The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks.
Roy Keane: The Autobiography Penguin, €9.99
Given the success of the hardback, which sold 130,000 copies in Ireland, it's hard to imagine anyone with an interest in Roy Keane's story not already being in possession of this Eamon Dunphy-ghosted autobiography. The paperback includes a new chapter covering events that followed the hardback's publication, notably Brian Kerr's attempts to get Keane to return to play for Ireland and a radically edited version of the most controversial passage in the hardback - Keane's account of his challenge on Alf Inge Haaland. There is, predictably, no softening in his view of Mick McCarthy, nor of Niall Quinn. Mary Hannigan
Rapture Susan Minot Fourth Estate, £6.99
Kay and Ben are beaten survivors of a love affair that never had a chance. Ben was already in a long-haul relationship with Vanessa, whom he didn't love but couldn't possibly leave, when he met Kay. A year after finally breaking with Ben, Kay feels she is strong enough to collect her portfolio from his office. Perhaps they can have a friendly lunch? Small hope. They quickly end up back in her bed. Minot takes us through their final sexual encounter, from both their perspectives. This is an emotionally shrewd and intelligent book from a very good writer. Kay confronts her weakness, Freefall Ben his duplicity and cowardice. Minot, the truth teller, takes no sides. Anyone who has ever come limping out of what they thought, or hoped, was true love will wince with recognition. Eileen Battersby
The Reason of Things: Living with Philosophy A.C. Grayling Phoenix Books, £7.99
Far from being an abstract academic discipline, philosophy is so much a matter of everyday life that its tomes should be placed on kitchen shelves, alongside cookbooks and first-
aid guides; thinkers from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt deal in the timeless, mundane matters that make us human. In his pithy weekly columns in the Guardian's Saturday Review, A.C. Grayling showed this with skill and subtlety, treating moral and cultural questions in the context of real, current situations. Now Phoenix has brought together many of those essays, as well as some deriving from reviews of particularly stimulating books, to create an intriguing, entertaining collection touching on everything from religion to remembrance, credulity to cloning, sex to slavery. Grayling is a careful arbitrator of the great philosophers' arguments. On the ancient sites of their wisdom, his own insights and consolations sparkle like bright new stones.
Belinda McKeon
The Burned Children of America Foreword by Zadie Smith Hamish Hamilton, £10
In her introduction to these short stories by 19 of the brightest and best young US writers, Zadie Smith makes much of a thread of sadness running through the collection. The melancholy line is there in the book's title, which might also be seen by some as suggesting that this is a response to 9/11, but the stories were written before that seminal event. This rather undermines the collection as a state of the Union offering, indeed especially given that most of the contributors actually don't live too far from Ground Zero. Nevertheless, there is some wonderful stuff here from A.M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, Matthew Klam, Jeffrey Eugenides, Amanda Davis, Stacey Richter, George Saunders and dogged Dave Eggers. John Moran
I'll Take You There Joyce Carol Oates Fourth Estate, £7.99
It is the heady early 1960s on Syracuse University campus. The narrator has won a scholarship which takes her away from life on a farm in Strykersville with her grandmother and three older brothers who have ignored her for most of her life. Her father was merely an intermittent visitor and her mother died soon after she was born. Not an auspicious start! But the fun for the reader starts when she joins the Kappa Gamma Pi sorority where she fails to learn social graces, falls foul of the hideous English housemother and is only tolerated by the Gammas when they need help with term papers. There are at least three marvellous setpieces in this tri-partite novel - one is when the sorority is en fête and Anellia confesses to a well-to-do "alum" that she has a small amount of Jewish blood in her veins. The second is when she has sex for the first time with an older, black philosophy student in his hideously grimy room and when he takes her to dinner in a decent restaurant. Kate Bateman
The Plague Race Edward Marriott Picador, £7.99
The words "bubonic plague" can still send a shiver down the spine; few things are more frightening than a disease which wiped out half of Europe in the 14th century and which has reappeared periodically, and catastrophically, ever since. Its last major appearance was in Hong Kong in 1894, and the subsequent attempt to stop the spreading of the disease is the subject of this fascinating book. It tells the stories of two rival researchers, the brave but solitary Frenchman Yersin and the politically-minded Japanese scientist Kitisato, who raced to find the cause of - and a cure for - the Black Death. The Plague Race is a story of science, disease and colonial prejudices, and it's as gripping as any thriller. It's also disturbing - as Marriott warns us, plague still "squats on our doorstep", and hypochondriacs might want to avoid reading the final chilling chapters, which look at the number of plague- carrying animals currently lurking in the US alone. Anna Carey