A roundup of this week's paperbacks
Not Untrue and Not Unkind
Ed O’Loughlin
Penguin, £8.99
Owen Simmons is a former Africa correspondent for a national newspaper who has been injured on assignment and left with a limp. Confined to the newsroom and contributing "the odd worthy think piece", he comes across an old photograph which takes him right back to – as the cover blurb has it – "a dusty road in Africa and to the woman he once loved". If you think that means a nice, gentle love story, think again. Ed O'Loughlin is a former Africa correspondent for this newspaper and one of the most generous and conscientious people you could ever hope to meet: his debut novel, however, is crammed with what must surely be the bitchiest, dodgiest, most self-obsessed bunch of war corrs ever to be assembled in one place. It's a great way to explore the moral issues around war reportage, and O'Loughlin is a master of bleak, terse, descriptive passages – but if you still harbour notions about the romance of it all, this book will blow them right out of the water. Which may well be the whole point. Arminta Wallace
Dublin 1916: The Siege of the GPO
Clair Wills
Profile Books, £ 8.99
The GPO's place in the national consciousness has undergone a radical transformation since the most famous veteran of the Rising, Éamon de Valera, presided over the 50th-anniversary commemorations in 1966. But the fight for the emblematic image of the most famous building in Ireland continues. By the time of the 50th anniversary, a revisionist analysis was already stripping away the mythological veneer for a more rigorous understanding of the Rising. In more recent times, and with one eye on the centenary celebrations in 2016, Fianna Fáil has wrested the GPO from modern-day physical-force republicans. In this valuable cultural history, Clair Wills examines the hold the GPO continues to have on the Irish imagination from the first-hand accounts of the participants and witnesses through Yeats's poetry and O'Casey's plays to Neil Jordan's cinematic treatment in Michael Collins. Tim Fanning
The Fall of the House of Paisley
David Gordon
Gill and Macmillan, €14.99
A new chapter on the "sex-and-money scandal" involving Iris Robinson, wife of DUP leader Peter, is included in this already less-than-flattering account of the Paisley dynasty. The Belfast Telegraph's investigations correspondent David Gordon argues that the house of Paisley was never a particularly stable construction in this pacey book, which acknowledges the influence of Paisley's formidable wife Eileen.
Gordon also focuses on the befuddlement felt by some long-time Paisley supporters, who had "fiercely opposed power-sharing down through the years at their leader's urging", when he and Sinn Féin's Martin McGuinness morphed astonishingly into the so-called 'Chuckle Brothers'. Archive photographs include a 1967 snap of a youthful Paisley being escorted to a police car after throwing a snowball at Taoiseach Jack Lynch's car. Mary Minihan
Map of the Invisible World
By Tash Aw
Fourth Estate, £7.99
This Malaysian-born writer's second novel is beautifully written, though the braided narrative threatens to become overly convoluted as the novel progresses. Adam is adopted from an orphanage in Indonesia by Karl, a Dutch painter, while his older brother, Johan, is adopted by a rich Malaysian couple and raised in Kuala Lumpur. When Adam is 16, and post-colonial Indonesia is struggling under Sukarno's rule, Karl is arrested as part of a "repatriation" effort. Adam then tries to find his father in Jakarta, enlisting the help of Karl's old American lover, Margaret. Adam finds himself pulled into petty terrorist plots in the hopes of finding Johan, who likes soft drugs, expensive restaurants and riding around in his father's Mercedes and feels guilty for abandoning his brother. Like many novels about post-colonialism, the story of the individual mirrors the conflict of the newly independent nation – though perhaps at times too conveniently, with Adam's birthday falling on Independence Day. Emily Firetog
Catherine the Great
Simon Dixon
Profile, £10.99
Dixon relates how Catherine the Great (1729-96), the daughter of a minor Prussian prince, conspired with others to depose her husband, Emperor Peter III of Russia, in 1762. Following this successful coup, she was proclaimed Empress Catherine II. She greatly expanded Russia's borders, extending the empire southwards and westwards. In her earlier years, she favoured intellectual freedom and corresponded with philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot, but the end of her reign was a period of intellectual repression. Dixon's style is lively and readable. With copious quotations and descriptions of ceremonies and celebrations, buildings and furnishings, he conveys a strong sense of what life was like at the imperial court. However certain key events in Catherine's reign, such as the partitions of Poland and educational and provincial reform, are accorded only cursory treatment. A fuller assessment of these would have been welcome. Paul Byrne
