Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
The Kick: A Life Among Writers Richard Murphy, Granta, £9.99
This absorbing, intelligent and richly populated memoir is proof of how a poet's life and his work exist not in a clear, referential relationship, but rather invade one another's boundaries slowly and soundlessly over long years of experience and encounter. Richard Murphy has drawn on five decades of notebooks to depict rural Co Mayo and colonised Sri Lanka, the Oxford of C.S. Lewis and the Dublin of Patrick Kavanagh, and to provide brief but unforgettable accounts of an impressive company of writers and artists, including Wittgenstein, Robert Graves, Theodore Roethke, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Gripping, too, are flashes of Murphy's most private moments: his memory of burying a miscarried son is deeply affecting. The sense that there is more to this life than he can comfortably articulate is not a flaw, but works as another portrait. - Belinda McKeon
The Visit of the Royal Physician. Per Olov Enquist, Vintage, £6.99
Enquist's first novel after a lull of eight years has culled a fistful of prizes across Europe, and no wonder. From the first line, this powerful book snares the reader, who is as helpless and unable to resist the narrative flow as the characters are trapped in the flow of history. During the mid- to late 18th century, as the Enlightenment spread across Europe, advisers to the mad Danish king, Christian VII, procured him a personal physician, the German, Dr Struensee. After four years of revolutionary reforms - and two years of an illicit affair with Queen Caroline Mathilde - Denmark's ancien régime schemed to have Struensee put to death. The story unfolds with a masterfully controlled tempo almost sinister in its restraint - no seduction could be better executed. Enquist bores into every aspect of power - and its inevitable betrayal - in language that seems clinical but works voluptuously on the reader. - Christine Madden
After the Quake. Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin, Vintage, £6.99
Life tends to be a mixture of the surreal, the practical and the deadly boring - and it is precisely this pattern that Murakami's accessible, slightly offbeat stories reflect. For many Western readers, he is the voice of contemporary Japanese urban experience. Although at his most restrained throughout the six thematically linked, if diverse, tales in this low-key collection, Murakami retains his interest in fantastic possibilities. Yet even when subdued, he remains a confirmed romantic, as the final narrative suggests. Lives, loves and disappointments provide the subject-matter, but strongly present is the shadow of the Kobe earthquake and a symbolism that extends far beyond the physical destruction. Murakami never loses sight of the essential panic driving us all. - Eileen Battersby
Spix's Macaw. Tony Juniper, Fourth Estate, £8.99
The particular species of macaw named after explorer John Baptist Spix was an extreme rarity and therefore greatly prized among collectors. As Spix's macaws became increasingly scarce, agencies and governments acted. But the illegal trafficking continued - "people's obsessive fascination with parrots was paradoxically wiping them out". Today, parrots are part of an illegal trade in wildlife that ranks second in value only to the multi-billion-dollar illegal drugs and arms markets. When, in 1990, only one Spix's macaw was found to be living in the wild, an emergency international operation was launched to prevent the extinction of the species. This book is both depressing, because of how many irreplaceable ecosystems man has destroyed, and uplifting, because enough people care to fight to preserve species on the point of extinction, irreplaceable parts in the jigsaw of creation. - Brian Maye
Amedeo - The True Story of an Italian's War in Abyssinia. Sebastian O'Kelly, Harper Collins, £7.99
Sharing the bloodline of Europe's oldest royal family, the House of Savoy, inculcated into the subject of this book a powerful sense of duty. Amedeo Guillet was eager to do his duty but, unfortunately for him, the not-so-great dictator Benito Mussolini was in charge at the time. Nevertheless, when the call came, the dashing young cavalry officer set out on an epic adventure in an Italian army on its way to carve out a glorious empire in Abyssinia. Amedeo is largely the subject's extraordinary account of his adventures in that briefly successful campaign, as retold engagingly and further researched by journalist Sebastian O'Kelly. The Italian army soon lost Africa Orientale Italiana to the British, but Amedeo bravely fought on - his sultry Bedouin lover by his side - famously leading a cavalry charge on a white horse against two British armoured divisions. - John Moran
The Birds of Heaven - Travels with Cranes. Peter Matthiessen, Vintage, £7.99
The author of this touching and occasionally sad book sees his beloved cranes as a striking metaphor for the vanishing wilderness of "our once beautiful Earth". Since ancient times, they have represented longevity and fidelity; today, the dark shadow of mankind hangs over the bird's future. Peter Matthiessen is a naturalist and explorer and writes authoritatively of a world, as he sees it, in ecological crisis. He sees the dauntless crane as a final frontier against the rapidly retreating wilderness and the despoliation of clean water, earth and air. He has travelled extensively to remote and forbidding (and forbidden) places in search of the crane's breeding grounds and his excitement and passion for these beautiful birds drip from the page. The book is illustrated with beautiful plates depicting the various breeds of crane, which add to the pleasure of a worthwhile read. - Owen Dawson