Irish Times writers review some of the latest releases in paperback.
The Speckled People. Hugo Hamilton Fourth Estate £7.99
If there were any lingering doubts about the quality of this memoir of a German-Irish childhood, they would be swiftly dispelled by a glance at the compendium of reviewers' comments on the cover of this paperback edition. "A masterpiece . . . a work of art . . . astonishing . . . don't be surprised if it bec omes a classic . . ." But of course there are no doubts. How many memoirs have been published in or about Ireland in the past five years? Hundreds, maybe. Maybe more. But Hugo Hamilton's searingly honest, beautifully-written account of growing up dressed in lederhosen and Aran jumpers in a house in Dún Laoghaire where only German and Irish - no English - could be spoken is, quite simply, the best. Quite apart from the brilliance of the telling, his strange, moving, bittersweet story speaks for the child in all of us.
Arminta Wallace
31 Songs. Nick Hornby Penguin Books £6.99
The mind of a musician is a difficult one to fathom, that of a music fan even more so. Here, Hornby lists his favourite songs and albums and, by way of anecdotal explanation, describes just what it is about music that stirs the blood in his trademark succinct and sparse fashion. There are few who would agree with his selection of songs, but even fewer who would disagree with his topography of the musical mind. He is unashamed in his adulation of songwriters, and admits that he writes books because he cannot write music: "Maybe it's only songwriters who have ever had any inkling of what Jesus felt like on a bad day". Hornby loves "the relationship that anyone has with music: because there's something in us that is beyond the reach of words, something that eludes and defies our best attempts to spit it out". This is as good an attempt as you're likely to read.
Laurence Mackin
Gallipoli. L.A. Carlyon Bantam £9.99
In November, 1915, after allied and Turkish troops had been stuck on the Gallipoli peninsula for six months, Turkish soldiers threw a note into the Australian lines. It read: "We can't advance, you can't advance. What are you going to do?" It summed up the stalemate not only at Gallipoli, but in theatres of the first World War all across Europe and the eastern front. Les Carlyon quotes it in his compelling story of the disastrous campaign, for which he retrod the footsteps of the soldiers who endured the misbegotten venture. The Gallipoli campaign still has iconic status in Australia. Gallipoli is masterly, written in the short sentences of the news journalist, and a huge seller in Australia. Carlyon avoids blanket demonisation of the architects of the disaster, and threads anecdotes of everyday soldiers such as Jack Simpson, whose statue stands outside both the Canberra War Memorial and the Shrine in Melbourne.
Angela Long
Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. Ross King Pimlico £9.99
Michelangelo Buonarroti began painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in 1508, having been commissioned by Pope Julius II. The work is perhaps the single greatest piece of the Renaissance period, and it made Michelangelo one of the most famous artists of all time. The ceiling was painted in the fashion of fresco, at the time regarded as one of the most difficult and skilled of mediums. Ross King describes in exquisite detail the four long years the commission took the reluctant artist to complete, exposing his artistic techniques, preliminary sketches, qualms about the project, and family relations. What is more he gives a fantastic description of events unfolding in Rome itself, and further afield, in a time of political and military upheaval. King also explodes many of the myths surrounding Michelangelo's work, and in doing so makes the story yet more interesting.
Sophie MacNeice
Napoleon. Paul Johnson Phoenix £6.99
This must be one of the shortest books written on Napoleon and it is certainly thought provoking. Johnson argues that Napoleon was an opportunist "who seized on the accident of the French Revolution to propel himself into supreme power". To Johnson, the French Revolution heralded the totalitarian state and the so-called "total war" which so defaced the 20th century, and Napoleon was "the infernal executive" in these terrible developments because he lacked sensitivity, compassion, imagination and religion, and because he could not distinguish between truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Historians seldom express themselves in such apocalyptic terms nowadays. It makes great reading, but is it good history? This is not the biography to read if one wants a rounded and balanced picture of le petit caporal.
Brian Maye
The Journey Home. Dermot Bolger Flamingo £7.99
This is a story of the 1980s in Ireland: a bleak time for all as detailed here, with economic, sexual and political corruption rife. Two friends, Shay and Hano, get caught up in this nether world and pay dearly for their involvement. It is at its best in its descriptions of the uncertain passage between the world of adolescence and the adult world: the tentative and often difficult journey away from family, towards independence. It is, though, a novel marred by its confused polemic, linking - and deriding - the rural and the traditional while simultaneously being nostalgic for a world before the advent of dual carriageways and housing estates. When first published, it epitomised what was labelled the "Northside Renaissance".
That seems a hollow term now for a novel that closes with something akin to a Yeatsian celebration of, of all things, the Anglo-Irish Big House.
Derek Hand