The Irish Timesreviews a selection of paperbacks
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk, Harper, £9.99
Robert Fisk's brilliant memoir of three decades covering the Middle East should be required reading for aspiring war correspondents. Contemptuous of the "official" sources that feed their obedient servants in the Western media, the author subscribes to the maxim that seeing is believing - be it hitching a lift with a Russian army convoy through the treacherous mountain passes of Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation; visiting children dying of cancer in a Baghdad hospital thanks to the depleted-uranium munitions dropped on Iraq by allied aircraft during the 1990s; or coming face to face with Osama Bin Laden. This is a savage indictment of the West's hypocritical policies in the region. It seems, as far as the Middle East is concerned, we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of history. Tim Fanning
The Door by Magda Szabo, Vintage, £7.99
This remarkable novel, in which a writer develops an intense bond with her singular housekeeper, was published in Hungary in 1987. Its strength lies in the inspired handling of the narrative voice with its various mood shifts, its burden of guilt and its tone of regret. It is also a tragic love story of profound feeling that far transcends sexual desire. The narrator, the writer, who having been politically silenced for a decade now wants to write, has an ailing husband and her own anxieties. Like a child or an anxious suitor, she woos the bizarre, volatile but utterly human servant, Emerence, whose existence depends on being needed. Half aristocrat, half barbarian, she is on the run from the law and the Church. Hard physical work and being useful have proved her salvation and given her a mythic status in the neighbourhood. Here is a masterclass in the art of fiction writing Eileen Battersby
In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory b y Brian Dillon, Penguin, £8.99
In exploring the cluttered halls of the mind, Brian Dillon takes a journey through the workings of memory, both the cultural and the personal. It centres on the death of his mother when Dillon was young and the sudden passing of his father a few years later, yet expands far wider without becoming flabby or overly indulgent. Alongside his subjective experience, he explores the wider attempts to understand memory. He spends much of the book's first half dealing with his and his brothers' move from their family home, and the ghosts of the objects that once filled the rooms, but he uses it as a lens to sweep from Rachel Whiteread's ghostly mould of a house to Proust's appreciation of how easily remembrance can be triggered. With so many memoirs exploiting personal disaster, Dillon's could have been just standard autobiographical fare, but instead is evocative and moving. A lyrical and philosophical book. Shane Hegarty
An Irresponsible Age by Lavinia Greenlaw Harper Perennial, £7.99
If you have missed Lavinia Greenlaw's novels to date, read An Irresponsible Ageand start working backwards down the list. Funny, personal and grim in a blasé sort of way, it portrays the weird, isolated feeling of being young and supposedly footloose and fancy-free at the edges of London. It is set in 1990 after a decade of power-hungry excess. Juliet Clough and her grown siblings inhabit a dilapidated house on a street not mapped by the all-inclusive A-Z. Together, they muddle through the death of their brother and the arrival of a motley crew of new lovers and babies. The Cloughs inhabit a pocket of moonscape in the big, bustling city they never really see or interact with, coming to terms with difficulties of family, love and health with hilarity and sticking together despite the odds. A fantastic story, recommended for anyone who has ever felt marooned but determined to persevere in the Big Smoke. Nora Mahony
Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde by Alexis De Veaux Norton, $17.95
"As a black lesbian mother in an interracial marriage, there was usually some part of me guaranteed to offend everybody's comfortable prejudices . . ." Add to that mix the fact that poet Audre Lorde's "Oscar Wilde-ish" husband, Edwin Rollins, was himself gay, and it's clear that this is no ordinary life. Alexis De Veaux's deep affection and admiration for her subject is clear throughout this engrossing biography. It is difficult to imagine anyone telling this story better. De Veaux has managed to weave her research (including speaking to Edwin Rollins, who had kept a 20-year silence) fluidly into the narrative of Lorde's life. She emphasises the "transfiguring" effect of adversity on the writer. "Poetry," says Lorde, "was something I learned from my mother's strangeness and my father's silences." Gerard Lee
The City of Falling Angels John Berendt Sceptre, £7.99
It's a good idea to take a city and book-end its story with the burning of its famous opera house; helpful to readers who want to acquire a feel for a place as mesmeric as Venice. The burning of the opera house, the Fenice, is the prop on which this book is mounted - "mounted", as with a gala stage performance. It's a work of scenes and set-pieces with a sleuth-narrator pretending to uncover a motive and unmask the villain of the piece - arsonist or careless caretaker. The bother is with the labyrinthine intrigues, the conspiracies of the residents, and the wars of the Lovetts and Guthries - American, opera-going, opera-funding, art exhibition habitués, owners of palaces on the canals. Together they are excessively demanding of a reader's attention. There is much about this book that is unpleasant, but Venice has a great hold on the imagination, and so I read to the end. Kate Bateman