This week's releases reviewed
The Infinities
By John Banville
Picador, £7.99
Humankind has always provided entertainment for the gods, that famously opportunistic bunch who refuse to play by the rules of even the worst-run boarding school. Their ungod-like presence further subverts the unhinged Godley household. Old Adam, a celebrated physicist, lies comatose, apparently dying. Memories and guilt are playing havoc with his mind. In a story partly narrated by Hermes, who observes his predatory old dad, Zeus, stalking Godley's bored actor daughter-in-law, the stricken Godley proves far more astute than his family. His bewildered son attempts to make the best of life in the battered family home, where his alcoholic mother drifts aimlessly and his sister, Petra, wasting her dreams on a cad more interested in her father, seeks comfort in ritualised self-mutilation. Banville's wonderfully knowing, stylish, sophisticated comedy, where Shakespeare meets Beckett, is an earthy delight; rich in astounding images, laconic asides and vivid characterisation. With echoes of his virtuoso Mefisto(1986), The Infinities, ever clever, always kindly, encapsulates the horrific comedy of being alive. Eileen Battersby
A Single Swallow
Horatio Clare
Vintage, £8.99
"In your hand a swallow weighs little more than a full fountain pen, yet twice every year it makes a journey of a scale and precision unmatched by our mightiest machines." Clare travels that journey from the South Africa from which his father was banned for opposing apartheid to the Welsh hillside where his mother raised him, his quest to test the beliefs he had been taught: that people, regardless of creed or colour, are equal. He takes three months to make the 6,000-mile journey; a swallow does it in 27 days. The problem is that swallows do not migrate en masse or all take the same route. Local difficulties prevent Clare from taking the direct route, including crossing the Sahara, the most critical and mysterious part of the swallow's whole journey. He encounters another migration along the way – people leaving their families in the poor south to seek a better life in the north. All are certainly not equal. This is a book of rare lyrical beauty. Brian Maye
Lark Termite
Jayne Anne Phillips
Vintage £7.99
In an epigraph to her lyrical Lark and Termite, Jayne Anne Phillips pays homage to William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury,and Lark and Termiterecalls Faulkner both thematically and formally, exploring themes of war, memory, family, loss and sexual awakening, and alternating the narratives of several characters. Phillips's characters, the sensual, beautiful and nurturing Lark and her damaged, angelic, much-loved brother Termite – "He's like a hum that always hums so the edge of where I am is blunt and softened" – are alive and intimately rendered; their warmth suffuses the novel like low-burning embers. The book itself hums with the characters' individual voices, and its main theme is the ties that bind them – ties of blood and the ties of protective, erotic and at times redemptive love. Eimear Nolan
All Names Have Been Changed
By Claire Kilroy
Faber, £7.99
Following her forays into art restoration and classical music in All Summerand Tenderwire, Claire Kilroy excavates the hallowed ground of Literary Tradition for her third novel, All Names Have Been Changed.It's the 1980s, and Dublin is stalked by recession and thugs in shiny tracksuits. Inside the walls of Trinity College eight students embark on a creative writing course with a novelist known, simply and mostly reverently, as Glynn. A lot more imbibing than inscribing is done by all, however, and as the academic year turns, the wheels come off big-time. Part literary satire, part gothic coming-of-age drama, part hymn to the highs and lows of Dublin itself, All Names Have Been Changedis a rich, buttery, finger-licking feast of a book with stylistic treats on pretty much every page. As for Glynn, the pompous, womanising literary has-been who's a legend only in his own back catalogue, well. It couldn't happen in real life. Could it? Arminta Wallace
The Housekeeper and the Professor
Yoko Ogawa
Vintage, £7.99
Yet again, the extraordinary Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa casts her spell in this gentle tale of mesmerising pathos. The professor has lived his life through the beauty of numbers. Now they are all he has. Having suffered severe head injuries in a car accident, he no longer has a memory and can only recall what happened during the previous 80 minutes. For the young housekeeper, the candid, practical narrator, life is about hope. A single mother who works for an agency specialising in home help, she is the 10th housekeeper to arrive at the professor's little house, which stands a short distance from a larger one in which his controlling, widowed sister-in-law lives. Each morning the housekeeper must re-introduce herself to the professor. When her 10-year-old son joins the little world created by her for the professor, the boy shares his passion for baseball with the academic and they build a friendship. Eileen Battersby
