The latest titles reviewed
Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan, Pocket Books, £7.99
The evolution of a creative life - particularly from the artist's point of view - has seldom been so well documented as it is here. Dylan's reconstruction - in sharp, superb prose - of his early engagement with the folk tradition, his inculcation into bohemian New York of the 1960s, and later his flight from the various personae imposed upon him - is a sparkling tour-de-force. His insistence that he was neither the conscience nor spokesman for any generation - and that flight from the public gaze - is recounted in passages of almost bitter chagrin. As much social document as biography, Chronicles is the clearest illumination of his songwriting craft we are ever likely to have. Already much praised as a landmark biography, it is more than that - for all his elusiveness and the cloak of enigma he took with him from Hibbing, Minnesota, the artist reveals himself in detail of immense richness . Dylan may not have painted his masterpiece, but he has written it. Gerard Smyth
Don't Wake Me at Doyles, Maura Murphy, Hodder Headline Ireland, €10.99
This memoir runs from a poor childhood in rural Offaly to domestic service, emigration and giving birth to nine children in quick succession. Murphy's life will be familiar to many whose marriages followed the same pattern of mistrust and bitterness and who reared large families in conditions now unthinkable. Predictably, her hugely successful book has been compared to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, which might set off alarm bells in some readers, and it is similar in its descriptions of deprivation. The silver lining comes in Maura's recovery from cancer and her break from her husband of 50 years, which was welcome in the end. Sadly, she died this month, even as the book was flying out of the shops. Claire Looby
The Insider: The Private Diaries of a Scandalous Decade, Piers Morgan, Random House, £7.99
Hand-picked by Rupert Murdoch when he was a 28-year-old Sun showbiz reporter to be the editor of the News of the World, Piers Morgan's career as one of the most influential people in Britain offers plenty of material for this addictive diary of 10 years as an editor. It makes for an exhilarating run through the news of the last decade, from the inside. From turning his back on his mentor, Murdoch, to becoming editor of the Mirror (the tabloid it was okay to like), to lunches and correspondence with Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Princess Diana, et al, Morgan describes everything in a deliciously indiscreet style. While ruthlessly playing the tabloid game, he also agonises over certain stories, and resolves to make the Mirror more serious in the aftermath of 9/11. But as he discovers early on, "Sometimes the job does feel a bit like playing God with people's lives . . . But editing a paper like this does not allow much room for sentiment". Davin O'Dwyer
Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon, Gijs van Hensbergen, Bloomsbury, £8.99
Van Hensbergen has produced a dapper little insight that is heavy on Guernica from an artworld- lover's perspective contextualised within 20th-century Spanish history. Opening with a look at the Spanish Civil War and settling upon the destruction of the Basque town of Gernicka (the Basque spelling of Guernica), the narrative follows Picasso's painting from its inception through childhood and middle age, its debut at the World Fair in 1937 and international acclaim, to its homecoming to Spain in 1997. Following exile in Paris and a long sojourn at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the midst of art glitterati, ideologues and the politics of art, both communist and capitalist, this is as much a biography of the famous painter and his bande á Picasso as it is a history of the painting itself. Paul O'Doherty
Windows on the World, Frédéric Beigbeder, Harper Perennial, £7.99
Some day, when the emotional debris has sufficiently settled, people will start making films, made-for-TV movies and performance art pieces about 9/11. But likely none of them will be as moving and gripping as this book (some of them might even be based on it.) The narrative shifts point of view from a fictionalised eyewitness account from those trapped in the Windows on the World restaurant at the peak of the ill-fated tower to the personal journey French writer and broadcaster Beigbeder embarked upon in pursuit of comprehension of this incomprehensible event. This editorial device juxtaposes the arbitrariness of fate against the event's historical significance as the violent beginning of a new era. Beigbeder's style does sometimes falter, but this doesn't lessen the impact of his impressive work. Christine Madden
Something Sensational to Read in the Train: New Writers from the Oscar Wilde Centre, Lemon Soap Press, €10
Seamus the shy chemist who is foolish enough to buy Tom the salesman's dodgy soap but gets his reward in Tom's very own en suite; a first date under the sperm whale in the Natural History Museum; a dying bird found during a tennis lesson - they're all part of a new anthology of fiction and poetry produced by 13 MPhil students at Trinity College Dublin, who undertook the university's 2004-5 masters programme at its Oscar Wilde Centre for Creative Writing. The writers, including journalist Roisin Boyd, playwright/actor Eithne McGuinness, computer scientist Patrick Finnegan and "badger-reared" raw-meat-eater William Collinson, bring their varied experiences to a collection that is pacy, provocative, and never dull. Hard to disagree with Prof Brendan Kennelly when he says in the foreword that the different voices "challenged and illuminated each other, frequently with sharp eloquence". Lorna Siggins