Irish Times writers review a selection of this week's paperbacks.
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell
Penguin, £6.99
Austerlitz, a once displaced child from wartime Europe, now a retired architectural historian, sets out to reclaim his lost self. His quest is slow, painstaking, and determined by the past, memory and the dead. This is an elegant, strange, heartbreakingly beautiful performance, less abstract than The Rings of Saturn but as seductive. Having been raised by Calvinist Methodists in Wales, Austerlitz had, as a teenager, been informed of his true identity as the son of a Czech opera singer who had been dispatched to the Terezin ghetto. In old age, he visits the camp where she died and then tracks his father's ghost to Paris. Both elegy and testament, Sebald's meditative, photomontage-like fiction is as elusive as it is allusive. His subtle, majestic fourth book, published shortly before his death, is a masterwork exploring the tensions linking the living and the dead.
Eileen Battersby
The Dig Tree
Sarah Murgatroyd
Bloomsbury, £7.99
In 1860, Robert O'Hara Burke - a Galway policeman known to become lost on his way home from the pub - led an expedition that aimed to be the first European group to cross Australia from coast to coast. The cavalcade immediately became bogged down in the soft ground of the Melbourne park from which it had left, giving an early hint of the tragedy that awaited as it journeyed unprepared into the "ghastly blank" of the continent's centre. While he took a large bathtub, a cedar dining table and oak chairs with him, only 12 bottles of water were packed. Burke and English scientist William Wills succeeded despite themselves. However, their back-up party waited at a desert watering hole for four months, only to abandon it mere hours before they returned, leaving only a message carved in a tree: "Dig 3ft under". Sarah Murgatroyd's account is an utterly fascinating, often jaw-dropping, catalogue of colonial and human folly propelling men ever deeper into catastrophe.
Shane Hegarty
Robert Mitchum: Baby, I
Don't Care
Lee Server
Faber and Faber, £8.99
Everything you've always wanted to know about Bob Mitchum - and a whole lot more besides. Server's biography gives a new meaning to "exhaustive". Fortunately, his prose is perfectly matched to his subject: sharp, ironic, caustic and funny, with an ever-present scent of hard-boiled machismo. Mitchum comes across as extremely talented, intelligent and no-nonsense; in other words, extremely likeable (though his wife, who stayed through thick and thin, would have a more complicated take on that). As for Server's tales of Hollywood intrigue, I can vouch for none of it, but it's still good fun.
Joe Culley
The Algebra of Infinite Justice Arundhati Roy
Flamingo, £8.99
Arundhati Roy is often asked if she is writing another book, to follow her Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things. With the threat of nuclear war hanging over India, she replies: "Another book? Right now? . . . So what kind of book should I write?". Instead, Roy has become a spokesperson for the planet and its needy peoples, writing closely argued, fiery and often poetically beautiful polemics on the injustices of the world. In this collection of articles, written between 1998 and 2001 (some published in the Guardian), she takes on Hindu extremists responsible for state-sanctioned massacres against Muslims in India; world governments and multinationals for their corruption and their plans to privatise such essentials as water; and George W. Bush who, with his pronouncement: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists", provides justification for "butchery".
Sarah Marriott
Promises Promises
Adam Phillips
Faber & Faber £9.99
This effervescent collection of essays ranges across a variety of topics, from the meaning of clutter to the function of fascination via the philosophy of jokes. Each is a stand-alone gem, but the thematic leitmotif of Phillips's argument is that if psychoanalysis is to survive, let alone prosper, in the 21st century, it would do well to move away from the abstract jargons of theoretical science and adopt a more intuitive, literary style of expression. His range of references is stunning - from Freud and Lacan to Peter Ackroyd and Martin Amis via Keats and Shakespeare - his thought process as cogent and refreshing as a dash of lemon juice in the shower.
Arminta Wallace
Chance in the House of Fate - A Natural History Of Heredity
Jennifer G. Ackerman Bloomsbury, £8.99
American writer, Jennifer Ackerman has that wonderful gift of making science interesting to the non-scientist. In this fascinating book, she blends personal and family details (her mother's premature death from cancer, her sister's congenital handicaps and her grandmother's Alzheimer's Disease) with contemporary and historical scientific findings in a non-deterministic and beautifully flowing writing style. At the heart of this book is Ackerman's desire to incorporate new discoveries from the human genome project - in which, for example, strings of DNA were found to be functionless and human genes were found to be transferable to lowly creatures such as the humble fruit fly - into what was already known. Throughout, she marvels at various discoveries yet holds on to a sense that there is still much we don't know. If you read only one science book a year, this one's got to be it.
Sylvia Thompson