The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks
Swallowing the Sun David Park Bloomsbury, £7.99
From its fraught opening section to its mesmerising conclusion, David Park's fifth novel is fuelled by the rage boiling just beneath the surface of its main character, museum guard Marty Waring. Traumatised by his brutal childhood in loyalist Belfast, Marty has spent his adult life trying to make himself safe from his past, but his tension is barely manageable and he is constantly on the lookout for events that will undermine his control over himself. When tragedy does finally strike, however, it is not in the way he might have anticipated and his struggle with his responses makes compelling reading. Park's writing is painstakingly crafted and resonant, his characterisation moving and convincing, and his story full of unexpected diversions. In the current climate, this deeply felt plea on behalf of the victims of the "peace dividend" in the North couldn't be more timely. - Giles Newington
The Smoking Diaries Simon Gray Granta Books, £7.99
Simon Gray is best known as a playwright. It was during rehearsals for a West End production of one of his plays, Cell Mates, that Stephen Fry famously vanished in 1995. The play closed after three weeks, which led Gray to write Fat Chance, his insider's view of the events, followed by Enter the Fox, a whimsical account of a year of things going wrong. On turning 65, realising he had become a grumpy old man, and his plays were not as hot as they once were, he set about writing these memoirs. Forget about diaries, this is not a structured day-to-day recording of events. Forget about cigarettes, if you can, even non-smokers can feel safe in the company of this hilarious meandering memoir about life, disease, debt and death. This self-effacing ramble secures Grey's position as one of the great comic writers in English today. - Martin Noonan
Dr Mukti and Other Tales of Woe Will Self Penguin, £7.99
Verbal delight found in human vileness and fate's cruelty is Will Self's trademark, and while it can be exhausting in some of his novels, it works well in this latest collection of shorter fiction. The novella-length title story sets the disturbing tone, with a pair of paranoic psychiatrists using their patients against each other in a lethal game of status and vengeance. Elsewhere, Self continues to bully and test his characters without mercy, only rarely allowing them to surprise him - and us - with their resourcefulness. It is these moments that work best, as in 161, the poignant tale of a young fugitive and a lonely widower marooned in a condemned tower-block, who together manage to evade the anticipated mayhem. For the most part, though, London is hell, life is an hallucination, everyone is mad - and Will Self is in his caustic element. - Giles Newington
Secret Histories: Finding George Orwell in a Burmese Tea Shop Emma Larkin John Murray, £7.99
With elements of biography, travel literature, and cultural studies, Emma Larkin's account of her voyage to Burma is as hard to classify as it is to put down. Raised in Asia and a fluent speaker of Burmese, Larkin is the ideal guide through this secretive and forbidding country. Wily in her dealings with the Big Brother-style security of the military regime and patient despite the frustrations of investigating anything in this tight-lipped society, she makes great headway in her research on the influence of Orwell's own Burmese days on his most famous novels. While very informative about Orwell , the book is equally a travelogue of life in a cruel place. Too often, the cultural consequences of totalitarianism are forgotten in favour of a geopolitical focus, but Larkin's attitude is more humane - and indeed, infinitely more Orwellian. - Nora Mahony
Where We Have Hope: A Memoir of Zimbabwe Andrew Meldrum John Murray, £7.99
In this disquieting book Andrew Meldrum, a Guardian journalist with a huge sense of justice, writes of Zimbabwe under the regime of President Mugabe. At the outset he speculates about this bookish man who earned three degrees while imprisoned by the Rhodesians, and spends the remainder of the book informing us how Mugabe has ruled over a malignant regime that tyrannises this once-
promising nation. Nobody in Zimbabwe today, insists Meldrum, is safe from arbitrary arrest, illegal abduction and deprivation of their rights. Little wonder he was unceremoniously thrown out of the country. Meldrum's writing is driven by his love for Zimbabwe and its people, and he still believes the country has a future - but not with Mugabe. - Owen Dawson
Fools Rush In Bill Carter Corgi, £7.99
Caught in a quagmire of Serb, Croat and Bosnian checkpoints, psychotic gangsters, an ineffectual UN mandate, and running the gauntlet of various sniper's alleys, Carter creates from rubble, sorrow and devastation, the story of the siege of Sarajevo, 1992-1996. He was on the run from a personal tragedy and in the company of a maverick, fun-loving and charismatic aid agency called The Serious Road Trip. Carter's narrative offers life in an intense melting pot, where all sides mingle in the shadow of the crazed Serbian militia high on the hills. It's a well-written, introspective travelogue that mixes hunger, loneliness and death with rock'n'roll, satellite linkups and corrupted politics, and captures the jealousies and testosterone tempers that cause havoc with the male ego - a metaphor and backdrop for the simplicity and divisiveness wherein the origins of war usually fester. - Paul O'Doherty