Our pick of the latest releases
Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas
Matthew Hollis
Faber and Faber, £9.99
The unhappy, self-tormented personality of the British poet Edward Thomas is studied with subtle compassion by another poet in this extraordinary winner of the Costa biography award. Matthew Hollis looks at the final years of a brief life that ended in the slipstream of a shell at Arras on Easter Monday 1917. Having become the most prolific literary journeyman, reviewer and poetry critic of his day, Thomas, at the suggestion of his friend, the American poet Robert Frost, eventually turned to verse, initially celebrating nature, and went on to complete a lifetime's work in two years. The beauty and pathos of the narrative, with its traces of the biographer's bewildered fascination with his subject, are spellbinding. Thomas, a reluctant husband and father, looked to the first World War as his personal salvation – and, indeed, it proved to be so before it killed him. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the languid Rupert Brooke feature as the early 20th-century literary scene of Georgians and Imagists is juxtaposed with the routine and the intimate in a rare and wonderful book. Eileen Battersby
Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates
Corvus, £8.99
In the title story, a woman writes to the lover who spurned her years earlier, to demand what he promised her so long ago: his heart. She's adamant, too, as she eerily predicts a "freak accident" that will claim his life and ensure his bequest. In this collection, love can be violent and lust brutal; marriage is unsettling and families are ever strained. The recipient of countless prizes and plaudits, Oates is a noted master of American Gothic. However, these tales do not deliver on the book's subtitle. The rhetorical litanies of the jealous and the jilted fall short of suspenseful, while there is little mystery to her raw depictions of vulnerability, sexual predation and violation. The impact, rather, lies in the sense of dread and impending catastrophe that Oates doggedly crafts around each protagonist. These stories certainly stay with the reader, if only for their deeply unsettling sway. Sarah McMonagle
Life Times: Stories 1952-2007
Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury, £12.99
Few short-story collections come with as high a pedigree as Life Stories. A remarkable anthology by this Nobel laureate, it spans six decades of her writing and is both a celebration of her life as an artist and a unique record of the recent history of her South African homeland. Gordimer's central theme has always been her country and its people, and here the reader can trace South Africa's development from a land where a white farmer refers to his black employees as "my natives" to the point where a farmer who shoots his black "boy" accidentally can complain that the tale "will fit exactly their version of South Africa". As with so many of Gordimer's stories, all is not as it seems, and the story's last line contains an unexpected twist. Such is Gordimer's achievement: a lifetime of challenging her readers to rethink certainties once thought set in stone. Freya McClements
Sphärenmusik: Ausgewählte Gedichte/ Music of the Spheres: Selected Poems/Ceol na Sféar: Rogha Dánta
Matthias Politycki
Coiscéim, €9
One of the German language's leading contemporary writers, Matthias Politycki may not be familiar to many Irish readers. After all, and regrettably, too many of us are snug in our ignorance of foreign languages – other than English, of course. Happily, then, this trilingual volume gives a selection of his work in its original German and is accompanied by translations in the Republic's two official languages – English and then Irish – from Hans-Christian Oeser and Gabriel Rosenstock. It has to be said that there is initially something a little disconcerting for the reader in jumping between three languages, yet there is also something exhilarating about the experience. The book is a little tower of Babel that reminds the reader poetically about the power of language and how different languages register in our minds. Politycki's poetry requires careful reading and gives much to think about it. Gut, good, go maith. Pól Ó Muirí
Moonwalking with Einstein Joshua Foer
Penguin, £8.99
If you've had one of those experiences recently where your car keys disappeared into thin air, or your Pin vanished like the snows of yesteryear, get ready to be astonished by the feats of memory chronicled in this book. Foer claims at the outset that he, like the rest of us, is a key-loser and Pin-forgetter, yet within a year of discovering the art of memory training he found himself in the finals of an international memory championship. He uses a technique called "the memory palace", which involves coming up with wild and wacky images – hence the book's title – and placing objects in the rooms of a house that's familiar to you. (Sounds simple until you try it.) But this book isn't a how-to so much as a joy-of, with a cast of extraordinarily memorable characters, among them the autistic savant Kim (Rain Man) Peek, who can forget nothing, and the man known as EP, who can remember nothing. Wide ranging, witty and smart as a whip. Arminta Wallace
