This weeks paperbacks reviewed by Irish Times critics
Paris: After the Liberation 1944-1949
Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper
Penguin, £12.99
Fans of Beevor (Stalingrad, Berlin) may have missed this 1994 offering first time out. Reissued now with perfect timing - the first sentence reads ominously: "Few countries love their liberators once the cheering dies away" - this is accessible, page-turning, gossipy history at its best. A scintillating cast, from the unexpected (Airey Neave, future Pope John XXIII as Papal Nuncio, Samuel Beckett and his fellow Irishman, the mysterious Count O'Kelly) to the iconic (Piaf, Hemingway, Chanel, Genet, Dior, Sartre) wanted to go to this postwar party, hosted reluctantly by a petulant, brooding, de Valera-esque Charles de Gaulle. A treat for Francophiles, helpful for anyone puzzled by Chirac's stance on Iraq and recommended bedside reading for US soldiers in Baghdad.
Michael Parsons
Brick Lane
Monica Ali
Black Swan, £7.99
True, Ali's 2003 Man Booker-shortlisted début had the bad luck to run against the all-conquering Vernon God Little, yet the wry humour and grace of this intuitive narrative convinces from the opening page. Nazneen is a Bangladeshi village girl despatched to a drab London flat to marry a stranger twice her age. Her dangerously over-educated husband, Chanu, is sustained by his disappointed ambitions. Nazneen proves a sympathetic heroine who develops from bewildered girl to wise pragmatist grasping the difference between existence and survival. But clumsy, pompous Chanu is the novel's real achievement. His ongoing exasperation is funny and touching. On the eve of returning to Bangladesh a failure some 30 years after arriving in London full of dreams, he decides to explore the sights. The family's outing offers rich insights about life and living.
Eileen Battersby
The Long Suit
Philip Davison
Vintage, £6.99
A golf course on Long Island is, presumably, a salubrious place, and certainly not one where you would expect to find a body with a bullet-hole through its forehead. The victim turns out to be an MI5 operative - "one of our gentleman spies" - so Harry Fielding is called in to sort it out. When it comes to the unexpected, though, Harry is a master of the art, and things don't go quite as his masters in London would wish. Philip Davison is a gem of a writer, and this is a glittering read, deceptively leisurely in pace, with killer flashes just when you least expect them, and Harry's wonderfully human relationship with his amnesiac father as an added bonus. Will we get more of Ross Kemp as Harry on the telly? We live in hope.
Arminta Wallace
Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War
T.J. Stiles
Pimlico, £8.99
Those who think of Jesse James as a dashing Robin Hood will be shocked by this hard-hitting biography. The author persuasively dispels the legend of James as an underdog who defended farmers and the downtrodden against the banks and railroads; rather, he was a "forerunner of the modern terrorist", a politically astute, media-savvy stone-cold killer. Born of a slave-holding family in Missouri, which stayed in the Union during the Civil War, James was a hardened Confederate paramilitary by the age of 16. During the war he rode with his older brother Frank under William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson, butchering abolitionists and Union supporters in Missouri and Kansas. After the South surrendered, the James brothers took up a lucrative second career robbing trains and banks, sometimes leaving behind their own press releases and once even donning Ku Klux Klan disguises.
Kevin Sweeney
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Bloomsbury, £6.99
Hosseini's début novel begins and ends in his native Afghanistan, from where his own family was forced to flee when he was a child. Amir, a Sunni Muslim from a wealthy home, and Hassan, his Shi'a servant, grow up together as friends but both are always aware of their position within the social order. The situation has tragic consequences after a kite-fighting competition in which Amir aims to finally win his father's approval. The political backdrop of the 1978 coup and the Russian invasion of 1979 helps to define the changing world and the loss of status in Amir's mind, but it is his gradual realisation of the effects of his actions on that fateful day at the competition that influences him the most as he and his father flee to California to start a new and difficult life. The betrayal of a friendship, the acceptance of guilt, and the desire to atone for past errors make up the emotional core of this moving novel.
John Boyne
Green Gold: The Empire of Tea
Alan Macfarlane and Iris Macfarlane
Ebury Press, £7.99
This is yet another story of the history of tea, especially of the lives and times of the garden managers and the tea-pluckers, but it does not shrink from telling of the luxurious lives of the former and the appalling plight of the latter. The profits made by the garden owners between 1870 and 1970 beggar belief, while the gap between the high life of the planters and the squalor and misery of the labourers was simply obscene and only began to be closed in the last quarter of the last century. This tale relates mainly to the tea gardens of Assam in North India, where women could pluck as many as 30,000 shoots in a day for a mere pittance. Tea was and is big business: its world consumption equals all the other manufactured drinks in the world put together. It is a plant which has made millions of people's lives tolerable, even pleasurable. The authors graphically tell us at what cost.
Owen Dawson