The latest paperbacks reviewed.
An Evening of Long Goodbyes. Paul Murray, Penguin, €6.99
Charles Hythloday spends his time pottering about in a large house in Killiney, watching old movies and working his way through his late father's wine cellar. But when his sister gets involved with a working-class lad by the name of Frank, Charles's life begins to unravel at an alarming rate. In this delightful début novel, shortlisted for last year's Whitbread First Book award, Paul Murray takes a satirical pop at some unlikely nooks and crannies of Irish society - from greyhound racing to community theatre via Bosnian immigrants. The charm lies in the fact that it all seems effortless, not to mention hugely good-humoured. If you've reached the stage in your reading life where the words "comic" and "Irish" in the same sentence make you shudder, go out and buy it at once. It will restore your faith, and then some. - Arminta Wallace
Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps. Anne Applebaum, Penguin, £8.99
Every educated person knows - and every civilised one accepts - that Hitler killed six million Jews. But how many of his own citizens did Stalin murder? And let us not forget Lenin, with whom the killing started. Anne Applebaum's authoritative history of the Soviet prison camp system offers some, necessarily tentative, answers: 18 million detainees between 1929 and 1953; six million "special exiles", social groups and nationalities deported en masse; 800,000 political executions; deaths in the system from "natural causes" - tragically unquantifiable. While the democratic German state has forced, and continues to force, its people to confront their terrible past, the Russian state and people, Applebaum argues, see the past as "a bad dream to be forgotten". Gulag is an impressive work of scholarship, a compelling, if disturbing, account of human barbarity and a formidable boulder in the path of a dangerous historical amnesia. - Enda O'Doherty
Mayday! Mayday! Heroic Air-Sea Rescues in Irish Waters. Lorna Siggins, Gill & Macmillan, €12.99
On Christmas Eve 1963 Comdt Barney McMahon of the Air Corps took off from Baldonnel Aerodrome in an Alouette III helicopter to answer a distress call from a French trawler 100 miles off the west coast. It was the first mission flown by the recently formed air-sea rescue service. And so begins Lorna Siggins's history of, and homage to, the service and its crews. In scenes reminiscent of The Perfect Storm - a force 11 gale, 80-foot waves and icy seas - she takes us, adrenalised, to the end of a winchman's hoist and safely back again as she recounts some of the operations from the past 40 years, the triumphs, the tragedies and the politics. It is is a fitting tribute to the Air Corps and a reminder of the debt we owe to the professionals who run it. - Martin Noonan
Welcome to Coolsville. Jason Mordaunt, Vintage, £6.99
This is a sassy, spacy, satirical novel set in Dublin in a future unlikely enough to make you chuckle and awful enough to be distinctly plausible. Thus, "Coolsville", or Maymon Glades, a subopolis well west of the Liffey mouth. The media insist that the influx of high-tech money has made it a "cool" place to live; unimpressed locals say the name was coined by ex-cons from WentWest Correctional, aka the "cooler". See? You're smiling already. Confident sans brash, Irish sans stage and definitely sans sentiment, packed with wonderful oddballs and so adeptly plotted that it never drops the ball - not even at the end - Welcome to Coolsville is welcome indeed. Think Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan crossed with an episode of Star Trek featuring a dodgy mogul by the name of J.P. Gillespie. It's a hoot. - Arminta Wallace.
The Good Doctor. Damon Galgut, Atlantic, £ 7.99
Galgut, the former boy wonder of South African fiction, shapes a dark, bleak narrative that compels from the opening sentence to the final line. Frank is a middle-aged doctor in a deadbeat bush hospital. He has long since lost interest in everything. Into his torpor walks jumpy, idealistic Laurence, a young doctor, with whom Frank must now share a room. The eager newcomer initially bothers Frank, yet unintentionally revitalises his consciousness. The more Frank tells us about Laurence and his equally zealous African-American, born-again-African girlfriend, the more we are intrigued by Frank, a wry and candid narrator. With this 2003 Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, Galgut proves he is as strong on those vital moments of slow realisation as he is on creating the setting for each small drama. - Eileen Battersby.
A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. Gil Courtemanche, translated by Patricia Claxton, Canongate, £7.99
This prize-winning bestseller, the first novel by Québécois journalist Courtemanche, seamlessly translated from the French by Claxton, is an unsentimental hymn to a much-loved nation. The country is Rwanda at the outbreak of genocide in 1994. Told from the perspective of fictional Canadian journalist Bernard Valcourt, it reveals how he came to be enamoured of a divided people at their most violent. Brutal and profoundly upsetting, the novel documents the mutilation, torture, rape, and execution of the Hutus in Rwanda while outlining the pandemic spread of propaganda, corruption and AIDS. Simultaneously, in the last luxury hotel in town, the love story of Valcourt and a Rwandan waitress named Gentille provides some respite from the gruesome images chillingly evoked by Courtemanche's detached journalistic prose. - Nora Mahony