Book Reviews

Dogs on Dates, by Luke Healy; The Woodchipper, by Joe Ollman; Fault Lines, by Rob Cullen; Dear Historian, by Joff Winterheart; and Children of Light, by Jean Pleyers

Daring debut novel explores themes around publishing, identity and bland writing trends

Prolific author Elle Kennedy has published her first YA novel, Thornbird, a satisfyingly twisty and swoony mystery tale

As a foster kid who became a princess, the screen siren who would now be 100 is the embodiment of the American dream

Rather than tackle all of Morris’s books, author summarises just one-third of total collection

Riley is one of our clearest thinkers

Beckett’s youthful study illuminates the intellectual development of one of Ireland’s most formidable literary talents

Timely collection covers a range of topics from gothic fiction to poetry and women of the diaspora

Authors tactfully focus on Plath’s vital hard-won poems, while their introduction affirms how she ‘taught readers to love poetry’

New books by Tony Shaw, Alan McDougall, William Kennedy and Jim Thompson

Author notes, for example, that the superrich in France face an effective tax rate half that of the average French person

Final novel in two-time Pulitzer winner’s Harlem Trilogy traces evolution of its ageing crook characters and of New York itself

Washington prepared to interfere in European politics to influence policy towards Middle East and US tech interests

A nuanced narrative that exposes the tragic heritage novelist and protagonist share as Palestinians

Author expresses an unusual and emotive quality in this novel – pure, unabashed feeling

Collections by Stephen de Búrca, Nithy Kasa, Eamon Grennan and Rita Ann Higgins reviewed

An excellent compendium, and a valuable introduction to the author’s novels

A book about language, memory and the imagination’s resistance to fear

Excellent overview of disorder in our internal chemistry shows author to be an optimistic cheerleader for endocrinology

‘Writing a novel is pretty audacious to begin with. Why not lean into the audacity a little?’

Exploring what it means to ‘live a good life’

A tender novel whose meditations on the self’s uncertain parameters urge excavating the past to better understand the present

At age 17, Forster was invited by the British admiralty to accompany Captain James Cook on his second expedition

Once hailed as the saviour of Spanish democracy, scandal precipitated the former monarch’s abdication and exile

Density of detail in Service’s research means this book is likely to become a definitive account of episode

Moving memoirs from Laurie Hertzel, Kevin Sharkey and Neil Griffiths

The novel is more concerned with the pettiness and absurdities of cancel culture than the scrambled interactions that spark them

A comprehensive guide to buildings that chronicle centuries of conquest, settlement and adaptation

The book about Troubles agents raises troubling questions around the rationale for espionage

The extent to which Titley has taught us to read differently in Irish is persuasively demonstrated in each page of these welcome critical essays

Fintan Drury’s Genocide: Sponsoring the Destruction of Palestine

An attempt to redress the balance and rescue Louis-Napoléon, one of the most popular, if divisive, men in 19th-century France

Álvaro Enrique’s historical novel Now I Surrender tears up everything we know about the western

Mariana Mazzucato’s positive work reminds the reader of the need for optimism around what the state can do, but big issues are not fully addressed

A novel of emotional truth

A thoughtful work; pity about the relative paucity of visual aids, photographs or diagrams

Russia compared with other empires that have emerged from the steppe: the vast grassland plain that runs from China to Hungary

This is a valuable piece of historical detective work about the Waterford MP Richard Musgrave

From Krasznahorkai’s extraordinary Nobel-prize acceptance speech to McManus’s astute chronicles of tumultuous times

Garbhán Downey details the sinister murkiness of Seán Brown’s murder as well as its investigative failings