This week' s releases reviewed
100 Must-Read Prize Winning Novels
Nick Rennison
AC Black, £6.99
Maligned literary-prize judges will heave a collective sigh of relief on seeing this snappy volume, which gathers together 100 prize-winning, often excellent novels. Even if the first entry weren't Peter Ackroyd's wonderfully baroque Hawksmoor(1985), there would be sufficient gold dust to ensure one's attention: William Golding's Rites of Passageand JG Ballard's Empire of the Sunare included, as are JM Coetzee's second Booker victor, Disgrace, Charles Johnson's superb 1990 National Book Award winner, Middle Passage, Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark, Adam Thorpe's Ulverton, Alasdair Gray's Lanarkand Andrei Makine's L e Testament Français. Several International Impac Dublin Literary Award winners, including David Malouf's Remembering Babylon, Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, Colm Tóibín's The Master, Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horsesand Edward P Jones's The Known World– although listed only for its Pulitzer win – also feature. Having read 96 of the 100, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Eileen Battersby
The Devil and Mr Casement
Jordan Goodman
Verso, £10.99
The "devil" is Julio César Arana, whose Peruvian Amazon Company administered a vast rubber empire in the Amazon rainforest and used Indians as slave labour. The British government investigated the company's practices because it was registered in London, had British directors and employed Barbadians, British subjects at the time. Roger Casement, who had won fame for his exposure of Belgian atrocities in the Congo rubber trade, was sent to the Putumayo, where he compiled evidence of torture, mutilation, mass rape and murder of the native Indian population. His report, for which he was knighted, provoked outrage and led to an investigation by a select committee of the House of Commons, but little was done. His experiences in Congo, and particularly in the Amazon, turned him against imperialism, strengthened his nationalism and set him on the road to his death. This carefully researched book enhances his humanitarian reputation. Brian Maye
The Cost of Living
Mavis Gallant
Bloomsbury, £10.99
Far closer in style to Cheever or Updike than she is to Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, a sophisticated hybrid, ensures that her Canada exists at a remove. This volume of 20 stories, all but three of which were initially published in the New Yorker, is a book in its own right. For readers of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant(1997) it is essential reading. These are the early works in which Gallant, initially a working journalist, established her enduring theme of displacement. She left Canada and settled in Paris in 1950; it provided her the distance from her homeland. Her astute intelligence has also ensured that she has remained at an equal remove from France. She continues to be alert to "the well-bred Parisian voice that silences stone". Feel for character is her gift; plot is almost irrelevant. The title story, written in 1962, is a benchmark narrative: read it and then read on. Eileen Battersby
Twice Condemned: Irish Views of the Dreyfus Affair
Richard Barrett
Original Writing, €12.99
When the Jewish artillery officer Alfred Dreyfus was wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, in 1894, charges of anti-Semitism were levelled at the French government that bitterly divided liberals and conservatives in France and elsewhere. Richard Barrett reveals that the body of opinion expressed in the Irish press about the affair was quite untypical. His short, essay-style chapters reflect the political fragmentation of 19th-century Ireland with examinations of nationalist newspapers, unionist comment, Catholic periodicals and the Irish expatriate press. Although some anti-Semitic criticism appeared in Arthur Griffith's United Irishman, by and large Irish attitudes to the Dreyfus Affair had very little to do with Jews. Rather, the pro-Dreyfus position adopted by Britain was seen as hypocritical in the eyes of Irish nationalists and underlaid varied comment on social justice, anti-Dreyfusardism and sectarianism. Point-scoring was certainly integral to fin-de-siècle Irish politics. Barrett presents this in a unique and notably accessible way. Sarah McMonagle
A Bouquet of Barbed Wire
Andrea Newman
Serpent’s Tail, £7.99
The original television adaptation of Andrea Newman's taboo-busting novel shocked 1970s audiences with its frank depiction of infidelity, lust and incest. Republished to accompany a new reworking, already screened on UTV and coming soon to TV3 , the novel chronicles a summer in the life of the Mansons. Spoilt eldest daughter Prue becomes pregnant by her teacher, prompting her devastated father, Peter, to begin an affair with his secretary, and by story's end, as Clive James commented, "everybody had been to bed with everybody else except the baby". Newman's depiction of sexual and psychological tension remains gripping, but her subject matter has lost much of its power to shock. More striking are the social mores it chronicles, but it is the fast pace and snappy dialogue that ultimately allow the novel to transcend the time it so vividly captures. Freya McClements
