A round-up of this week's paperback releases
My Father’s Watch
Patrick Maguire, with Carlo Gebler
Harper Perennial, £7.99
For Patrick Maguire, truth has proved more harrowing than any fiction. The youngest of the "Maguire Seven", he was only 14 when he and his family were wrongly imprisoned for the Guildford pub bombings. My Father's Watch, co-written by Carlo Gébler, tells the story of a London Irish childhood torn apart by arrest and imprisonment, and of the subsequent fight to clear a family's name. It is a grim and moving tale, full of unbearably poignant detail – at one point his mother writes from jail, begging him to make sure his little sister gets a doll's cot from Santa – but it is a tale without a happy ending. The description of Patrick's later struggle with depression, drink and drugs shows that no amount of compensation can make up for the lasting harm inflicted upon innocence. A fascinating personal insight into one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history, it is also a sad tale of a life ruined. Freya McClements
The Post-American World – And the Rise of the Rest
Fareed Zakaria
Penguin, £9.99
Zakaria here explores the changing balance of global economics and power resulting from the rapid growth of the "emerging markets" of countries like China, India, Brazil and Russia. China, with its cheap manufacturing and eagerness to save money, has the largest dollar-reserve in the world and is America's creditor. India provides cheap IT services across the globe, and its economy grew at 8.5% between 2003 and 2007. Meanwhile, America continues to consume beyond its means. Zakaria draws parallels between America and the British Empire, but is sanguine in his conclusion that the US occupies a healthier position than the 19th-century UK. He argues expertly that the world's one superpower – if it can accept the loss of the privileged, "spoiled" position it has occupied for a century and adapt – can remain at the forefront of the global community. Colm Farren
Remembering the Year of the French: Irish Folk History and Social Memory
Guy Beiner
University of Wisconsin Press, $29.95
In this ground-breaking study, Beiner explores "the relationship of folklore, memory and history". The "Republic of Connacht", set up by the invading French force, was vividly recalled in folk history but has been relegated to "a sideshow of the 1798 Rebellion". In the 1930s, the Irish Folklore Commission documented hundreds of oral traditions about the Year of the French. In addition, Richard Hayes, when researching his book, The Last Invasion of Ireland: When Connacht Rose (1937), interviewed people along the route of the Franco-Irish campaign and collected many songs and stories. This shows a vibrant "social memory" existed in Ireland in the 1930s as regards '98 but that has waned, as mirrored by the absence of official commemoration. Beiner expertly retrieves this, showing along the way that folk history is democratic because it includes groups of people typically excluded from scholarly history. His is a new and refreshing approach to the writing of history. Brian Maye
Beijing Coma
Ma Jian
Vintage, £8.99
Life under China's Communist dictatorship is depicted here with keen, awful vividness. Dai Wei lay in a coma, shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest. That was 10 years ago: now to the outside world he is a vegetable, but inside his mind moves restlessly, relentlessly. Sometimes he tunes in to the sounds and smells around him – hospital rooms, his mothers voice – but mostly he floats on a tide of memories. We travel back with him through a lonely, painful childhood, and the turbulent student years where the threat of violence hovered constantly. Meanwhile, the voices that come and go at his bedside tell their own story. Like Dai Wei in his coma, they are locked into a world of struggle. China has become a prison for her citizens; the only weapon is the strength of the human will. A difficult but beautiful novel. Claire Anderson Wheeler
VS Naipaul: Letters Between a Father and Son
Edited by Nicholas Laughlin and Gillon Aitken
Picador £8.99
Vidia Naipaul was 17, in 1950, when he wrote from his home in Trinidad to his sister, Kamela, at college in India, that his Oxford scholarship had come through. Later letters reveal family expectations and the urgency of escape from career limitations in Trinidad. The significance of university education in the Naipaul household, where money was scarce especially for the father, Seepersad Naipaul, a frustrated writer and sometime-out-of-work journalist, is underlined. While the sons letters are often petulant in tone and the father's are full of admonishment and anxiety, they are bound to be of interest to students of post-colonialism, West Indian literature and sociology. What is uncertain is the book's general interest. The exchanged letters are remorselessly un-funny and dogged; the concerns, as well as academic, include behaviour and shortage of money. Kate Bateman