A selection of paperbacks reviewed
Last Days in Babylon Marina Benjamin Bloomsbury, £9.99
Up to the middle of the 20th century indigenous Jews formed the largest ethnic group in Baghdad, comprising over a third of the population. London-born journalist Benjamin tells their story in the form of a memoir of her own family, focusing on her maternal grandmother, Regina Levy. In Regina's youth, Baghdad was a bustling, prosperous place and its thriving Jewish population lived in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbours. But during the second World War, with the rise of pan-Arab nationalism, attacks on Jews became frequent and more and more repressive legislation was introduced. After the division of Palestine in 1947 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli war, hundreds of thousands had to flee the country. Regina's daring escape took her first to Calcutta and then to London, where she ended up working in wallpaper shop in Hounslow. Regina died in 1992. She would probably be heartbroken to see her city now, but she would undoubtedly be proud of her granddaughter's affectionate, elegantly written book. - Cathy Dillon
Absurdistan Gary Shteyngart Granta, £7.99
The only son of a recently assassinated Jewish-Russian oligarch, the hugely overweight Misha Vainberg is beached in his native St Petersburg when all he wants is to return to his massive New York apartment and hang out with his kind-hearted Bronx girlfriend. Now banned from the US because of his father's homicidal activities, Misha's plan B involves a trip to the obscure republic of Absurdistan, where the bulk of Gary Shteyngart's scabrous satirical novel is set. The gullible, sensuous Misha is then led up the garden path and down again as the Absurdis plot catastrophically to attract the oil dollars of Halliburton. Despite getting everything wrong, Misha plods philosophically onward to reach his final destination on September 10th, 2001. Shteyngart was on Granta's Best of Young American Novelists list last year, and with this witty and inventive odyssey it's easy to see why. - Giles Newington
Day AL Kennedy Vintage, £7.99
Germany, 1949: 25-year-old Alfie Day, ex-RAF, is re-living the war - as an extra in a second World War film. To Alfie, humanity and his own life after 1945 are irredeemably polluted things, yet he cannot quite give up on them: his insuperable hope is what sustains and torments him. He is not the only veteran drawn to this surreal re-enactment. Some are trying to resurrect the only world they now understand; some seek catharsis, a way to dispel the past. Though bitterly comic, there is an underlying tenderness to Day that makes the Costa award-winning novel as beautiful as it is sharp. Stream-of-consciousness monologues spliced with second-person narration does not make for smooth reading, but it is a pleasure to be tripped up by this prose, which has a broken, dislocated beauty of its own. - Claire Anderson-Wheeler
Hollywood and the Mob: Movies, Mafia, Sex and Death Tim Adler Bloomsbury, £9.99
Adler's take on the mayhem, greed, drugs and sex that lines the stomach of the malignant symbiosis of the film industry's cohabitation with the Mafia is a non-stop rat-a-tat of anecdote, hearsay, half-truth and facts that retells the Hollywood story from the emergence of the psychopath Al Capone to the later-day psychosis that underwrites The Sopranos.
All the great studio moguls feature from Harry Cohen to Louis B Meyer connecting such luminaries on the dark side as Lucky Luciano, Bugsy Siegel and Sam Giancana with the great stars of their day, including, Jean Harlow, George Raft, Lana Turner, Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Sammy Davis Jnr, and drawing fire from the seminal gangster flicks from Scarface to The Godfather. In a fascinating if overly generous tribute to the mythology of the genre and other people's research, by the end, you'll be wondering Animal Farm-like who are the Mafiosi and who are The Players. - Paul O'Doherty
Somewhere in Between Ruth Gilligan Hodder Headline Ireland, €10.99
Ruth Gilligan's debut novel Forget was a number one bestseller in 2006, shortly before the Blackrock girl achieved six A1s in her Leaving Cert. Her follow-up novel centres on Dublin twins Chloe and Alex, as they finish their own Leaving Cert exams and embark on an alcohol-fuelled summer of stress relief. At least, that's the plan. The flies in the ointment are Chloe's anorexia, born of a poor self-image despite her "party girl" reputation among friends, and Alex's friend Barry, who lies in a coma in hospital as a result of a road accident caused by drunk driving. Neither of these issues adds a great deal of gravitas to this lightly written yarn, though they are dealt with quite compassionately, if naively. The story reads like a teenager's diary with a cycle of sexual encounters, competitive drinking sessions and baffled parents, along with the inevitable mobile phone texts that are such an integral part of the Facebook generation's social networking. - Claire Looby