This week's new releases reviewed
China Road: One Man's Journey into the Heart of Modern China, By Rob Gifford, Bloomsbury, £8.99
In this engrossing mix of travel book and cultural analysis, journalist Rob Gifford travels the 4,824km of China's Route 312 - which stretches from Shanghai to Kazakhstan - meeting ordinary Chinese people, urban and rural, as he hitch-hikes, travels on buses, and stops to investigate the many intriguing scenes he comes across. The book interweaves details of China's epic history with reportage on its current situation, and reveals a continent-sized country full of contrast and dichotomy, which struggles to provide for its population of 1.3 billion and connect itself with the modern world without losing its cultural identity. The statistics are all huge (150-200 million people leaving their homes to search for work in the cities), and the characters all colourful (for example, the mountain cave-dwelling Daoist monk with a mobile phone). Gifford, who lived in China for seven years, shows a great ability to put the locals at ease and to communicate with them. The book is written with great understanding of, and affection for, this astonishing country.
... Colm Farren
Run, By Ann Patchett, Bloomsbury, £7.99
Following her best-selling novel, Bel Canto, Patchett tells more than she shows in Run - a softened reflection of race and class in the US with ultimately "nice" characters. Here, Boston's former mayor, an Irish-American widower with two adopted black sons, finds his life intertwined with the lives of a young girl and her mother after a car accident. Though the meticulously plotted story deals perhaps one plot-twist too many, Patchett deftly looks at questions of identity: who we are, how our parents might wish to shape us, how genetics can, and cannot, be ignored. The highlight of the novel, rising above the suspense-ridden twists, is its quiet flexibility - the movement from the mind of the young, overly aware girl to that of the ageing and devoted father is flawless. Patchett introduces the symbolic gravity of "running" perhaps too late in the novel to truly warrant its title, but her storytelling is graceful, lending itself to the easy comfort of the novel's tidy-if-expected closure.
... Emily Firetog
Nation of Extremes: The Pioneers in 20th-Century Ireland, Diarmaid Ferriter, Irish Academic Press, €22.95
The unfortunate Irish relationship with alcohol is an important social and cultural phenomenon thoroughly explored here from various perspectives, most of all from that of the extraordinarily successful voluntary organisation set up to combat excessive drinking - the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (PTAA). Founded in 1898, within 20 years it had 200,000 members, mainly because its founder, Fr James Cullen, was "a real Napoleon for organisation", according to a later central director. The membership peaked at a remarkable 500,000 by 1945. Its silver jubilee in 1949 and diamond 10 years later saw well over 100,000 members assemble in Croke Park. Thereafter its numbers declined, but it still boasts 180,000 members in Ireland. The main growth areas have been in Africa and South America since the 1960s. It may have shown, as Ferriter says it did, the brash triumphalism of the Irish Catholic Church at its height, but he also acknowledges that it saved so many from a lifetime of alcoholism.
... Brian Maye
The Afterlife, Donald Antrim, Abacus, £8.99
This is an atypical memoir - not a simple chronological journey through the author's formative years, but a powerful study of the figure who came to dominate them: his mother. She is a surreal character, and it is a remarkable portrait. A charismatic and beautiful girl, Louanne Antrim was to become an intensely unhappy woman who drank herself to death. She emerges from the book as a technicolour vision of nightmarish proportions. She was destructive, demanding, manipulative, needy, abusive, vulnerable and, above all, deeply angry. Antrim unveils his portrait with startling frankness, baring himself and his family unsparingly. The emotion in his words is powerful - there is nothing distanced about them. As a book, however, it escapes the trap of "misery memoir", being mercifully self-aware. A blistering account, but not a plaintive one.
... Claire Anderson-Wheeler
My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke, Robert McCrum, Picador, £7.99
One day Robert McCrum was a high-flying publisher at Faber & Faber; the next, he was on the floor unable to move, having rolled out of bed. He was 42 and had had a stroke. The Cinderella of afflictions, stroke is little understood and is often dismissed as "an old person's ailment". It doesn't even, as McCrum points out, have a sensible name, "stroke" being "a synonym for brush or sweep or caress . . . and of course it's also associated with idleness, as in 'he never does a stroke of work'." McCrum's predicament was mental as well as physical; and the fact that he has not only pieced his conscious self together again, but has written about it in such a coolly analytical manner is astonishing. He has done a service to stroke victims, and created a wonderful work of art.
Arminta Wallace