The Irish Times reviews a selection of Paperbacks
In the High Pyrenees Bernard Loughlin Penguin, £7.99
Some memoirs make their mark because they have a memorable story to tell, others because the way they tell their story is unforgettable, and some - a very few - make an indelible impression because they do both. Bernard and Mary Loughlin thought they had found paradise in the Catalan Pyrenees when they got married and bought a house there. Convinced that their children ought to be educated in Ireland, however, they returned to run the artists' retreat at Annaghmakerrig in Co Monaghan - a paradise of another sort, as anyone who visited during the Loughlins' time there will happily attest. Then they discovered that their children had, for years, been sexually abused by a neighbour. The shock runs through the book like a tsunami. It is skilfully written, honest to the point of discomfort, and as for memorable, well, read it - and just try to forget it.
Arminta Wallace
A Special Relationship Douglas Kennedy Arrow Books, £6.99
The now much-maligned special relationship between America and England is the ironic title of Douglas Kennedy's fifth novel, which sees two newspaper foreign correspondents, Sally, an American woman, and Tony, an English man, fall in lust as they cover the story of a flood in Somalia. Two fiercely independent people, they are suspicious of relationships, love and obligation. Months on, lust has become love, marriage and a pregnancy. The difficult birth of Sally's son and her reaction to it is just the beginning of a terrible descent into the long tunnel of post-natal depression. Kennedy's evocation of the inner life of a woman suffering from this condition is meticulously researched and gut-wrenchingly credible and, with great sleight of hand, he manages to turn out a seriously good page-turner to boot.
Yvonne Nolan
Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds Marina Warner Oxford University Press, £12.99
Though ostensibly an academic text, this collection of Warner's 2001 Clarendon lectures is itself as beguiling as the narratives of myth and magic through which it winds its eloquent course. Tracing what she outlines as the four main processes of metamorphosis - mutating, hatching, splitting, doubling - in literature and art, Warner moves seamlessly from ancient creation stories through the strange worlds of Bosch, from a 17th-century Dutch study of the life cycles of insects to the visions of Kafka and Nabokov, right up to the daemons of Pullman, the revenant of Atwood. She questions notions of identity and intersubjectivity against a rich cultural and historical backdrop. Warner populates her scholarship with the thrilling ideas and marvellous personae of a creative work, and from the chemistry she works between her subjects comes something truly inspiring.
Belinda McKeon
The Master Butcher's Singing Club Louise Erdrich Harper Perennial, £7.99
A young German soldier returns from the horrors of the Great War. Driven by loyalty and the grim sense of duty which makes him marry the pregnant fiancée of the dead friend who had saved him, Fidelis sets off to the New World with a suitcase full of "his father's miraculous smoked sausage" and his own butchering tools. Erdrich's big, vivid eighth novel is on the theme of the European seeking a new life in the US. The prose is rich, urgent, and the story is told with warmth, humanity and her trademark flashes of the surreal. Whereas previously her native American heritage has dominated, this time Erdrich looks to her German roots. In Fidelis, she has created a believable hero who endures the agony of real love when it challenges duty. Black, often grotesque, teeming with life, ghosts, suffering and notions of escape, this is a vibrant, surprising novel, often very funny and ultimately sad.
Eileen Battersby
The Lucky Ones Rachel Cusk Harper Perennial, £7.99
Rachel Cusk's fourth novel is a loosely connected sequence of what otherwise might be viewed as long short stories. Thus, a snippy young solicitor who makes a prison visit to a woman wrongly convicted of murder turns up as a minor character in the following story about a skiing trip; the twin sister of one of the skiers is the focus of 'The Sacrifices', a story about childlessness; another skier subsequently has a baby with an eccentric artist much to the chagrin of her mother. Cusk, who writes with hypnotic grace, examines with great honesty and microscopic concern the changes wrought on people and relationships by the arrival of children, she questions the power some women wield over men when they become mothers and, shows that for all their self-proclaimed victimhood, these women are far more robust than their hapless mates.
Yvonne Nolan
The Opposite of Fate Amy Tan Harper Perennial, £7.99
There has always been an autobiographical element in Amy Tan's fiction, but she has never actually written directly about her own life until now. This isn't, however, an autobiography; instead, it's a collection of essays about various aspects of her life and work, from her traditional Chinese parents to her religious beliefs to her experiences in Hollywood. She's at her best when she's being funny or angry, and the best essays are probably those in which she writes about the inherent racism of academia or what it's like to be the subject of other people's academic theses (deeply embarrassing, apparently). But there's more to Tan than just her (considerable) dry wit; she's an engaging writer who deftly mixes humour and poignancy with a dry wit, and even those who have never read her fiction should find much to enjoy in this smart and charming collection.
Anna Carey