A selection of paperbacks reviewed.
Horse Latitudes
Paul Muldoon
Faber, £9.99
Paul Muldoon is a force of nature. His 10th collection, Horse Latitudes, may show signs of middle age spread, but his music, tone and delight in language remain razor sharp. That his sleep-fuelled thoughts, on waking, could turn him into a poetry machine, might signal danger, or whatever makes him riff obsessively through "something else, then something else again" lead to flippancy, has been well documented. But it's worth the ride.Twenty years living in the US, he still pulls at the stitches of Ireland's moth-eaten fabric, writes moving elegies, inserts himself in an egg to peck out a family secret and tosses out random texts to Tom Moore. From his Princeton redoubt, from his inner room filled with dictionaries, from his love of all things contrary and the nag and pull of The Old Country - at whatever remove , we are lucky to have him. This is a marvellous book.- Gerard Fanning
Afterwards
Rachel Seiffert
Vintage, £7.99
Rachel Seiffert's second novel takes up where her Booker-nominated The Dark Room left off. Northern Ireland and Kenya replace wartime Germany as Seiffert revisits her familiar theme of the moral and ethical dilemmas created by war. Alice's boyfriend, Joseph, is a former squaddie traumatised by an incident at a Border checkpoint in South Armagh; her grandfather, David, is an ex-RAF pilot who once bombed civilians in 1950s Kenya. When Alice asks him, "How could you have lived somewhere like that, at such a time, and not have been aware what was happening?" she pinpoints a dilemma that haunts both men. Communication - or rather its absence - lies at the heart of this novel, and it is only when one man begins to talk that the barriers created by silence are broken down. Seiffert gives them voice with sensitivity and insight. - Freya McClements
Ship of Dreams
Martina Devlin
Poolbeg. €14.99
When Martina Devlin discovered that her great-granduncle was among those who perished in the bitter Atlantic waters in which the "unsinkable" Titanic sank in 1912, she found the impetus to create a glimpse of what life in New York might have held for the survivors. Among Devlin's characters is Nancy Armstrong, the pregnant 18-year-old bride of a New York millionaire who gave up his lifeboat seat to Limerick-born Hannah, also pregnant and facing life without her fiancé who was sailing with her to a new life in America. Divided by class but grappling with the common fears of life without a husband, their lives become connected with many of their fellow survivors. This snovel is a page-turner with a heart, a new take on a maritime disaster that still captures the imagination almost a century later. - Claire Looby.
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Picador, £7.99
Never can ash have been used to such relentlessly bleak literary effect as in Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which sees a father and his young son struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. They walk south along the titular road, scavenging for food, trying to avoid the menacing cannibals who roam the landscape. Being McCarthy, though, this is more "Sad Max" than Mad Max, a ruminative, sparse work of the imagination. In this nightmarish future, thick clouds block out the sky and a thick layer of ash coats every surface: the distracted, forlorn narration offers no chinks of light; so wretched is the world created, you feel the pages might turn to dust in your hands. The convincing authenticity of this world really chills, and raises the novel from sci-fi experiment to the level of ominous warning - this world and this life, we must never forget, is fragile. - Davin O'Dwyer
Passionate Minds
David Bodanis
Abacus £9.99
Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire met in 1733 and were lovers and companions on and off until Émilie's early death in 1749. Theirs is a story of mutual passion and shared enthusiasm for literature and science set against a background of corrupt pre-revolutionary French society. Voltaire's enthusiasm for Émilie was such that she almost diverted the great man of letters toward science; she had absorbed the then novel Newtonian physics, her greatest achievement being a French translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica. The author's research is thorough and his notes on sources are extensive, although Émilie's scientific work deserves a more detailed analysis. Bodanis's prose is, however, quite breathless and suffers occasionally from stylistic infelicities: the lovers arrive at their chateau "and there went at it some more". Voltaire and Émilie were much more romantic than that. - Tom Moriarty
City of Lies
RJ Ellory
Orion, £6.99
There's a riveting plot at the centre of this frustrating thriller: John Harper, a vaguely unhappy Miami journalist, is suddenly called home to New York, where he learns that his father, a man he never knew and long assumed to be dead, is actually alive and in hospital, the victim of a seemingly random shooting. Harper is also shocked to discover that Dad is a very important made man in the New York mob, and has entered into an uneasy alliance with rival gangsters to pull off a big-score series of robberies. When Ellory keeps his focus on the criminals (most of them, interestingly enough, Jewish) he imagines some marvellously terse scenes, and there's enough intrigue and surprises (just) to fill some 450 pages. Unfortunately, as a protagonist Harper is so passive he comes across as catatonic, and the author's faux-Chandler writing style is pretentiously hard-boiled. - Kevin Sweeney