Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye on the latest crop of paperbacks including Anthony Beevor's Berlin: the Downfall 1945 and Ian Thomson's biography of Primo Levi.
Berlin: the Downfall 1945. Anthony Beevor, Penguin, £12.99
Cornelius Ryan's account of the fall of Berlin, The Last Battle, is now nearly 40 years old and quite out of date. Beevor, a more scholarly writer, follows up his classic, Stalingrad , with a book which should surely head the field for years to come. By the spring of 1945 the Western Allies were already over the Rhine, but for Berliners - and indeed for almost all Germans facing east - the real nightmare was the Russian hordes pouring across the Oder. The orgy of rape and destruction which accompanied the Soviet armies was at least partly revenge for what they themselves had suffered, but it still makes traumatic reading. Though Berlin, encircled and already blasted by years of aerial bombing, had few real defences, the Russsians had a hard fight before they planted their banners on the Reichstag. A hypnotic book, but also a deeply saddening one. - Brian Fallon
Primo Levi. Ian Thomson, Vintage £8.99
When the Italian writer Primo Levi committed suicide in 1987 most theories about his motivation centred on the supposed long-term effects of his experiences in Auschwitz and in particular on the phenomenon of "the guilt of the survivor", a topic he had addressed in his book The Drowned and the Saved. As his biographer points out, however, Levi suffered for much of his life from crippling clinical depression and any attribution of a particular motive for his suicide is simply built on air. Thomson places the life of this lucid and humane thinker in the intellectual context of post-war Italy. What emerges is a picture of a stubborn truth-teller, a man with a huge talent for friendship but a troubled family life and a writer whose literary range was more ample and varied than his primary reputation as a Holocaust witness would suggest. - Enda O'Doherty
Unless. By Carol Shields, 4th Estate, £6.99
Reta Winters, nee Summers, though better known as a professional translator, is also the author of an unexpectedly successful comic romance. Her domestic life as the wife of a doctor and mother of three daughters, also appears to be ordered, as tidy as her comfortable home in rural Ontario. She has good friends and has another book to complete. Everything seems perfect until her previously happy 19-year-old university student daughter takes to sitting silently on a street corner. Unless is a dark, deceptively philosophical novel exploring multiple truths and the panic that can lurk behind outward calm. Shields has always been a polite but innately subversive writer, and this 2002 Booker runner-up is confessional, honest, and unnervingly angry. Reta is a wry, likable narrator with a subtle grasp of the small defeats and vital compromises essential to survival. - Eileen Battersby
The World Below. Sue Miller, Bloomsbury, £6.99
When Catherine Hubbard, a thoughtful, sunny natured, twice-divorced teacher in San Francisco with three adult children, learns, at the age of 52, that she has inherited her grandmother's house in Vermont, the outer frame of this novel's plot drops into place, and, as with all good stories, there is a twist in the tail. Sue Miller easily persuades her reader to experience a layered (rather than chronological) tale of four generations as it moves between the crises of vividly realized characters. Middle-class America of the 1850s sits easily with 20th-century San Franciscans. The spirit of Willa Cather hangs over the novel, so there is neither self-abasement nor overwrought drama as the family memory bank is excavated by means of dialogue, diary-reading and reflection. - Kate Bateman
The Hunters: Two Short Novels. Claire Messud, Picador, £6.99
The first of these novellas, 'A Simple Tale ', is just that: the story of a young Ukrainian woman who flees a workcamp in Germany during the second World War, marries a Polish fellow-survivor and makes a new life in Canada, working as a cleaning lady for a number of affluent families. The second, 'The Hunters ', can also be summed up simply: it's the story of a summer spent by an American academic alone in London and his/her acquaintance (the character's gender is never revealed) with the woman who lived in the flat downstairs. Through these apparently unprepossessing stories, Messud considers survival, death, love, memory, family bonds, isolation: the strange truths of our existence. She sees the extraordinary details of ordinary lives and describes them in prose that is calm, unadorned, yet full of subtlety, its seeming spareness a testament to her skill. - Cathy Dillon
Home Fires. Shivaun Woolfson, Atlantic £7.99
This book's subtitle, 'A Survivor's Story', pretty much says it all - this belongs in the newly busy 'biography as therapy' genre. The writer was born in Dublin, in the late 1950s, into an affluent Jewish family. Her mother suffered a breakdown and left home when Shivaun was quite young and she revisits that period in her life often during her own self-imposed exile in Miami. She soon has two children and lives in the shadowy world of the illegal alien in America. After several abusive relationships with men, she falls in love with a vivacious but equally damaged woman. For all her rebellion, even into her 40s her father is still paying her bills. Her descriptions of life on the edge and in the ageing Jewish community in Miami are sharp and skilful. However it's easy to see what the writer is getting out of the book, not so the reader. - Bernice Harrison