Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over a selection of paperbacks including Rose Doyle's Fate and Tomorrow and Giles Foden's Zanzibar.
Shroud. John Banville, Picador, £7.99
Narrated in the late 1980s by the ageing intellectual, Axel Vander, this novel demonstrates the historical specificity of Banville's ostensibly cerebral sense of moral collapse. Banville has always regarded the second World War as mankind's definitive horror, and he has Vander report, obliquely, on the rise and fallout of Nazism while recounting a visit to Turin to meet with a mysterious interlocutor, the suicidal young Irish woman, Cass Cleave. Along with the expected literary and philosophical allusions, the secrets uncovered by Vander's developing relationship with Cass defer to eye-witness accounts of 1930s Europe and the problematic biographies of Paul de Man and Louis Althusser. Lamentations for the public world are brilliantly mixed with privacies: human contact here is as shady as ever in Banville, but Shroud might almost be called a love story. - John Kenny
Star of the Sea. Joseph O'Connor, Vintage, £6.99
Regarding popular narrative accounts at the time and since, the question is often asked: was there silence about the Famine? After the documentary fiction of William Carleton and Liam O'Flaherty, John Banville addressed the question philosophically in Birchwood; but the most startling reply has come with this widely hailed novel, described by O'Connor as a "big, noisy book" about an eponymous coffin ship. Authentic and concocted histories are mixed in a grand entertainment of modes and forms, and complex characterisations encourage nuance in our attitudes to 19th-century Britain. The authorial work quotient is striking, and even readers dissuaded by the shallowness of much of O'Connor's previous fiction will acknowledge that here he is stylistically as well as thematically out on the deep. - John Kenny
Authenticity. Deirdre Madden, Faber & Faber, £7.99
Deirdre Madden's last novel, the 1996 Orange Prize-shortlisted One By One in the Darkness, dealt with life in the key of politics as it traced a week in the life of three sisters in pre-ceasefire Northern Ireland; Authenticity sees her tackle life in the key of art. Set in Dublin, it begins with a chance encounter between a young woman who is involved with a successful painter, and a lawyer who is on the point of suicide. Her spontaneous kindness saves his life, but the question is - as the question always is - what next? Authenticity is a story of light and shade and ambiguous perspective; sharply observed, yet full of warmth and humanity, it is quite wonderful. - Arminta Wallace
Fate and Tomorrow. Rose Doyle, Coronet, £6.99
Storyteller Rose Doyle once more brings Irish history to life, this time with a theatrical tale of a Co Sligo girl from the Big House whose world is turned upside down when her father commits suicide after land reform. The first act is an Upstairs Downstairs portrait of poverty-stricken landed gentry, their loyal servants and what happens when naïve country girl meets amoral theatre folk in Dublin. The surprise comes in the second, when Nessa O'Grady marries an older man working in the rubber trade and heads off to the Belgian Congo. On seeing children's hands severed by the slave-owning colonisers, she realises her husband's cruelty and flees to the Irish consul, Roger Casement. Unsentimental and gripping, this one is a page-turner - while her experiences in the third "act", after she returns to Ireland with a black child, give it a modern-day resonance. - Sarah Marriott
Zanzibar. By Giles Foden, Faber & Faber, £7.99
This is a strange thriller, written, in the main, before September 11th 2001, but painting a frighteningly convincing picture of the activities and ambitions of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. They are revealed mainly through the story of Jack Queller, a CIA agent who worked with Bin Laden during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Queller's story, and those of Nick (a marine biologist working on Zanzibar), Miranda (a US embassy employee) and Khaled (a reluctant terrorist), are connected in a fictionalised account of the run-up to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. Foden has obviously done Trojan research in areas from the forensic procedures followed by the FBI to the hatching habits of turtles, but for the most part he's not too heavy-handed in displaying it. In addition, his vivid evocation of the horrible aftermath of the bombings as well as the clove-scented farmlands, delicate coral reefs and glittering seas of Zanzibar make this an intelligent, enjoyable read. - Cathy Dillon
In The Sixties. Barry Miles, Pimlico, £8.99
Barry Miles has certainly been around: shaking with Allen Ginsberg, Pink Floyd, William Burroughs, Richard Brautigan and the Beatles and moving in most of the pop salons of 1960s London and New York. From art college in the late 1950s to the withdrawal of his services to the underground publication, International Times, in 1970, Miles documents his involvement in the decade that, it seems, pop's culture vultures will never want to forget. It's an engaging read, too, albeit written in a doggedly episodic manner that casts aside fluidity in favour of rolling reminiscences. There's too much of an entertaining nature here to walk away dissatisfied: New York "psychedelicatessens", the commercial versus the avant-garde dynamic within the Beatles, 50-foot long joints and an insider's view of the fragmentation of the UK underground movement. Miles was there - high some of the time yet, lucky for us, smart enough to take notes. - Tony Clayton-Lea