Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
Love and Sleep, Sean O'Reilly. Faber, £6.99
Niall, a failed writer, returns home to Derry after years spent drifting in Europe. There is nothing nostalgic about his homecoming. Angry, displaced and about as alienated - and alienating - as it is possible to be, he is merely continuing his private war in familiar surroundings. With honourable echoes of Sartre's Nausea, Dostoevsky's Underground Man and the narrator of Knut Hamsun's Hunger, this is a truthful, emotion-driven European novel by a writer who happens to hail from Derry. It is also by far the finest new fiction from the younger Irish writers. Less than two years after his first collection, Curfew and Other Stories, O'Reilly takes one of its stories, 'Rainbows at Midnight', and develops it into a sophisticated mixture of dark apathy and rage. That he succeeds in making the self-absorbed Niall surprisingly sympathetic testifies to his gifts. Eileen Battersby
The Snow Geese, William Fiennes. Picador, £7.99
Birds migrate to cope with the Earth's tilt discovered William Fiennes when, cooped up in his childhood home, he was convalescing from a serious illness. Inspired by Paul Gallico's The Snow Goose, Fiennes decided to fly his own nest to follow the six million lesser snow geese who travel some 4,000 miles from their wintering grounds in the southern US to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. This beautifully written, poetically moving account of his journeys - both inner and outer - brings home the true purpose of travel: to rediscover ourselves and to see the marvels of the world with new eyes. Along the way, a delightful cast of characters befriend the goose man - from the retired hobo on a train to the Inuit who take him hunting on the Arctic tundra - but it is Fiennes's word paintings of the magnificent birds which linger in the mind's eye long after the book is put down. Sarah Marriott
Vigor Mortis, Kate Berridge. Profile Books, £7.99
Inspired by a "family fun day" at a funeral parlour, Kate Berridge charts changing attitudes to a subject which, after a long spell as a taboo, has undergone a rebirth - death. The taboo's origin, she argues, was the crisis of faith engendered by the pointless carnage of the first World War, itself partly a consequence of the Victorian obsession with youthful death. The Victorian section is fascinating, with its morbid cautionary tales, lives spent in mourning, and threats of divine retribution used as a device for sexual repression. Now, after an era in which the death/sex emphasis was entirely reversed, the secular modern world, in the wake of AIDS, has begun to evolve new rituals and attitudes to mortality. But, as Berridge shows, vicarious thrills often take the place of a more thoughtful, humane approach. Ainvigorating read, as the title promises. Giles Newington
The Dressing Station: a Surgeon's Odyssey, Jonathan Kaplan. Picador £6.99
This account of hospital life - a surgeon's odyssey - is at once depressing and uplifting. The author is a South African doctor who devotes much of his medical time to the war fronts around the world, often working under well-nigh impossible conditions. We learn yet again of the folly of war and its tragic legacy of the brutally maimed and dead. Dreadful facilities or lack of proper operating equipment often means the difference between life and death. Occasionally, the author takes time off and occupies himself as a ship's doctor or a flying doctor. Thankfully, he cleverly lightens the literary tone for these somewhat entertaining diversions - his captain is "a man unburdened by charisma". But be warned: you will need a strong stomach for much of this totally fascinating book. Medical devotees may even love it.
Owen Dawson
Misconceptions, Naomi Wolf. Vintage, £7.99
The one thing mothers who have just delivered want to talk about, for hours, is how it was for them. Not enough for Naomi Wolf: this articulate, incisive and honest new-generation feminist wrote an entire book about it, and how the experience of carrying and caring for a child changed her thinking and sensibilities dramatically: "My politics were rebalancing around my belly". But in addition to the section specifically about her experience of labour and the birth of her child - which turned into a nightmarish travesty of the natural and loving experience she had hoped for - Wolf also discusses with vicious clarity the absurdly iconic, beatific blueprint of motherhood women are expected to live up to, while at the same time their duties - the birthing and bringing up of the next generation - is grossly undervalued by society. Christine Madden
Bloomsbury and Beyond: The Friends and Enemies of Roy Campbell, Joseph Pearce. HarperCollins, £9.99
The South African poet Roy Campbell certainly had the knack of making enemies, though he also collected many real friends. In literary London, divided between supercilious Bloomsburyites and the public-school Left, he was a foreign body and in general felt more at home on the Continent. Campbell's outsize, macho personality was out of tune with the times, even if he endured bravely his wife Mary's affair with the predatory Vita Sackville-West. His role in the second World War was marginal, though his personal courage was undoubted. Joseph Pearce at times adopts an almost apologetic tone which is uncalled for - Campbell at his best was a good poet, and his frequent lapses of judgement do not annul his inherent generosity and independence of character. Brian Fallon