The latest paperbacks reviewed.
Crabwalk. Günter Grass, Translated by Krishna Winston, Faber, £7.99
German history continues to inspire and provoke Günter Grass, the always-daring 1999 Nobel Literature Laureate. In this punchy, laconic and profound novel, he considers German war suffering instead of war guilt by looking at a real-life disaster, the torpedoing of the converted cruise liner the Wilhelm Gustloff. Carrying some 10,000 refugees, the ship sank, losing all but 500. Described as the single worst tragedy in maritime history, it has been neglected. Why? Because the casualties were German. Aware of his country's long reluctance to lament its own war losses because of the legacy of national shame, Grass exposes Germany's sideways approach to its history - hence the title. The narrator, journalist Paul Pokriefke, is a failed son, husband and father whose existence has been dominated by his flamboyant mother, a survivor of the sinking, during which he was born. She has always urged him to write the story, finally he does. - Eileen Battersby
All Summer. Claire Kilroy, Faber, £7.99
The protagonist of Claire Kilroy's first novel, Anna Hunt, has "lost her memory, and is on the run", but this far from characterises the rich narrative texture of this modern thriller. Set in undisclosed locations from the west to the limits of the Dublin commuter belt, All Summer is ambitious in structure, character development, and style, making it read like the work of an older, more seasoned writer. Kilroy nimbly conducts us through the theft of a painting, Girl in the Mirror, its title reinforcing the twinned themes of observation and identity central to the storyline. Stendhal famously defined the novel as a man carrying a mirror down the high street. Kilroy's is a shattered mirror, boldly held up to the perpetrators of a seemingly victimless crime, their identities refracted and fragmented along the twisted lanes and teeming streets of this fantastic novel. - Nora Mahony
Ralegh's Last Journey. Paul Hyland, HarperCollins, £7.99
Sir Walter Ralegh, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, fell foul of James I and spent from 1603 to 1616 in the Tower of London. Released, he hazarded all on one last desperate voyage to Guiana in search of gold. It failed and he was arrested on returning to Plymouth and taken to London to be tried. The last journey of the title is this one. It took nearly three weeks and involved intrigue, deceit and some low comedy. Paul Hyland's books on English places are classics of the type and he describes in detail the various places Ralegh went through. Feigning ill health in Salisbury, Ralegh wrote his Large Apologie for the ill successe of his enterprise to Guiana, which he sent to the king. "It was a compound of grief and anger and regret that he had come so close to rehabilitating himself and his fortune but had only succeeded in losing his elder son [Wat was killed on the expedition] and his last hope in the world." - Brian Maye
Plague. William Naphy & Andrew Spicer Tempus, £10.99
In this intriguing account of the world's greatest catastrophe, we learn that biological weapons of mass destruction were used in 1346 during a siege of a Genoese colony in the Crimean city of what is now Theodosia in Ukraine. Yanibeg Khan's Golden Horde of Mongol besiegers were stricken by a deadly outbreak of plague, whereupon they catapulted infected corpses over the city walls. Genoese ships returning to Italy are suspected of introducing the Black Death to European cities. Intermittently over the next 400 years, Europe was virulently infected and lost up to 50 per cent of its population. When the scale of the apocalypse became evident, the medieval mindset variously believed it to be God's punishment for sin, lost faith and awaited death in an orgy of Bacchanalian debauchery, fled or blamed Jews and foreigners. - John Moran
Beef and Liberty: Roast Beef, John Bull and the English Nation, Ben Rogers Vintage, £7.99
Roast beef as a patriotic emblem of the English is the theme behind this social history. The popular food of Britain in the Middle Ages, made famous by Shakespeare in Henry V, where English soldiers "eat great meals of beef . . . like wolves and fight like devils", is revealed in all its simplistic glory. Where its culinary charm is rustic and simple, the French cuisine is infuriatingly complex and fussy and the early half of the book seems preoccupied with how the English disparaged the "foppish" French and their ostentatious meals. Some of the darker elements are interesting, such as how the English royalty often enjoyed the violence of bull baiting and dog fights, but this account is for those who prefer their history smeared with English mustard and doused in Lancashire ale. - Laurence Mackin
Adventurers & Exiles: The Great Scottish Exodus. By Marjory Harper, Profile, £9.99
The pursuit of wealth took Scottish artisans all over the world. Tens of thousands of others less fortunate were forced to emigrate. In the 17th century, they headed to Ulster and by the 18th century across the Atlantic to the Americas. While the Ulster plantation has to be mentioned - by 1641 up to 30,000 lowlanders may have moved to Ulster - Harper concentrates on the exodus of the 19th century when emigration became a significant European phenomenon. For all these emigrants, the US was the main destination. Inevitably there are many parallels with Irish emigration. Of interest perhaps to libraries, some Scots and perhaps the dyed-in-the-wool Scots living abroad, it is difficult to enthuse about a book so thorough in minutiae that we occasionally lose interest. - Owen Dawson