A round-up of the latest paperback releases
Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel García Márquez, Penguin, £7.99
In the opening chapter of this extraordinary memoir, the 23-year-old Márquez, who has just given up his law studies because he wants to be a writer, returns with his mother to his home town to sell his grandfather's house. They are invited to lunch by neighbours. "From the moment I tasted the soup, I had the sensation that an entire sleeping world was waking in my memory." The world Márquez invokes, from his childhood through to his 20s, is presented in the magical way only a superb writer can achieve. He moves back and forth through time to show how memory colours experience. The boundaries of truth and fiction are toyed with and explorations of vital episodes in his life show that, despite the vivid mental pictures, the events themselves could not have happened temporally. Volume one of a projected trilogy - bring on the next one.
Brian Maye
Götz and Meyer, David Albahari, Vintage, £6.99
Götz and Meyer are interchangeable, dull, earnest, obedient subjects of the Third Reich whose job it is to drive a Saurer lorry with a hundred Jews in the rear airtight compartment from the grotesquely named Fairgrounds camp to their deaths while travelling . . . yes, while travelling. Meyer or Götz regularly get out and connect the exhaust pipe to the compartment so that everybody in it is slowly asphyxiated. The trope of the novel is that a teacher is lecturing his students - he even takes them on an ersatz bus-outing, replicating the original transport experience. This taut, neat, unconventional prose work takes readers to places they don't want to go - not even in imagination. However, it matters that we go there lest we forget to question "initial assumptions" and become obedient to the "how, when, where" of strategy and conquest.
Kate Bateman
Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter, Anna Beer, Constable & Robinson, £7.99
Walter Ralegh thought love was "a way of error, a temple full of treason". He and Bess Throckmorton were secretly married while she was pregnant with his child in 1592, yet he did not mention her in his letters for another three years. This non-academic biography by an Oxford don describes Bess's experiences as Gentlewoman of the Privy Chamber of Queen Elizabeth, her years in the Tower of London, the birth of her third child at the age of 40, and her efforts to secure her family financially and at court. While Bess's letters do not survive, Beer often gleans information from Bess's contact with luminaries of the day, such as John Donne and Ben Johnson. The Raleghs emerge as a team, and Bess as a skilled legal and political negotiator, and promoter of her husband's legacy.
Ralph Benson
1968, Mark Kurlanksy, Vintage, £7.99
On the face of it a book about the year 1968 entitled 1968 seems like a pretty good idea. After all, there was a lot going on; the Vietnam War, massive disaffection in the Communist Bloc, the twin assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. However Kurlansky's decision to flit between the domestic (the US) and the international arenas proves erroneous because the historical focus is blurred by what appears to be the author's own nostalgia (he was a 20-year-old student at the time). Too much time is dedicated to the minutiae of American campus politics, much of which, with the benefit of hindsight, seems hopelessly idealistic.. This is regrettable as there are some very good sections, those dealing with Walter Cronkite and his influence on American public opinion and the Vietnam War and the rise and fall of Czech Communist leader Alexander Dubcek are particularly informative.
Ken Walshe
Deceptions, June Considine, New Island Press, €13.99
Fleeing the scene of an accident, in damning circumstances, Adrian and Virginia leave behind the broken body of a young man and find themselves bound together in a secret beyond their illicit affair. Fleeing her broken marriage and betrayal by her husband and best friend, artist Lorraine Cheevers uproots her teenage daughter to make a new home in the small seaside community where Lorraine and Virginia spent childhood holidays. June Considine's well-crafted and compelling story traces the deceits which begin unnoticed but end in the destruction of friendships and lives. In Killian, the injured young man, who struggles to emerge from a coma, we find a most beautiful foil to the machinations of those around him. His family's determination to awaken him contrasts with the unravelling lives of those who caused his injuries; his struggle for life condemning those who would so carelessly have taken it away.
Claire Looby
His Brother's Keeper, Jonathan Weiner, Harper Perennial, £8.99
In 1999, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner started researching a story for the New Yorker. A young Boston genetic engineer, Jamie Heywood, had quit his job and founded a non-profit organisation in an attempt to find a cure for his younger brother, Stephen, who had recently been diagnosed with ALS (motor neurone disease), a debilitating neurodegenerative disease. Weiner befriends the Heywood family and takes an insider's view as Jamie's infectious personality and entrepreneurial flair propel him and the scientists working on the treatment towards immensely risky and controversial procedures. Weiner's book gives an invaluable insight into the ethical, political and profit-making influences on modern medical science, as well as telling a unique human story.
Brian Keane