Unholy Ghosts, by Ita Daly (Bloomsbury, £6.99 in UK)

Belle is a Jewish girl whose family is determined she will be more Catholic than Catholic Ireland: or is she? Themes of alienation and identity are explored with delicacy in this coming-of-age novel, which invests the innocence of 1950s student socialism in Ireland with a sinister undercurrent of insanity. Daly's apparently casual prose strolls around the ruined pillars of post-war Irish society, taking in scenes of emigration, illness and political impotence with an apparently bland impartiality which, in the novel's closing pages, packs a considerable punch. A.W.