Moral Formations: Discipline and Religion in the Irish Army, 1922-32 by Daniel Ayiotis (Eastwood Books, €20)
Replacing the Irish Republican Army that had fought the War of Independence with a “National Army” that would defend the nascent Irish Free State encumbered the first government as it confronted the threat and then the reality of the Civil War. Ayiotis, who is director of the Military Archives, draws extensively from the archives, and other sources, to show how the Department of Defence and Army GHQ created a command structure and codes of discipline, while Catholic chaplains demanded chapels in every barracks for Masses, retreats and sodalities, and the Medical Corps sought to ensure sanitation and hygiene while fighting “the twin vices of drink and venereal disease”. Ray Burke
A Fool’s Kabbalah by Steve Stern (Melville House, £16.99)
A Fool’s Kabbalah unfolds as a dual narrative set against the wreckage of postwar Europe, where wit becomes not only a refuge but a form of resistance. With precision and dark lyricism, Stern crafts a meditation on survival, grief, memory, and the strange absurdity of history. Gershom Scholem, a renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, sets out to salvage Jewish texts destroyed by the Nazis, while Menke, a shtetl trickster, faces a very different fate. The novel moves between biting irony and aching sorrow, its language crackling with echoes of Kafka and Beckett. Stern’s prose is elegant and richly imaginative, balancing pathos with philosophical insight. He doesn’t offer easy solace – only a raw, unflinching reckoning with history’s weight. A beautifully crafted novel of intelligence, compassion, and surprising moral grace. Adam Wyeth
Motherland: A Journey through 500,000 Years of African Culture and Identity by Luke Pepera (W&N, £22)
Pepera has set himself an ambitious task in journeying through the history of a people that “extend[s] all the way back to the beginning of our species”. “Journey” is the appropriate word, as the author focuses on sharing the essence rather than penning a comprehensive history which, he muses, would take several lifetimes given the “continent’s vastness and the sheer immensity of varied peoples who have lived there”. In order to do so, Pepera reaches beyond the lens of colonialism and the Transatlantic Slave Trade - which occupy a culturally important but rather brief part of the continent’s history - focusing rather on topics ranging from ancestral veneration to matriarchal societies, oral storytelling and its influence on modern-day rap music, and how the dead live on in African societies. An informative, enlightening read. Brigid O’Dea
