Irish Times reviewers take a look at the latest crop of paperbacks including Finders Keepers by Seamus Heaney and Gaby Wood's Living Dolls.
Finders Keepers. Seamus Heaney, Faber, £12.99
This new selection of Heaney's prose spans 30 years of "occasional" work - essays, reviews, lectures and broadcasts - with subjects ranging from the books (and indeed comics) of his Co Derry childhood to longer studies of major 20th-century poets and celebrations of particular heroes like Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky. In his meditations on culture and identity we see the young poet anxious to avoid being "swung . . . by the long tail of race and resentment" and alert to the claims of "the other side". "A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish," he wrote in the Listener in 1971, "would take some of the twists out of the minority." All the pieces, short and long, are marked by Heaney's distinctive voice and accent, scrupulous diction and broad learning "easy carried". - Enda O'Doherty
Clara. Janice Galloway, Vintage, £6.99
Making good use of Berthold Lizmann's three-volume biography of Clara Wieck - the child musical prodigy, concert pianist and composer who is best known as the long-suffering wife of the impossible Robert Schumann - Galloway has fashioned a wonderful novel. The urgent, atmospheric prose evokes the atmosphere of 19th-century European, and particularly German, artistic life. Long dominated by her famous music teacher father, Clara then becomes the object of the young Schumann's obsessive interest. Determined to have her, he humiliates her father and gets his way. The rest is history - and true human tragedy. The passive, bewildered Clara, with her confused sense of self, is brilliantly drawn, as are the other characters, particularly Schumann, a genius descending into madness and death. - Eileen Battersby
Living Dolls. Gaby Wood, Faber, £8.99
The oxymoron in the title is almost true. This is the story of mechanical simulations, of mad beliefs and curious spectacles. The author takes us on a fascinating 300-year exploration of humanity's age-old fixation with dwarfs and moving dolls, the more lifelike the better. In other words, a breathing model of Napoleon ("to the astonishment of the medical world"), a machine that could play 12 different melodies, an automaton that played the violin and even one that was famous for its excrement. Dwarfs were treated as mere objects by the curious public - people wanted to believe they were machines and vice-versa. Even Descartes, rational theorist that he was, imagined his doll as his daughter. Much of this erudite tale is related with sensitivity and, for good measure, occasional humour and offers us food for thought, especially with an eye to the future. - Owen Dawson
The Map of Tenderness. William Wall, Sceptre, £6.99
Joe Lyons is thirtysomething, alienated from his family, drifting through a comfortable, unremarkable life. Things appear to be looking up when he begins a relationship with Suzie, a young music teacher - but the world of William Wall is one in which the sinister stuff is never far beneath the surface, and when his mother becomes gravely ill and Joe is summoned back to the family farm, the scene is set for a series of discoveries which puts a whole new spin on the expression "family saga". The dynamics of domesticity and the devastation wreaked by illness are at the centre of this stately dance of life and death, but it's all in the telling: a tapestry of evocative images and subtle rhythmic patterns, Wall's lithe prose is a joy to read. - Arminta Wallace
Tilting At Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport. Andy Miller, Penguin, £6.99
If all you know about sport is that you duck when someone shouts "fore", and if you sing "away, away, away" instead of "olé, olé, olé", then you'll welcome journalist Andy Miller's first book. In the age of soccer-mania and Manchester United plc, sports ignoramuses need an anti-Hornby. Is Miller that messiah? Well, he avoids the clichés of anti-sport journalism and instead embarks on a thoroughly original quest to become a genuine fan. He goes to see Tiger Woods play, begins to "follow" QPR, and seeks to become a golfing great himself by trying miniature golf. The book is funny and humane, but unfortunately lacks the artistry of Fever Pitch. Shame. You'd think the nerds who sat at home writing essays could come up with superior writing to the boys who legged around fields. - Conor Goodman
The Footnote: A Curious History. Anthony Grafton, Faber, £8.99
The average reader often sees a footnote as just an interruption. Noel Coward once humorously confessed that having to read a footnote was akin to having to answer the door whilst in the midst of making love. The love/hate relationship scholars have with the footnote is carefully examined in this entertaining volume. Grafton recounts the footnote's evolution while giving us a shrewd volume of historiography. He demystifies a somewhat academic underworld, revealing the many uses of the footnote, not only to cite sources and provide evidence, but to acquire respect; to buttress against criticism and to exact revenge on fellow historians. He reveals with wit and clarity how footnotes to history give way to footnotes as history and how eventually, "the footnote won its place on the historian's page". - Sophie MacNeice.