Now I Am Here by Chidi Ebere (Picador, £14.99)
Written from the perspective of an officer facing violent death, Now I Am Here is a confession of horrifying wartime sins, addressed to his lover. Nobody is named, and the countries involved are kept purposefully unidentifiable. While a fascinating subject, unfortunately the pomposity of the language distracts from the story (perhaps this overblown quality is meant to represent the officer’s incipient madness, I’m not sure). Regardless, the main issue is his lack of depth. I longed for insight into his motives; an exploration of his willing participation in such monstrous evil (somewhat insouciantly, he explains it away as an egoistic love of the uniform). Overall though, less repetition and more characterisation could have made this truly brilliant, and I’ll look forward to whatever Ebere writes next. Lucy Sweeney Byrne
The Stamp of Beauty by Fionola Meredith (Dalzell Press, £14)
Meredith’s debut novel sees Leni, an aspiring writer and unhappily married young mother, struggling with mother issues of her own. Leni is spurred on to submit an article about parenting to a local Belfast newspaper when family finances become tight. A meeting with the newspaper’s misanthropic editor, Roddy Riseborough, leads to a dysfunctional, age-gap affair into which Leni’s self-centred mother, Patti, inevitably inserts herself. Seeing and being seen are central to the story as Roddy spies on his neighbours at their bath time, and Patti harks back to her career as a photographer cut short by her love of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl as a “feminist” trailblazer. In the end, it’s the characters’ despicable selfishness and long-held secrets that prove to be their undoing. An interesting read. Claire Looby
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Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories by Lore Segal (Sort Of Books, £8.99)
In the “Ladies’ Lunch” half of the book, five close friends, erudite and articulate New York nonagenarians, meet for their monthly lunches where they start out discussing their philosophical agenda but invariably puzzle over the enigmas and affronts of ageing. The next part of the book consists of three stories which throw light on Lore Segal’s characters’ backgrounds. The narrator of Dandelion, like Segal herself a Kindertransport refugee from Vienna, recalls a walk with her father in the Alps on their last ever family holiday together. Making Good is the standout story, where a rabbi tries to build bridges between Jewish exiles from Austria, and Austrians with pro-Nazi antecedents; it’s moving and powerful. The three pieces of memoir which round off the book contain many perceptive observations on human nature. Brian Maye
