This week's paperbacks reviewed
The First Verse, Barry McCrea, Brandon, €15
The Da Vinci Code spawned so many po-faced imitations, most of them irredeemably tedious, that it was hard not to suspect a conspiracy among the great and the good of publishing. But here's a literary debut which involves a bizarre cult of "literary mysticism", complete with secret rituals, unhealthy obsessions and paranoia - and it isn't tedious in the least. The First Verse is no imitation but a true original, the intensity of the narrative undercut by a kind of ironic Irishness which hints that only in Dublin could a young student get caught up in a literary cult, for heaven's sake - and which, behind its clever, brash façade conceals a tender and beautifully observed gay coming-of-age story. The scene in which the narrator goes into the George pub for the first time is just one of many delights: meanwhile, although the "cult" at its centre never quite lives up to its sinister early promise, The First Verse is entertaining, smart, and very, very readable. - Arminta Wallace
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment,Edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y Okihiro, Norton, £11.99
The US internment of Japanese people in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbour is something of a forgotten chapter in American history. Dorothea Lange, a photographic pioneer and portraitist par excellence, spent years working for the government photographing the unfortunate inmates of these dustbowl concentration camps. The humanity and displaced domesticity in evidence are disconcerting and the pictures together with two essays, on the work of Lange and the history of the internment, make for a handsome volume and important document. The policies that motivated the internment are laid bare, in all their racist sentiment, and it is a reminder that suspending human rights in perceived times of crisis is not a new development in domestic or foreign US policy. - Laurence Mackin
Redemption Falls, Joseph O'Connor, Vintage Books, £ 7.99
"It took her almost a month to slog across Louisiana . . .". That unforgettable opening image of a 17-year-old girl setting out to walk across America in search of her younger brother is an apt metaphor for the scale and ambition of this sprawling book, a kind of sequel to Star of the Sea but on a much, much bigger canvas. The action in that bestselling novel took place on a famine ship, which served as a frame for a number of unconnected but interwoven narratives. This time, it's Eliza's walk which serves as the frame, and the characters are a bizarre collection of flotsam and jetsam washed up by the civil war: a love-sick cartographer, a silent boy, an irascible revolutionary, a runaway slave. From these confused and tattered threads O'Connor weaves his tapestry of a devastated America, using ballad lyrics, photographs, scraps of newspaper editorials, semi-illiterate letters, reproductions of recruiting posters and biblical quotations to assemble a richly allusive whole which is forever threatening to fall apart, yet never does. A virtuoso performance - but also a great book to keep you company on long summer evenings. - Arminta Wallace
Dúirt Bean Liom, Máire Ní Néill, Coiscéim, €7.50
Máire Ní Néill's Dúirt Bean Liom . . . is a collection of interviews with 12 women prominent in their different disciplines. There are politicians, educators, artists, singers and even journalists - including Irish Times journalist Catherine Foley - who have established themselves in their own fields of expertise. Ní Néill employs a simple and effective question and answer style while interviewing her subjects - though 'interview' might be too formal a description of what she does; informed chat is probably more accurate. Ní Néill is very successful in drawing out her subjects' personalities, politics and views. It is certainly instructive to compare and contrast, say, what Fianna Fáil's Mary Hanafin and Sinn Féin's Bairbre de Brún have to say on history and republicanism while TG4 journalist Sorcha Ní Riada gives an insight into the challenges of juggling children and a career in journalism. - Pól Ó Muirí
Lost City Radio, Daniel Alarcón, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Peru-born Daniel Alarcón's much-lauded debut novel starts from a slightly facile plot conceit: a woman whose husband disappeared 10 years ago during the civil war in their unnamed South American country now presents a popular radio show in which the names of the missing are read out on air. A junta-endorsed Surprise! Surprise!, if you will. Cue the arrival of a young village lad with a list in his hand bearing one name of special interest to our heroine. Alarcón's depiction of a society traumatised by war and totalitarian rule draws adroitly - if at times a little obviously - on the precedents of Orwell and Huxley, while his preoccupation with identity, clandestinity and betrayal suggests Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory and The Third Man have pride of place on his bookshelf. The masterly switching between past and present time-frames is surely Lost City Radio's signal achievement, the somewhat anti-climactic ending perhaps its most conspicuous blemish. - Daragh Downes