Hermit by Chris McQueer (Wildfire, £18.99)
Following up his short story collections HWFG and Hings, Chris McQueer’s debut novel Hermit charts teenage Jamie’s descent into incel subculture. While McQueer brings a distinct, compassionate style to the narrative, the novel struggles to fully engage with the complexity of online radicalisation. By presenting Jamie as a largely innocent protagonist, pulled into inceldom almost by accident, the story risks flattening the more insidious dynamics of toxic online communities. Despite moments of tender insight, the novel’s approach occasionally sidesteps the deeper, more uncomfortable truths about how hatred festers and spreads. McQueer offers a nuanced portrait of isolation, but ultimately pulls his punches when confronting the novel’s central darkness: so many of the “incels” you hear about on the news do not get a happy ending. Liz MacBride
Flower by Ed Atkins (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
The first thing you wonder after finishing Flower by the British artist Ed Atkins is whether it was written by a robot. The sequel to A Primer for Cadavers (2015) and Old Food (2019), this self-described “anti-memoir” proceeds like ChatGPT malfunctioning. “In speech my sentences will taper to wordless implore,” reads one word salad. All, however, is not what it seems: published to coincide with his retrospective at Tate Britain, Flower is an extension of Atkins’s art, playing with artifice and authenticity. Here, two “Ed Atkins” emerge: a “real” one, who’s grieving his father; and a “fake”, who claims to be “cyborg”. Thus, in this satire on literature in the age of AI, the reader is given a glimpse of a future where some authors use software to write, while other writers don’t even exist. Huw Nesbitt
The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 25 to No 1
The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 50 to No 26
The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 100 to No 51
The Great Betrayal: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East by Fawaz A Gerges – engaging read for seasoned observers
Spring is the Only Season by Simon Barnes (Bloomsbury, £18.99)
Simon Barnes’s career as a sportswriter gives him a unique edge as a wildlife writer – the winner-takes-all, high stakes energy of sport is remarkably similar to that of the natural world. This book illustrates aspects of spring in 23½ chapters, reflecting the degree change that transforms the seasonal countries of the northern hemisphere when winter’s chill gives way to spring’s glorious riot of birth and growth. It is a wonderfully entertaining discussion of the influence that plants and creatures of all stripes have had on art, literature, mythology and music for centuries. Barnes also considers the frighteningly serious impact of humans on the natural world and the changes he has noticed in his own lifetime. A real treasure of a book. Claire Looby
