All Because of You by Melissa Hill

All Because of You
Melissa Hill
Poolbeg €14.99


NOTHING is more maddening than wilfully inefficient people. “Oh, you’re so lucky to be together,” they say, dimwittedly, maddeningly, after someone finds their dog or rescues their computer from viruses.

And Tara, the heroic life coach in Melissa Hill’s new bestseller, has an inefficient sister of the first water. Emma sulks her way through life. She can’t get or hold a decent job.

It wasn’t her job that she was bored at school while perfect Tara had perfect marks. She can’t help it if she’s a dull, pregnant failure while Tara has a gorgeous husband and a great job and drives a glossy convertible.

But Melissa Hill is the master of what Aristotle used to call peripeteia – the reversal of fortune. So the contented reader, sitting down by a well-stoked fire with a glass of wine by her side and cat on lap, knows what to expect.

Devilish twists.

The twists are devilish enough to please here - but Hill's let herself down in a way. She's not playing up to her game.

Because the plot of Emma's pregnancy, and the subplots of her sister Tara and Tara's friends Liz and Natalie take an aeon to unreel.

Surprises that should have been sprung in succession like a series of fantastic fireworks all explode with a pop and a bit of a fizzle towards the end, after a long time of hand-wringing and discussion. But it's still funny and an enjoyable read.

Tara and Glenn are at the centre. Tara's the one who has it together, with her life-coaching job and a calm, balanced relationship with geeky, talented Glenn.

Liz, Tara's old pal, is finding the move back to Castlegate tough. She and her husband, Eric, set up a boarding kennels in his hometown, but now Eric is away at work all the time while Liz is in the doghouse, brooding that maybe Eric's the father of Emma's baby.

And Natalie - well, Natalie is rapidly turning into a bunny-boiler. Every new man she meets is Mr Perfect, and she has him fitted out for the groom on top of the wedding cake before she even knows him.

Fun and frolics, full of laughs and oopses.

****

Growing Up Again by Caitriona McCloud

Growing Up Again
Catriona McCloud
(Orion €??)


OH, those awful mistakes we make, that wake us up before dawn, trembling and grinding our teeth, and thinking "Why? Why? Why?"

In the case of Janie Lawson, heroine (and I use the term advisedly) of Growing Up Again, the mistakes include her marriage.

Then she wakes up in an unfamiliar - yet strangely familiar - bedroom. She looks in the mirror and sees an unfamiliar - yet strangely familiar - face looking back at her.

Janie's gone back to the future. She's 15 again, and she has her whole life to live over.

But Catriona McCloud's take on it isn't as limited as Hollywood's. Janie doesn't just have her own life to live. She's got her chance to change the world.

McCloud is in fact Scottish detective writer Catriona McPherson, and she brings the tough love approach of detective fiction to this foray into chicklit land with good effect.

She brings Jane back to the awful clothes, music and wallpaper of the 80s, then she sics her on world politics.

Because Jane's back in her past for a purpose. When she meets a man called Pilchard it all falls into place.

I mean, what would you do if you could persuade Lady Di Spencer that the big-eared bloke who's courting her isn't the man for her?

And you know how the Millennium Bug never sent the world into meltdown? Ever wondered why? That was because Pilchard came back and stopped it - of course!

What about the Twin Towers - what would you do if you could save those thousands of people killed when the planes went into the world's most prominent finance district, and the hundreds of thousands killed since in the 'war on terror'?

We've all had those fantasies - if I could go back I'd be able to make a million by betting on the unknown Shergar, to stop Martin Luther King and President Kennedy being assassinated.

But of course it's not that easy when you're Jane, a schoolkid with just the awesome power of a 15-year-old.

Growing Up Again is set in Scotland, but has the rather anodyne lack of localness of girly books.

But it full of laughs, with plenty of twists and turns to keep you turning the pages.

****

Lisey's Story by Stephen King

Lisey's Story
Stephen King
(Hodder & Stoughton €??)


THIS monstrous and glorious book is the culmination of horror icon Stephen King's work.

It is the story of writer's widow Lisey (rhymes with Cee-Cee), who is finally, two years after her husband's death, tackling his papers.

She's going to donate them to the tribe she calls the Incunks, the academics who devour incuncabilia – writes’ leavings such as manuscripts and letters.

Soon she's dealing with the swarming stories of her life with Scott, her husband; stories weaving and flashing like shoals of sheer skill.

Scott always lived in two worlds: the real world, and the parallel universe where he went to heal from his childhood of abuse and terror.

This was a place he called Boo'ya Moon, safe in daylight, but at night haunted by horrors.

The book is all the more powerful for being told in the intimate family-joke language of Scott and Lisey's marriage.

It flashes back to his childhood and occasionally hers, and into the life of her own edgy family of sisters.

In his childhood, Scott’s mad father tells him that they belong to a family that can go one of two ways. Some turn 'gomer', descending into catatonia. Others become inhabited by the 'bad-gunky', turning into homicidal maniacs.

Scott’s father had a way of helping his little boys: he cut them, and himself, to free them from the harm by releasing the blood.

“A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning,” King writes at one stage, using the language of magical tales.

And having wound up the story of Scott, his strange family, and how he found healing with Lisey, King turns the spring tighter.

Now, widowed Lisey has to face her own horrors, as she is stalked by a sadist set on by an Incunk, who is gleeful at finding an excuse to hurt her.

King lost the plot here, because Lisey immediately decides to tackle the loony herself. While she calls the cops, she doesn’t have any real intention of depending on them.

So the ending is weakened. It’s also weakened by the lack of a genuine feeling of threat – Lisey’s too capable a woman. You know she’s going to win when she fights any form of bad-gunky.

But still and all, this is high-quality Stephen King, and you keep turning the pages till the story’s over, then close the last with a sigh of regret.

Temptation by Douglas Kennedy

Temptation
Douglas Kennedy
Hutchinson €??

Lucille Redmond


FAILURE David Armitage gets his big chance: one of his scripts is bought for TV and he’s suddenly the creator of a hit series.

So what does he do? He walks out on his wife, of course.

She’s a failure too – an actress trying to make it while minding the kid. But Happy Dave leaves both of them in the lurch.

Soon he’s got a new home, a new babe and a new high-flying lifestyle.

Wait for the crash, eh?

Kennedy – once a Dublin resident who ran the Peacock Theatre – sells books by the zillion across Europe, but hasn’t yet really cracked the US market.

His annoyance – in a recent Independent interview he said his books were published in 17 languages, “but the one country I am shut out from is my own” – may have provided tinder for the crackling fire of Armitage’s rage as he’s dropped like a rock by the people of the glamorous world he craves.

But redemption is Kennedy’s game, and having watched Armitage’s catastrophic fall, we get to see him crawl back out of the slime of his life and into his own good books again.

Before redemption, though, there’s eerie stuff going on: plagiarism by a billionaire, and accusation of plagiarism by David himself.

It all reflects some of the creepy embarrassments of the last couple of years, when a succession of writers were discovered to have – unconsciously, they swore – reproduced verbatim or nearly the work of earlier authors.

David finds himself at the mercy of Hollywood’s literary researchers, who go through his work with a finecomb and find lots and lots of, well, hommages.

Soon he’s being asked to give back fees, under the contract clause that the writer guarantees the work is his alone.

And not long after that he’s knocking back the doubles and being paparazzi-ambushed as he attacks a catty journo.

Temptation is a pretty funny portrayal of the temptations of fame, but it could have done with a razor-sharp editor who’d take a slash-hook to the philosophical moments.

But in the hilarious descriptions of a screenwriter’s life bathing in the pool of Hollywood sharks, Kennedy is superb.

And his gossipy insider’s picture of the life of the horribly wealthy is enough to cheer anyone up as they wait in the rain for the 19A bus.

The Hat Shop on the Corner by Marita Conlon McKenna

The Hat Shop on the Corner

Marita Conlon-McKenna
Bantam Press price??


HATS have a special place in a woman's heart. There's something about a hat
that represents the celebration of life; they call up the happy times. You
have to live up to a hat by being happy in it.

The Hat Shop on the Corner is by the author of The Magdalen, and a series
of children‚s novels on the Famine, filmed as Under the Hawthorn Tree.But
here she‚s using a more gentle touch.

Ellie Matthews is cleaning up her late mother's hat shop on South Anne
Street in Dublin when two people come in and change her life.

One had ordered a hat from Ellie's mother, and expects to find it ready for
her daughter's wedding in a few days. .

The other is the solicitor with whom Ellie‚s mother had been negotiating -
to sell the shop to the developer who's hoping to build a multi-storey
emporium.

It‚s a development that could spell the end for the lovely street of
intimate shops where generations of Dubliners have bought treats for
themselves and the people they love.

As Ellie‚s aunt Yvette says, "Naturellement the gallerias and the large
department stores bring thousands of people to shop every day, but just
look at Paris - we have the best shopping in the world, huge stores, but
many of our finest shops are small, exquisite and individual."

Somehow, Ellie ˆ who was trained as a milliner by her French mother, but is
now a textile buyer for a big Dublin company - is drawn back into running
the shop.

This is a charming story of Ellie and her customers, who run the gamut from
ladies who lunch to the highly unlikely.

Dublin's new mayor Mo Brady, a battling northsider, walks in looking for a
serious hat for her newly glamorous life - and weighs in to make sure Anne
Street‚s shops stay in business.

Tough tyke Tommy Butler wants a Memory Hat for his nan's 100th birthday,
commemorating her century of Dublin life.

The neighbourhood revives as shopkeepers and their friends help each other
to repaint and rebuild, and offer each other ideas ˆ and have lots of great
parties.

And amid the millinery Ellie finds love: unreliable but gorgeous Rory, the
roadie for a series of bands, and Neil Harrington, the serious young
solicitor.

This joyous book is delightful - a perfect gift, and a story to treasure.

A Place Called Here by Cecelia Ahern

A Place Called Here
Cecelia Ahern
(HarperCollins €??)

WHERE do all those socks go, that go into the washing machine and never come out, all those mobile phones and umbrellas that just one day disappear?

This is the question on the mind of ex-garda Sandy Shortt, and it’s been plaguing her since she was 10, when classmate Jenny-May Butler went out one day and was never seen again.

Sandy has always been neurotic about losing even a toothbrush. She left the Gardai to set up an agency to find missing people.

A lot of people go missing in Ireland. Over 300 children seeking asylum have disappeared since 2001 – lone children who were in the care of our State.

It’s an interesting subject for Cecelia Ahern to tackle – because quickly the reader realises that this is a fantasy novel, a huge jump in genre.

Sandy often finds the missing – until, one day, she runs right out of this world and into the world where all the missing things go.

It’s a land where people dress in clothes found in lost luggage, and trade goods that turn up in the woods around the villages.

Greens will be happy that Ahern’s ideal world has solar panels and wind turbines, with government by consensus.

Of course, Ireland is the home of the echt story of lost and found: Oisín’s journey to Tír na h-Óighe and his return and search for the Fianna. In Irish, when someone drifts around aimlessly – or arrives very late – people say that he’s like Oisín i ndhiaigh na Féinne.

But it’s The Wizard of Oz that underlies Ahern’s story, with its theme of finding heart and brain and courage.

Her missing people marry and have families (though not, seemingly, pets – all those dogs who trotted off one day, nose to the ground, and didn’t come home must have gone somewhere else).

And Sandy is able to bring these hungry lost ones news from home.

It’s a gripping story, and a moving one. The plot sags a bit in the middle when Ahern gets pulled out of synch by planning her ideal world, but returns in full force by the end.

There’s even a strange kind of love interest happening in parallel universes, as the brother of one of the lost seeks Sandy, while her partner is seen in flashbacks growing increasingly despondent at her neurosis.

A strange book, and absolutely one for the handbag, for a whole new audience.

Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett

Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Vanora Bennett
HarperCollins €??

Lucille Redmond

THOMAS MORE was a genius and a canonised saint, but also a bit of a loolah, with his own private Guantanamo in his garden where he tortured heretics (Protestants).

Rumour – and if you’re looking for gossips look no further than the court of Henry VIII – had it that he liked to have his favourite daughter scourge him into repentance for his sins.

He was also chancellor (minister for finance) for Henry VIII, a poet, one of the world’s first sci-fi writers (he wrote Utopia, a vision of a perfect society), and generally a Renaissance man.

One of the most unusual things More did was educating his daughters, a foible regarded as sheer madness at the time.

And in this bestseller, being gobbled up eagerly and passed between book clubs, Vanora Bennett takes a real person, More’s adopted daughter Meg Giggs, and uses her as the basis for the story of the Mores.

This is a great combination of a bodice-ripper and true history, taking in everything from the humanist thought of the Reformation to the fate of the little Princes in the Tower, murdered (maybe) by Henry VIII’s uncle.

Meg is a woman with a not unusual fate – she’s married to a man who’s a lot less intelligent than herself, but plenty ready to steal her ideas.

On the bodice-ripper angle, we have, as usual, a handsome devil, untrustworthy and gorgeous, while in the wings waits a sound, decent sort longing to pledge his love.

On the serious-history angle, we are reading a story we know, but seen through new symbols as tricky and fun as Holbein’s, making this one of the best books we’ll read this year.

Our knowledge of the More family comes partly from the sketches for a lost group portrait by tricksy Tudor court painter Hans Holbein – apart from his gift for making character apparent (that straddling portrait of Henry VIII), he famously hid a distorted skull in his composition The Ambassadors.

His tricks in the More picture included putting the family’s fool, Henry Pattison, in the centre, staring out and looking just like a dwarfish version of Henry VIII.

Bennett weaves all the tricks into a ripping yarn that has you saying to yourself: “I must put out the light and go to sleep… just a few more pages…”