A selection of paperbacks reviewed
Doctors & Nurses Lucy Ellmann Bloomsbury, £7.99
This is one of the smartest, wackiest novels you'll read this year. Ellmann tells the devastating but hilarious story of self-loathing Jen, who is full of female rage. Jen smells, has dandruff, and is so fat people stare when she walks past. When she's not thinking about cake, cheesy snax and lo-cal white wine, she's obsessing about "labial handbags" . While she'd rather not cure anyone at all, Jen gets a job in a "rural backwater" as a nurse. Lusting after her cleft-chinned boss, she looks for any excuse to rush into the doctor's surgery. Dr Lewis, on the other hand, thinks the world would be better off without women - and patients, whom he often misdiagnoses and occasionally kills. But the doctor and the nurse enter into a tumultuous romance, drawing the reader into a shrewd, angry and vitriolic tale with a fittingly outrageous twist. - Sorcha Hamilton
Admiral William Brown: Liberator of the South Atlantic Marcos Aguinis, translated by Bill Tyson The Admiral Brown Society, €17.95
In 1814, while 44-year-old Trim native Arthur Wellesley had Napoleon's army on the retreat in Spain, another Irishman, 36-year-old William Brown, from Foxford in Co Mayo, became commander of the Argentinian navy. Both men would become living legends. However, Brown's background was far from the silver spoon. He and his father had fled to Philadelphia when William was just 10 years old. Orphaned soon after his arrival, he found work as a cabin boy, and so began an extraordinary adventure that saw him fight for the British against the French, be captured and escape and eventually move to a new life in Argentina. Aguinis's lovingly written biography and the Admiral Brown Society's richly illustrated production is a fitting tribute to the memory of this noble Co Mayo man. - Martin Noonan
Earthly Powers Michael Burleigh Harper Perennial, £9.99
During the French Revolution, secularism soon adopted its own dogmas and savagely defended them. Ironically, it was the incorruptible Robespierre - a deist - who, in 1794, sought to draw a line under the de-Christianising of the revolution by celebrating the Cult of the Supreme Being. During festivities in the Tuileries, he took a torch from the artist David and set alight a cardboard statue of Atheism. Within two months he was a victim of the guillotine to which he had sent so many. In this ambitious account of the doctrines that shaped European thought between the Enlightenment and the first World War, Burleigh posits that secular ideologies such as Jacobinism, Bolshevism and Nazism need to be seen as "political religions". In putting forward his argument, the author laments the horrors committed in the name of these secular deities by totalitarian regimes and, in fine academic tradition, takes swipes at "Marxist" colleagues. - Tim Fanning
Envy Kathryn Harrison Harper Perennial, £7.99
Lust rather than envy is the driving force in Kathryn Harrison's latest novel. The discovery of past betrayals brings psychiatrist Will Moreland's life to the brink of destruction after he attends his college reunion in the hope of meeting his estranged twin brother. Instead, a disturbing encounter with a former girlfriend sparks a series of crises that will eventually force him to face up to his brother's disappearance, his son's death and his wife's subsequent coldness. The chaos this engenders is cleverly mirrored in the character of Will himself as he turns from doctor to patient in an attempt to analyse his life's rapid disintegration. The novel's many explicit sexual encounters are revealed as an elaborate cloak for the emotional scars Will must overcome. A few unlikely plot twists aside, this is a subtle exploration of the complexity of human nature.
Freya McClements Discovering Dorothea Karolyn Shindler Harper Perennial, £8.99
Shindler recounts the story of Dorothea Bates, a fossil-hunter and scientist who became affiliated with the British Museum of Natural History at the age of 21, at a time when that venerable institution was virtually woman-free. Of Irish descent, this intrepid explorer was thoroughly and delightfully British in her attitudes: capable, self-possessed and unflappable. She was dismissive of convention, regulations, ill-health, and indeed anything that stood in the path of her quest for knowledge. With true Victorian passion for the natural world, she was committed to making sense, through empirical means, of all that surrounds us. Her biographer evidently shares the same passion for discovery, unearthing Dorothea's story with engaging eagerness. She makes every effort to transmit the scientific wonder of Dorothea's findings, although the layman may find this inaccessible. Nonetheless, the whole is an impressive, striking account. - Claire Anderson Wheeler
Finding Tom Cruise and Other Stories Anne Chambers Linden, €10.99
Heretofore Anne Chambers's niche was popular histories of heroic Irish women, the outstanding Granuaile, Ireland's Pirate Queen among them. Here she changes pace and direction with her first collection of short stories, nine of them in all, exploring the complicated geography of friendships and isolation, culminating in The Journey Home, shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards and concerning a woman's journey back to her family after being diagnosed with breast cancer. The characters in the stories have no connection with each other, yet they share a common inner voice, seeking explanations, solutions, guidance. This intimate collection confirms Chambers among our most incisive and flexible writers. - Martin Noonan