A selection of recent paperback releases reviewed
The Letters of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Ed. Christopher Reid
Faber, £14.99
Though one of his generation's most gifted and decorated poets, the name of Ted Hughes reaches us burdened by the tragedies and ambiguities of his private life. Trapped for decades in the lurid, tabloid glare of his relationship with Sylvia Plath, he has too often re-emerged bled of talent and humanity, an insubstantial Heathcliff to her equally reductive Catherine. The Hughes of these letters, however, is by turns naive, arrogant, compassionate, witty, and above all, curious. Attentively edited so as to strike a balance between accessibility and the endearing scruffiness of the originals, these letters are the eloquent testament of an artist in lifelong conflict with an often chaotic and unresponsive world. It's the realisation that artistic genius, too, carries at its core a sense of bemusement and inadequacy that lifts The Letters of Ted Hughes from literary companion piece to that of inspired biographical record. Conor Nagle
The Act of Love
Howard Jacobson
Vintage, £7.99
Howard Jacobson's 10th novel is a moving, thought-provoking and darkly witty story of desire and love. The Act of Loveis a celebration of language and literature and a shocking study of the harm we inflict on the people we love. Felix Quinn is a successful antiquarian bookseller who derives a strange pleasure from his beautiful wife's sexual betrayal. Felix's obsession drives the story relentlessly forward as he plots and manipulates his wife into infidelity. Jacobson creates an intelligent and engaging narrator in Felix, whose perversion is lent a strange nobility by the language in which he describes it. The beauty of his phrasing and the wealth of literary allusions on which he draws make Felix's narrative as compelling as his story is strange. Set in present-day London, but steeped in literature and the classics, The Act of Loveis at once modern and of another time. Eimear Nolan
Burnt Shadows
Kamila Shamsie
Bloomsbury, £7.99
This three-generation novel tracks the horrors of US colonialism and oppression from Nagasaki to New Delhi, Karachi, Afghanistan, even New York: its epic scope is one of the things that must have charmed the 2009 Orange Prize committee, which shortlisted Burnt Shadowsin April. When Hiroko Tanaka's German lover is killed by America's atomic bomb, she goes to New Delhi to visit his sister Ilse, who is married to the British Henry Burton. There, she falls in love with the incredibly handsome Muslim Sajjad Ashraf and flees with him to the newly formed Pakistan. The couples' children, Harry Burton and Raza Ashraf, meet in Afghanistan – first fighting the Soviets, then joining the Americans (with CIA operatives and religious fundamentalists fuelling the plot). The multitude of characters and mastery of international politics are easily digestible with Shamsie's careful prose and subtle voice; her argument that the bomb is responsible for all the world's evils is a harder pill to swallow. Emily Firetog
A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes
Jonathan Bardon
Gill and Macmillan, €14.99
This broad sweep of Irish history covers all the main events and personalities, but what is especially attractive is the way Bardon goes behind these and chooses some idiosyncratic subjects in order to give greater insights into the reality of life as it was lived at a particular time. So, for example, we're given a perspective on the precarious existence of fugitive Catholic priests and of dispossessed land owners who lived as outlaws ("tories") in the woods, hills and bogs during the period of Cromwellian rule. Bardon displays a striking ability to choose the felicitous quotation. Lord Cornwallis, the lord lieutenant, who, with his chief secretary Lord Castlereagh, had the job of ensuring the Irish parliament passed the Act of Union, wrote that he was "negotiating and jobbing with the most corrupt people under heaven," (ie, the members of the Irish House of Commons). The episodic approach means each chapter is self-contained, but the narrative is continuous, ranging from the Ice Age to the 1960s. Brian Maye
Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times
Glenn Patterson
Bloomsbury, £9.99
Novelist Glenn Patterson sets out to unearth the love story of his grandparents, Jack and Kate – how they fell in love across the Protestant-Catholic divide in Lisburn a century ago, and why they didn't marry until years after the birth of their first child. The book's central incident is "Lisburn's Red Sunday" – the 1920 murder of an RIC police chief, followed by the looting and burning of Catholic homes. Patterson wants to believe his grandfather did his best to protect his Catholic partner and daughter during the violence, but cannot be sure. The most fascinating character is Eleanor, Jack's staunchly Unionist mother, who prevented Jack from marrying the Catholic girl he'd gotten pregnant, but was unfailingly kind to the resulting grandchild. Patterson's prose is disarmingly conversational. He pokes gleeful fun at much of the trivia his research throws up, and apologises for his compulsion to add writerly flourishes to a true story. A poignant, tangled and humorous family history. Eimear Ryan
