Friday, September 3, 2010 Previous editions
Listening to Van Morrison
Griel Marcus
Faber and Faber; £12.99
AT a concert in California in 1973, Van Morrison took umbrage at the spotlight illuminating him and barked a terse order from the stage for it to be turned off.
Per Petterson
Random House, €17.99
NOT a lot happens in Per Petterson’s latest novel.
Review: David O’Mahony
Cheyenne Madonna
Eddie Chuculate
Black Sparrow Books, $17.95
SHORT stories are an art. They must be long enough to tell a tale, short enough to be self-contained and vibrant enough to mean something to the reader. Eddie Chuculate’s anthology, Cheyenne Madonna, ticks all the boxes.
Review: Damien Enright
Four Fish
Paul Greenberg
Allen Lane/Penguin; €18
LAST month, the UN forecast that by 2030 an additional 30 million tonnes of seafood per annum will be required to meet global demand.
Margaret Atwood
Virago, €9.50
FOR anyone who liked Oryx and Crake, Atwood’s savage dystopian tale of a world gone horribly wrong, her latest book is a must.
You Do!, by Kes Gray with illustrations by Nick Sharratt (Red Fox €8.80), is a salutary lesson to mothers who ought to think before having a rant.
To Sea and Back: The heroic life of the Atlantic Salmon
Richard Shelton
Atlantic; €18.99
DICK SHELTON is very well placed to chronicle the life of the Atlantic salmon, having been the director of the Freshwater Fisheries Laboratory in Pitlochry, Scotland, for many years.
Review: John O’Mahony
Rain Gods
James Lee Burke
Simon & Schuster; £20.00
John O’Mahony on James Lee Burke, possibly the greatest crime writer of our time, though he is uneasy with the tag
The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver
faber and faber; €10.99
Barbara Kingsolver talks to Sue Leonard about the struggle she had writing her prizewinner, The Lacuna
Stephen Amidon
Atlantic Books, €9
SET in a self-conscious Massachussets college town, Security revolves around a group of disparate characters affected by the sexual assault of a young woman at the home of a local millionaire.
The Young Ireland Rebellion and Limerick
Laurence Fenton
Mercier Press; €16.99
LAURENCE FENTON has written a tantalising introduction to the events leading to the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848.
The Scarecrow
Michael Connolly
Orion; €19.80
YOU don’t become one of the best known names in the world of thrillers for nothing and in this book Michael Connelly flexes his muscles as only a true master of the craft can.
Jonathan Kellerman
Headline, €7.11
JONATHAN KELLERMAN has written over two dozen bestselling crime novels, and Evidence, the sixth in the Alex Delaware series, proves he is getting better with each book.
TWEET, Tweet in the Tree by Julie Fletcher and Anna Lubecka (Caterpillar Books, €6.30) is a handy-sized board book for toddlers aged 18 months who are at the stage of identifying animals and birds. The loud colours and simple shapes, along with easy rhyming read-aloud words, create the perfect bedtime book.
HEARTBREAK is a tiresome, frustrating book. Though marketed as a novel it fails to provide anything in the way of sustained narrative and is instead little more than an exasperating miscellany of thinly-sketched characters and random, disconnected vignettes.
THIS debut novel by Jim Powell is engrossing, sad, funny and satisfying.
ABBOTT’S debut novel centres on Henry, a retired advertising executive who is racked with guilt after the death of a young relative in his care.
A SERIAL killer who preyed on small African-American boys and a dad who told macabre tales of small girls who left the fridge door open – and died ...
THE poet, Louis MacNeice died suddenly in 1963 of viral pneumonia, contracted while recording sound effects in an underground cave in Yorkshire for his last radio play, Persons from Porlock.
AMONG the fascinating real stories to have emerged from this small land area over the centuries, the one of Algerian pirates sneaking into the West Cork village of Baltimore in 1631 and carting off over 100 of its inhabitants is surely ranked among the highest.
GUSTAV Mahler has had many champions since his death in 1911, from conductors Bruno Walter through Leonard Bernstein right up to today and the likes of Claudio Abbado.
THE words shipbuilding and Dublin are not often seen together – Harland and Wolfe in Belfast and the Verolme dockyard in Cork fit much better.
BRET EASTON ELLIS was 19 when he wrote Less Than Zero, a coruscating account of disaffected youth in his hometown, Los Angeles.
IF he wrote about the tribulations of turnip growing or the life story of, say, Noel Dempsey, Peter Ackroyd would still produce a bestseller.
Micka
Frances Kay
Picador; £7.99
FRANCES KAY’S first novel is a searing, uncompromising story about a deprived, neglected child, 10-year-old Micka. It left me enraged and tearful, the first time I’ve cried on finishing a book since Black Beauty.
FOR emergencies such as rain-induced cabin fever or plain old holiday boredom, Party Stencils by Maria Maddocks (Caterpillar Books; €7.55) is just the trick. With jaunty rhymes, colourful pictures and sturdy press-out stencils, this read-cum-creative book will restore sanity. Don’t forget the colouring pencils and paper! Age four to seven.
Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Clay Shirky
Allen Lane; £20
BERTIE AHERN worried about Robert Puttnam’s book Bowling Alone. He worried that we were lost and bewildered on the information highway.
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