The latest titles reviewed
Maps for Lost Lovers Nadeem Aslam Faber, £7.99
The bleakness of this tale would surely make the reader give up halfway through were it not for the beauty of the writing. Aslam spins his web-like tale of a Pakistani community in a north of England town in intensely poetic language. In his gorgeous, sensual descriptions, the natural world is contrasted with the religious repression, cruelty, ignorance and social alienation experienced in the community. At the centre of the web is the disappearance of Jugnu and his lover Chadna - presumed murdered by Chadna's brothers. Also prominent are Jugnu's brother, Shamas, a tolerant community worker and his strict Islamic wife, Kaukab, whose intransigence causes her to become increasingly isolated from her family. Aslam writes bravely and truthfully, his images shining like raindrops, and while you might be a bit relieved when it is over, it lingers in the mind. Cathy Dillon
Over The Bar Breandán Ó hEithir The Collins Press, €12.95
Arguably the best Irish sports book ever written, Over The Bar is a sharp, warm and wonderfully well-written reminiscence of Breandán Ó hEithir's early life, interwoven with memories of Gaelic games and dry observations on the GAA and its role in Ireland.
The author's son, Ruairí, told TG4's documentary Faoileán Árainn that, apart from family, the GAA was the most important thing in his father's life. Given Breandán's rich and varied life as a salesman, journalist, broadcaster and novelist, this is a fair achievement for the GAA.
The tone of the book is occasionally critical and melancholic but more often affectionate. He criticises and celebrates the GAA and the world it inhabits. Furthermore it is as good an account as there has been of Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s. Great to see it back on the shelves. Sean Moran
Tuning up at Dawn Tomás Graves Harper Perennial, £8.99
After early patches of painful name-dropping, Graves offers a wonderful account of a life on Majorca. The island he portrays is not one of beach resorts and drunken tourists, but rather a rural Mediterranean haven, with its own unique strand of Catalan culture, festival lifestyle and eccentric characters. The author's father, poet Robert Graves, moved his family to the island in 1946, where Tomás was born. Tomás himself, not quite Majorcan, definitely not English, tells of the island, its people and its history from his perch between the two cultures. Charting his own musical career (in the second most famous unknown band in the world) in parallel with the development of the island, he adoringly describes its music, culture and people, and the impact of changing circumstances, including the end of Franco's regime and the tourist invasion. Overall, a very readable memoir. Séamus Conboy
The Rare and the Beautiful Cressida Connolly Harper Perennial, £7.99
Forming the Venn diagram overlap between the bohemians of the 19th century and the avant-garde of the 20th, the nine siblings of the Garman family gloried in lives lived at the artistic fringe of polite society. They might not have been the last muses, as the book-jacket suggests, but they were certainly the last to pursue this vocation actively, sending out shockwaves of admiration, envy and lust in the circles they frequented. Mary Garman's tempestuous marriage to Roy Campbell didn't prevent her from further affairs with, among others, Vita Sackville-West; Kathleen endured years of an illicit affair with Jacob Epstein, eventually marrying him. Lorna seems to have enticed every artist going. They rose obliviously above the normal situations in which we mere mortals are entangled, and their stories make delicious reading. Christine Madden
The Last Gentlemen Adventurer Edward Beauclerk Maurice Harper Perennial, £8.99
This is an adventure story of a 17-year-old English boy who goes to work for the Hudson Bay Company for a period of five years in 1930. The place where Maurice finds himself is an inhospitable trading outpost on Baffin Island, visited once a year by a supply ship. The tiny population of Inuit hunters, their traditions and manifold skills provide Maurice with an altered outlook on previous certainties. He is a good storyteller and, without being unduly modest, is not ashamed to describe his own failings in his new life. He is also aware of the need to adapt and is able, with a little soul-searching, to enter into a domestic arrangement with a female Inuit, which would not have passed muster with his family but it does not matter as the family will not know. By discovering the Inuit, he discovers himself. John McBratney
Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Who Unwrote the Bible Julia Keay Harper Perennial, £8.99
The fact that he was locked up on three separate occasions for his madness, only to prove each time that he was perfectly sane, is probably the craziest thing about the life of Alexander Curden, although close contenders include his unrequited marriage proposals and his self-appointment as "corrector" of the morals of British society.
In an insightful analysis of 18th-century prison life, Keay retraces the steps and incarcerations of the man who wrote the concordance to the Bible (a two-and-a-half-million-word dictionary of biblical definitions and terms) between a number of personal tragedies.
Examining his early life and later career as a "bookseller by royal warrant" to Queen Caroline, and at times giving Curden the benefit of the doubt and a semblance of reason, this is more jail journal than specific history of a genius at work. Paul O'Doherty