Keegan: The Man Who Was King by Anthony Quinn (Faber, £14.99)
Kevin Keegan is hardly an enigma wrapped in a riddle, but he always had charisma, chutzpah. He was a hero to Anthony Quinn, who wants us to remember him for more than that moment when, wearing oversized headphones and doing a lot of finger jabbing during a post-match interview, he delivered the unsurpassable soundbite: “I will love it if we beat them.”
It’s a breezy essay of his life and career and, like Keegan’s management style, it works entertainingly to a point. Quinn’s sources are secondary so there’s no side to ‘Special K’ we don’t already know. The author likes to hammer Keegan, who had a tough upbringing, a little too cheaply too for focusing on making as much money possible in a short career. Imagine a footballer ever being thus? NJ McGarrigle
Brick Dust by Craig Jordan-Baker (époque press,£9.99)
The Nacullians, a disperse working class Anglo-Irish family, centred in the author’s debut, feature once again in this sprawling saga. Our arch omniscient narrator, an archivist, or “hoarder of documents”, maps the history of the family as they rack up library fines, build bridges, die and track down long lost relatives.
Like its predecessor, Jordan-Baker’s sophomore novel is very much metaliterary in style. The maximalist prose, replete with gallows humour and elaborate wordplay, juxtaposes the mundane realist plot. Yes, Nacullians marry, migrate and Morris dance, but it’s the mundanity of these life events that takes focus. Thematically, memory, what stories are told and who gets to tell them underpin the novel, although the arc-less plot itself is monotone in nature. No doubt an intelligent book, but one to appeal to the mind, not the soul. Brigid O’Dea
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Even Still by Celia de Fréine (Arlen House, €15)
Celia de Fréine’s first short story collection in English takes up the challenge of recounting ‘what it was really like growing up in this arsehole of a city during the Fifties and Sixties’. Though majoritively Dublin-based, the stories venture across the border and around the country. The Troubles are not her subject, but they make themselves known, digging into the very seams of the collection. The dozen or so (mainly female) narrators navigate class, gender and social barriers by retreating into their rich inner worlds, their ‘wild imaginations’.
De Fréine is a remarkable world-maker; her narratives often overlap, with both themes and characters creeping between stories. At once wistful for and disdaining of the past, Even Still holds a paradox of hope and retribution in its pages. Emily Formstone
