Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
Embers, Sándor Márai, translated by Carol Brown Janeway. Penguin, £6.99
Former friends, whose close relationship collapsed in a tangle of betrayal and evasion, meet again after 41 years during which the old feelings and hurts festered. Their confrontation takes place in the castle home of one of them, the General, who has spent years as a recluse in the Carpathian Mountains. First published in Budapest in 1942, this limpid, atmospheric elegy is yet another literary masterpiece from that lost Central European world of the Austro-Hungarian empire. The English translation appeared in the US in 2001. Its success makes the author's tragic story all the more painful. An established Hungarian novelist in the 1930s, Márai was driven from his country in 1948 by the Communists and eventually settled in US where he committed suicide in 1989 unaware of the fall of communism. - Eileen Battersby
The Child that Books Built, Francis Spufford. Faber. £7.99
This is an inspiring and admirably honest memoir of Francis Spufford's childhood and adolescent reading life. An original and brave book, it charts Spufford's early retreat into literature and the personal circumstances surrounding it. At times funny, and always compelling, we journey with him through the solace and joy that came with his early reading experiences, to the more complex realm of literary choice and its personal significance. From The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, to Lord of the Rings, through to the classics and on to science fiction, Spufford resurrects for the reader the magic of fiction while growing up, and the power it wields. At once a book of nostalgia, yearning, psychology and self-discovery, this memoir is written with an understanding and eloquence which will touch all who read it. - Sophie MacNeice
God: A Guide for the Perplexed, Keith Ward. Oneworld, £10.99
Who, or what, is God? More to the point, where is He, when the world seems about to embark on another of the senseless killing binges we call war - and why doesn't He do something about it? If you can even ask those questions, you could probably do with reading this playful yet intensely serious book, which rejects the idea of God as a supernatural person, reviews a range of Western cultural attempts to define the deity, from Aristotle through St Augustine to the movie Alien, and suggests seven ways of approaching the concept of divinity in a post-Holocaust, post-quantum-theory world - none of which involves a bearded ancient in a white bathrobe. A philosopher by training and Anglican clergyman by conviction, Keith Ward's lucidity in the face of complex and often conflicting intellectual arguments, combined with his dry wit and accessible style, make this book as entertaining as it is thought-provoking. - Arminta Wallace
Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children. Michael Newton, Faber, £7.99
The hour we become jaded by tales of feral children - of boys raised by bears, of girls emerging from the woods as snarling ghosts - will be the hour that humanity figures itself out. We can't help but see in them challenges of language, society, evolution and soul. Rousseau, Swift, Defoe and, of course, Kipling delved deep in search of philosophical and creative insight yet, as children starved of language, they have always held a tantalising, frustrating grip on their secrets. Newton's collection of cases is rich in its histories of the feral children, but even more so in its cataloguing of our relationship with them. - Shane Hegarty
Madame du Deffand and her World. Benedetta Craveri, Peter Halban, £11.99
Madame du Deffand's world was primarily that of the French Regency, during which the dissolute Duke of Orleans - whose mistress she was briefly - ruled in the name of his nephew, the future Louis XV. Married to a dull nobleman 10 years older than herself, she reacted by joining a Parisian fast set noted for its sexual libertinism. But her real vocation was as a hostess, not only to fellow-aristocrats but to the wits and philosophes who found her both a good listener and a tart disputer. Voltaire and Montesquieu were among her friends and correspondents, and late in her long life she developed an unreciprocated passion for Horace Walpole, who was much younger than herself. For those with a taste for the dix-huitieme siècle, the book will provide plenty of interest. - Brian Fallon
Flights of Love. Bernhard Schlink. Phoenix, £6.99
The legacy of the past casts its patina over the present, and Germany's tumultuous 20th century colours daily life in sombre tones. Bernhard Schlink's collection of lengthy, emotionally dense short stories describes the generation of today, still struggling on with the albatross of the second World War and the seismic adjustments necessitated by the reunification. These infiltrate the everyday lives and loves of the inhabitants of Schlink's stories: the boy fascinated to the point of obsession by a painting of "that Jewish girl" in his father's study; a couple torn apart by their shady, oppositional past in the dangerous days of East Germany and the Stasi. Related with sensitivity and mastery, Schlink's stories depict people in searching, meditative self-examination as they come to terms with their lives bound by love to others. -
Christine Madden