Heart and Soul by Maeve Binchy

Orion €23.40
MAEVE Binchy, founder of Irish chicklit, has written the book that will steal Christmas.
These loosely linked stories fan out from the central theme of a struggling new heart clinic. Here, kindness and hard work are rewarded and the bad punished. Very satisfying.
Some of the stories are amazing. My favourite is about the priest stalked by a determined woman ready to lie, blackmail and steal to get her way - and about how his friends get him out of this scrape.
It's laugh-out-loud funny, it's heartwarming, and it's a pageturner. And for fans, some of the characters from earlier Binchy hits make a new appearance here - like the staff of Quentins, and the ditsy twins from Scarlet Feather.
The new characters are some of Binchy's best. Anya, a sweet, tough-minded Polish girl, starts work as a general dogsbody in the heart clinic, and makes herself indispensible. But as she and the son of a social climber fall in love, things get rocky.
Down-to-earth doctor Declan falls madly for nurse Fiona the first time he sees her. Ah, but Fiona has a past...
Binchy has only got better since the days when she started her writing life as an affectionately gossipy journalist and then wrote the first girly bestsellers - can it be 26 years since Light a Penny Candle?
A lovely book.

Anarchy and Old Dogs by Colin Cotterill

Quercus €18.84
OLD communists in the Laos of the 1970s are the unlikely heroes of Colin Cotterill's thrillers - and especially his hero, Siri.
Dr Siri Paiboun spent his youth fighting in the jungles, side-by-side with his wife, to free his country from French occupation.
By now he's in his mid-70s, a lonely widower, and in any civilised country he'd be settling into retirement with the comfort of a pension and a medical card.
No such luck for the aged revolutionary: he's national coroner, and uses his medical skills and his love of Maigret to investigate mysterious deaths.
One of Dr Siri's cases is the drowning of a kid from a fishing village - an ace swimmer, whose corpse is covered in mosquito bites and splinters above the waist, but not below.
The other is a blind semi-retired dentist (ow!) killed by a truck - after picking up a letter written in invisible ink.
Dr Siri and his friend Civilai, a top government cadre, go off together to investigate. They're friends even though Civilai is one of those who stole the governing of the country from the founding revolutionaries.
It's very funny - particularly when the two pals attend a Bruce Lee show re-voiced in Lao, where the audience rock with laughter as the evil capitalist somersaults backwards onto the roof, snarling "We slaves of the Western money culture will always prevail, you common coolie".
Very funny, and very political, and quite instructive.

Microtrends by Mark J Penn and E Kinney Zalesne

Penguin €14.90
JUST days ago Microtrends - published this time last year but still sailing off the shelves of airport bookshops - seemed like an amusing analysis of a stable, static world. No more.
Microtrends authors Mark Penn and Kinney Zalesne write about " the emerging counterintuitive trends that are shaping tomorrow right before us".
Penn - advisor to Microsoft, the Clinton, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton - and lawyer and former Janet Reno counsel Zalesne chose 75 'microtrends' on how US society is going.
Or was going until the rolling economic crash of the last fortnight.
They said five million Americans aged 65 or over were still working, almost twice as many as in the 1980s, and added "That number is about to explode."
It certainly is, now that the comfortable pension you've earned is dissolving before your eyes.
'Old New Dads' who father children in late middle age were surely a boomer luxury.
The 'Sun-Haters', who spawned an industry of sun-proof clothes and sunscreen, may disappear now that there are more immediate dangers to fear.
How charmingly historic 'International Home-Buyers' now seem.
'Militant Illegals', ' Extreme Commuters' and '30-Winkers' are features of a world full of work, with ballooning house prices.
The recent past is another country. They did things differently then.

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Penguin €13.40
DISASTER Capitalism, Naomi Klein calls it - powerful people making their fortunes from chaos.
Bedad, they're feeding now.
Imagine this book being read by tooth-grinding, newly impoverished suits in the business class lounges of international airports.
Klein describes how right-wing ideologue Milton Freedman advised the dictator Augusto Pinochet to change Chile during the hyperinflation that followed his 1973 coup d'état.
The makeover comprised tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending, and deregulation - and replacing state schools by private ones funded by vouchers.
Klein, a Canadian journalist who founded the No Logo movement and has written about consumer culture for many years, follows the system of shock followed by 'reforms' through Iraq after the US invasion, Russia after Yeltsin, New Orleans after Katrina, and the Asian Tiger economies after the currency run that caused their crash.
Controversially, she links the free-market tactics to the rise in torture in countries where these theories were put into effect - claiming that torture is used to crush economic dissent.
Her theory is that the super-rich, backed by some world banking organisations, use the stunned shock of people after an economic or natural disaster to remake economies in the profitable image of laissez-faire.
If she's right, you may now have a chance to watch the shock doctrine in action in a country near you.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Bloomsbury €13.99

IT MUST have been particularly galling for Mary Ann Shaffer that she died before she could finish her first and only novel.
More galling for her readers. Shaffer's characters are so vivid that you sigh with regret as you finish their story.
She decided to write about Guernsey after getting stuck in the airport there, where she kept herself warm under the hand-dryer in the men's toilets.
There (not in the actual toilets) she found Jersey Under the Jack-Boot, and discovered to her astonishment that the Channel Islands had been occupied by the Germans during World War II.
Born in West Virginia, Shaffer spent a lifetime working in libraries, bookshops and publishing.
Eight years before she died, she started to write the story that haunted her.
It was finished in draft when she discovered that she had abdominal cancer, and asked her niece, children's writer Annie Barrows, to tie up the loose ends.
This is the story: after the war, a brittle London columnist finds herself in correspondence, first with a Guernsey pig farmer who has bought a book she once owned and seeks more by the same author, then with other members of his book club.
An innocent opening, which leads dreamily into the realities - including the horrors - of that German occupation. And to love, death, moral questions and the whole lot.
It's a winter book, the kind for a big leather armchair, a turf fire and a glass of hot port.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

Bloomsbury €13.99

IT MUST have been particularly galling for Mary Ann Shaffer that she died before she could finish her first and only novel.
More galling for her readers. Shaffer's characters are so vivid that you sigh with regret as you finish their story.
She decided to write about Guernsey after getting stuck in the airport there, where she kept herself warm under the hand-dryer in the men's toilets.
There (not in the actual toilets) she found Jersey Under the Jack-Boot, and discovered to her astonishment that the Channel Islands had been occupied by the Germans during World War II.
Born in West Virginia, Shaffer spent a lifetime working in libraries, bookshops and publishing.
Eight years before she died, she started to write the story that haunted her.
It was finished in draft when she discovered that she had abdominal cancer, and asked her niece, children's writer Annie Barrows, to tie up the loose ends.
This is the story: after the war, a brittle London columnist finds herself in correspondence, first with a Guernsey pig farmer who has bought a book she once owned and seeks more by the same author, then with other members of his book club.
An innocent opening, which leads dreamily into the realities - including the horrors - of that German occupation. And to love, death, moral questions and the whole lot.
It's a winter book, the kind for a big leather armchair, a turf fire and a glass of hot port.

Song of the Humpback Whale by Jodi Picoult

Hodder & Stoughton €14.99

WHAT a baffling book this is - until you realise that it's Jodi Picoult's first, published way back in 1992 and now reissued.
The story is all over the place, told in fractured scenes, with the culmination repeated in fragments.
Jane Jones is escaping a marriage that's sliding into violence by driving with her daughter Rebecca to her brother. star-
But her husband, a world-famous marine biologist who knows more than anyone else about the songs of the humpback whale, has spent his life tracking whales, sets out to track his wife and daughter.
Two love affairs, the death of a lover, a childhood of abuse and the maturation of a teenager in an extended road move are rattled around and thrown out again in a fragmented story.
Jane and Rebecca are heading towards the apple farm where Jane's brother Jolie works. They find three men there: the owner, Sam, and his employees Jolie and Hadley.
The novel was controversial because of its age-barrier-crossing shock tactics - Sam and Hadley are both 25, and the mother falls for one and the daughter for the other.
This was and is a bestseller. Don't let me put you off.
I didn't much like it. Oliver isn't a particularly nasty guy; a pain in the ass, certainly, and a control freak - but half of the women of Ireland are married to that.
But be assured, you're in the hands of an expert, even in Picoult's first published novel.

The Táin, edited and translated by Ciaran Carson

Penguin Classics €11.99

FUBSY but ferocious, Setanta Ó Sualdaim was a nasty piece of work.
At the age of seven the pup was beating the tripes out of 150 other Ulster sprogs when King Conchobhar, brother of Setanta's mother, Dechtire, asked his nephew to dinner with his blacksmith, Cullen.
Blacksmiths, in the Bronze and Iron Ages, were the techie tigers. They made all the weapons of mass destruction.
The king arrived at Cullen's, and Cullen let loose his massive mastiff with three men on the end of each of its three chains.
When Setanta turned up, dilly-dallying with his hurley, javelin and sliotar, he killed this family pet. But he told the weeping smith that he'd train up another dog - sure isn't one as good as another? - and meanwhile act as a guardian for the house and business.
So he got the name Cú Chullain - Cullen's Hound.
Fast-forward 10 years, the Connachtmen are advancing, led by huffy Queen Medhbh, in a fury because her best bull has gone over to her husband's herd.
The Ulstermen are under a curse put on them by a gravid sprinter and pre-pubertal Cúchullain, now a vicious superboy, is the only one who can defend them.
Ciaran Carson's new version is unlike the stately complexities of the myth, but has a slangy, riveting immediacy.

The Witness by Sandra Brown

Hodder €10.14
IT'S incredibly annoying when the hero you're reading about has a secret and you don't know it.
It's like one of those youthful episodes with big brothers dangling sweets high above your grabby little hands.
This is the way of it in Sandra Brown's 70th-or-so novel (more than 50 of which made the New York Times bestseller list).
A couple are in hospital - the woman, Kendall, has saved the man - she says he's her husband - obviously he's not.
Kendall tries to go on the run with her baby. The mystery man sticks to her like glue.
Interspersed with this thrilling chase is another - the story of the woman's marriage to a well-off Bubba, her life as a defence lawyer in small-town Deep South America, and increasingly sinister episodes.
Kendall finds, like many a girl before her, that the man she has married is deeply in love with his dad.
He prefers to go hunting and fishing with daddy. Poppa turns up for breakfast during their honeymoon.
And Kendall doesn't know whether she's being paranoid when she feels that there's something a little sinister about her father-in-law.
This is the perfect book to bring to hospital when you're going to have an endless wait for a nasty procedure. You won't be able to put it down - but you'll instantly forget it as soon as you finish it.