annoying in the extreme, while her distant relation, Isabelle, who lived in the 16th century, is equally downtrodden and trapped. Isabelle, shunned by her neighbours, is raped and brutalised by her husband, and horrible things happen to those who are closest to her. But there's something addictive about her story as the saga of the Tournier family unfolds against the backdrop of Calvinism. Equally, Ella's whining as she leaves her husband, falls into the arms of the delighted Jean Paul and journeys to uncover her long-buried French roots, which ultimately lead her to the sad Isabelle, is an intriguing mix of detective tale , ghost story and infidelity all rolled into one. - Catherine Foley