This weeks paperbacks:
Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight
Alexandra Fuller
Picador, £6.99
Fuller's upbringing was unconventional, but the memoir that has emerged is remarkable. Sometimes stalked by misfortune, other times inviting it, her parents moved from England to Rhodesia on the eve of the country's civil war, later moving on to Malawi before finally settling in Zambia. Fuller's mother, haunted by the deaths of three infants, turned to alcohol, while her father struggled to keep farm and family together in the face of political upheaval. Yet this is an unsentimental account, often comic even when it crackles with menace. It is also rich in its evocation of the African land Fuller's family could never quite get to grips with. Highly recommended.
Shane Hegarty
Love in a Dark Time
Colm Tóibín
Picador, £7.99
This collection of 11 critical essays has the form - and feel - of a musical theme and variations. The theme is laid out in 'Roaming the Greenwood': the author aims to investigate the "gayness" of a number of gay writers and artists and examine the ways in which secrecy, innuendo and obfuscation on the subject of their sexuality might have informed or influenced their work. The exploratory variations which follow range from the coolly restrained, (the title piece on Oscar Wilde) to the coldly angry ('Roger Casement: Sex, Lies and the Black Diaries'); from the delightful empathy of 'Elizabeth Bishop: Making the Casual Perfect' to the self-conscious skittishness of 'Pedro Almodóvar: The Laws of Desire'. Cogently argued and full of insight, Love in a Dark Time is serious and stimulating in equal measure.
Arminta Wallace
Angels
Marian Keyes
Poolbeg, €9.99
Just in time for the beach reading season, Poolbeg has released the paperback of Marian Keyes's enjoyable and smart new novel. Maggie Walsh has always been the sensible sister in the chaotic Walsh household - she married her childhood sweetheart, got a responsible job in a law firm and life seemed dull and predictable in suburban Dublin. Her marriage starts to fail and she hightails it off to Los Angeles where she sleeps with a charismatic film producer, flirts with lesbianism and gives herself a rigorous beauty makeover. That's the chicklit part. But Keyes is too smart a writer to leave it at that. Her trademark style is to weave a serious issue in with the fluff and in this, her sixth novel, it's Maggie's painful story of abortion and miscarriages. Keyes is a rare writer in her genre: her characters are as strong as her plot lines and the dialogue sparkles. Tinseltown's preoccupation with surface gives her a great opportunity for fun and she seems to relish it.
Bernice Harrison
Stone Voices, The Search for Scotland
Neal Ascherson
Granta Books, £9.99
Author and former Observer foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson turns his formidable observational talents on his native landscape and looks at the mix of ingredients that went into the making of today's Scotland. Ascherson chronicles the faint and ghostly Pict footprint flickering on the stony stage; he tells of Gaels coming from Ireland to build a seat of power at a rocky fortress on the hill of Dunadd; of Plantation Scots settling Ireland. He tells of Scotland's wars with England, "hurricanes" of military defeat, the Highland Clearances and the crushing of the Lowland Covenanters' rebellion. All of this, he says, resulted in a residual conservatism which today blinks uncertainly at the prospect of independence. But this is no great mischief. What is important, says Ascherson, is that Scotland's older immigrants - Picts, Gaels, Angles and Norse - are better understood. "Scottish identity has never been simple or single," the author argues irrefutably.
John Moran
The Biggest Game in Town
Al Alvarez
Bloomsbury, £7.99
If, like me, you sat happily entranced for six hours recently watching as Jimmy White captured the final of Barry Hearn's made-for-television world championship of poker, then you will be delighted with this reissue of Alvarez's 1983 masterpiece. Alvarez spent a month in Las Vegas in 1981 following the pros as they prepared for the annual World Series of Poker at Binions, and he draws the reader deep into that surreal milieu: it's all about character, and characters. He hears the life stories, learns their strategies, wonders at their coups and their bad beats, and details the drama of the final hands. After all, poker is less about the cards you're dealt and more about who you are and who you're playing.
Joe Culley
The Double Bond - Primo Levi: A Biography
Carole Angier
Penguin, 902pp, £9.99
Fame came late in life to Primo Levi, a Turin industrial chemist whose accounts of his Auschwitz experience, If This is a Man and The Drowned and the Saved, made him the one of the best-known literary witnesses to this unique episode of evil during the 1980s. His suicide in 1987 shocked many of his readers, who had found the calm, wise and balanced narrative personality of his books attractive and strangely reassuring. Levi, however, suffered from clinical depression all his life and had difficult relationships with his wife and mother. Angier's is the second biography of Levi to be published in paperback this year and is longer, more exhaustive and considerably more speculative about his private life than the excellent version of Ian Thomson.
Enda O'Doherty