A selection of paperbacks reviewed by The Irish Times.
Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern John Gray Faber, £7.99
John Gray, Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, and the natural heir to Isaiah Berlin, is the most clear-thinking of contemporary political philosophers. His best-known books are False Dawn and Straw Dogs.This new book is a characteristically unflinching assessment of the crisis in which we find ourselves post-September 11th. Al Qaeda, far from being a throwback to medievalism, is, according to Gray, a product of globalisation, whose "closest precursors are the revolutionary anarchists of late 19th-century Europe". Gray's is essentially a tragic vision, and as such is consolatory, despite the harsh truths he has to tell. He also writes beautifully. - John Banville
The Missing Andrew O'Hagan Faber, £7.99
In this enthralling and disturbing book, O'Hagan delves into his fascination with those who lie between the living and the dead - the missing. Part memoir, part journalistic account, this work stretches from the rough streets of Glasgow in a bygone era to the author's early memories in Irvine - where his interest was aroused by the disappearance of a child - to the sinister confines of 25 Cromwell Street, Gloucester, home of Fred and Rosemary West and final resting place for so many who walked blindly into their own violent mystery. O'Hagan leaves us shaken at the ease with which life, if only a documented one, can be lost and at the brutal truth that time is not essentially a healer. His investigation is moving, compelling, a harrowing depiction of deepest darkest Britain. - Tom Cooney
Brian Moore. A Biography Patricia Craig Bloomsbury, £8.99
At publisher Jack McClelland's stylish house in 1962 during a "glittering affair", Brian Moore "threw away an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the editor of Penguin Books in Canada". The man's voice had irritated him so he steered the woman he was talking to towards "the kitchen for a drink". He was smitten. He divorced his first wife and embarked on an enduring marriage to the great love of his life, Jean Russell. After the chapter "Brian's Jean", the colour and tone of the writing changes from dutiful silver-grey to light gold and Brian Moore of the biography becomes a grounded, rooted person and a writer with fixed abodes. Craig is at pains to show Moore's stance as a sociable man with an edgy temperament that provided him with an angled viewpoint of the life around him - whether as a non-exam passer in division-ridden Belfast, a reporter in Canada or a novelist of many genres. Moore may have left Belfast but, as Craig makes clear, it never left him. - Kate Bateman
Child of My Heart Alice McDermott Bloomsbury, £6.99
Alice McDermott's fifth novel delves behind a disarmingly straightforward plot to trace the now adult narrator's insights into the key summer of her adolescence. Far from the clichéd romp, McDermott develops a complex and disturbing protagonist. At 15, Theresa's beauty attracts older men in the tainted West Egg atmosphere of Long Island - not quite what her working-class parents had in mind when they moved with the hope of exposing her to upwardly mobile potential husbands. She accumulates an entourage of stray children and animals who accompany her as she observes their parents and hers from the verge of the adult world. Her casual commentary is cruel and perceptive as she bears unsentimental witness to the fine line between love and hate, youth and maturity, success and failure. - Nora Mahony
A Place Near Heaven: A Year in West Cork Damien Enright Gill & MacMillan, npg
Writer and broadcaster Damien Enright is a blow-in in West Cork. Poet Edmund Spenser was also a blow-in when, in 1596, he wrote: "Suer it is yett a most bewtifull and sweete Country as any is under Heaven". It seems little of importance has changed in the intervening 500 years. Both men were inspired by the beauty of the ever-changing landscape and the spectacular variety and abundance of wildlife. In his new book Enright takes us on an enchanting journey, month by month through a calendar year, lovingly charting the comings and goings of everything from the humble spider to the magnificent whales that journey past our shores, as well as seasonal effects on our flowers and trees. It is at once a diary, a natural history and an astute observation of rural life. As essential a read to those who like to go out-and-about as a TV guide is to a couch potato. - Martin Noonan
Courtesans Katie Hickman Harper Perennial, £7.99
The five 18th century courtesans featured in this engrossing book were, by any standards, remarkable women. Everything they did they did with style, be it conversation, fashion or (especially) the pleasures of the bed. They were highly cultured women; rich, famous and, most remarkably, independent in an era when this was almost impossible. Much sought after by the wealthy - who else could afford them? - they received large sums of money and expensive gifts, sometimes for services rendered, other times in the expectation of favours to come.
Yet for all their high living theirs was a lonely, hunted life and not all the attention given them was desirable. They sometimes married their patron - rarely a successful career move, as marrying one's mistress sometimes created a vacancy. They also occasionally committed the unforgivable sin of falling in love. Hickman has great affection for her subjects and is most sympathetic to the frailties and failings of her heroines. - Owen Dawson