IT's summer again and the Irish publishers have released a clatter of books for the "hazy days" market - books at have entertainment as their first priority, with complexity a long way behind.
First up is Kevin Brophy's Almost Heaven (Marino Books, 320 pp, £7.99), a satisfying yarn that flits between Michael O'Hara's present life as an obscure lecturer in a London university and his childhood, spent in Galway.
An obituary notice prompts O'Hara to return to the country he left 30 years ago and as he makes his pilgrimage, the details of his school years are revealed. The combination of his love for a Protestant girl boarding at the school where his father is the odd job man, a new and fascinating friendship and his growing alienation from his family, is one that finally has tragic results.
Brophy's strength is in his easy storytelling that moves his story and his narrator along effortlessly, and always keeps an element at suspended tension. When the final climax does arrive it does not disappoint - nor does it indulge in uneasy melodrama that would betray the subtle and enjoyable characterisation that distinguishes Almost Heaved from other novels in the light fiction department.
It is exactly this subtlety that is missing from Pauline Bracken's Indian Summer (The Collins Press, 190pp, £5.99). It deals with two love affairs; 53 year old Vera's with the dashing Dan Devereux, and an old but not forgotten one between Dorothy Reynolds, now a successful PR woman, and artist Frank Donegan.
As Vera's dalliance ends dramatically, Dorothy's youthful fling comes back in the form of the son she gave up for adoption, and both women end up with their lives changed utterly.
The narrative suffers from uneven timing, with rather too much happening at the beginning and the (very implausible) end, and too little in the middle. The characters never really stand a chance of coming alive due to the author's rather stiff use of everyday speech. Bracken set herself a task that is as difficult as it is underrated; writing a good but light love story, but while she manages some good moments she doesn't entirely succeed in pulling it off.
Mary Rose Callaghan's The Last Summer (Poolbeg, 227 pp, £6.99) kicks off on the day after Clare finishes her Leaving Certificate. Clare believes in Shakespeare, good diction, and that there's a right way of doing things and her family doesn't know it. She wants to he an actress but when her flighty father decides to put on a play by himself, she is cast in the role of stage manager.
On top of all this her mother, described by Clare in typical teenage fashion as "typewise she's Felicity Kendal - ageing innocence, with a conviction, like all the Irish, she'll win the Lottery", gets herself pregnant.
Callaghan has captured the natural speech and slang of all ages and types, and manages to sprinkle in a fair amount of contemporary references - to Oasis, Daniel Day Lewis, Roddy Doyle and so on - without it being a cringemaking effort at trendiness. There are no age limits to an enjoyable, uncomplicated and amusing novel like this one; but it would make perfect reading for someone who has recently finished their Leaving Cert.
SUCH an uncomplicated view of childhood is streets away from that offered by B.M. Spaight in God on the Wall (The Collins Press, 164 pp, £6.99). At first the story of Elizabeth Wallace's single and lonely motherhood, the novel is increasingly taken up with disturbing memories of a suffocating dysfunctional family. Her mother is overweight and locked away from her children by depression and malaise, her father is drunk, abusive, a shadowy and threatening figure, her sisters enemies rather than allies.
Spaight's language is broken, evocative and at times humorous and poetic; "As a child I always thought of `beech trees' as being more of a tree because I could see their shape more clearly, say, than a horse chestnut, which always struck me as being all over the place when it came to shape."
She captures both the disquieting perceptions of an abused child and the sad and self deceptive musings of a lonely adult with great clarity, and sometimes beauty. God on the Wall is a very worthwhile read, though maybe, unlike the other three, not best suited to a mindless afternoon on the beach.