The Shepherd’s Hut by Tim Winton is this Saturday’s Irish Times Eason offer

A sneak preview of Saturday’s books pages


The Shepherd's Hut by Tim Winton is this Saturday's Irish Times Eason offer. When you buy a copy of the paper, you can buy the novel for €4.99, a saving of €7. Read our review of what Neil Hegarty called a "lyrical exploration of masculinity that resonates with spirituality".

US author Tayari Jones has won this year's £30,000 Women's Prize for Fiction for An American Marriage, about a middle-class black couple torn apart by a miscarriage of justice. The novel has been championed by Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey, who is in talks to make it into a film. Milkman by Belfast author Anna Burns, winner of the Man Booker Prize, had been the favourite of the shortlisted tiles. Michael Hughes has won the £10,000 London Hellenic Prize for Country. Back at home, the €1,000 Caterpillar Poetry Prize has been won by Andrew Weale's Wonder-pudderful.

You are in for a treat this Saturday, as Eoin McNamee gets down and literary with demon dog James Ellroy. Sarah Moss, meanwhile, explores the underlying themes of Brexit and bog bodies in her superb novel, Ghost Wall, fresh from signing a six-figure deal for her next novel with Picador (not Pixar, as a colleague misheard, though to be fair we had been talking about the film deal for Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff). Jan Carson, freshly crowned with the Irish EU Prize for Literature for her excellent novel, The Fire Starters, explores her multi-layered idenities as Irish, British and European. Meanwhile, in the Magazine, Mary Cregan explores the personal tragedy at ther heart of her memoir The Scar, ahead of its Dublin launch in Hodges Figges at 6pm next Wednesday by Anne Enright.

Saturday’s reviews are Philip Ó Ceallaigh on Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler; and Vassily Grossman and the Soviet Century by Alexandra Popoff; Martina Evans on Chromatopia: An Illustrated History of Colour by David Coles; Anthony Roche on Shadowplay by Joseph O’Connor; Ciaran McMenamin on Gone Fishing by Bob Mortimer and Paul Whitehouse; John Self on Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson; Rosita Sweetman on How Was It For You? by Virginia Nicholson; Declan O’Driscoll on Ash Before Oak by Jeremy Cooper; Sarah Gilmartin on The Rapture by Claire McGlasson; and Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction.