The Selfish Capitalist by Oliver James

Vermillion €12.14

THE RICH are driving us crazy - worse, the poor things are driving themselves crazy too.
Oliver James's book Affluenza shocked the greedy last year. He wrote that the hunt for more and more affluence was an illness that left the infected feeling bloated and miserable.
He's back with The Selfish Capitalist, and a refreshing boot in the backside for those annoying geneticists who are creeping ever closer to the eugenics of the 1930s.
James reckons that the distress and mental illness that's on the rise in Anglo-American countries is the cause of a particular attitude to money.
"Based on the best available scientific evidence from the World Health Organisation, twice as many people suffer [emotional distress] in English-speaking nations compared with citizens of mainland Western European ones."
We're nuttier than the French. Oh, la, la!
This is a muscle-stretching book - you'll find yourself muttering at it, saying "but wait..." - but going on to read another page and another.
It ranges from how to get your kids to study successfully (teach them to be creative and autonomous) to the myth - according to high-up British military sources he talked to - of the 'War on Terror'.
Fascinating, controversial, crammed with facts and figures, and more fun than a barrel of monkeys.
Publisher's site

Between the Sheets by Colette Caddle

Simon & Schuster €8.99 (Easons price)

IRISH chicklit used to be great - witty, tightly plotted, with vivid characters. You never knew what was going to happen, and whatever happened you burst out laughing.
But in the last couple of years it's gone all fluffy. The plots are flabby, there isn't a joke in the place, and it's as dull as a daylight nightclub.
Colette Caddle just may be showing a light at the end of this tunnel with her latest book, though it's the dark light of misery lit.
It's an undemanding book, with more nourishment than flavour.
In Between the Sheets, Caddle's heroine, Dana De Lacy, is the type you read about in the Herald diary - a best-selling romance writer, well married, with publicists making sure her picture is in every paper as she haunts the glamorous night spots.
It all falls to pieces when Dana's sexy architect husband Gus walks out, saying their marriage was a sham. Both of them immediately get off with new squeezes.
Dana takes to the drink and starts writing about her dank Wexford childhood, when her father, a famous poet, was horrid to her brother and her mother, and idolised her.
The story goes back and forth between Dana's modern high life and early misery - but of course it all ends happily.
Publisher's site

Azincourt by Bernard Cornwell

HarperCollins €17.54
THE British love their battles, and once Shakespeare got his teeth into Agincourt (or Azincourt as the French and Bernard Cornwell call it), they hold their manhood cheap if they don't remember St Crispin's Day 1415.
Azincourt is a thriller about the battle that ended the feudal world.
Cornwell's hero, Nick Hook, is a serf, the unacknowledged son of his local lord. His family have a vendetta with the sons - also conceived through droit de seigneur - of the local priest.
Outlawed after punching the priest, ace archer Nick becomes a mercenary, and lives through a famous massacre at Soissons.
He fights his way (accompanied by an ex-nun, Sarah, another aristocratic offshoot) through the closing battles of the Hundred Years' War, until the culminating row at Agincourt, when a tiny English army used the super-weapon of English archery plus French mud to defeat the flower of French chivalry.
Azincourt is gripping, and meticulously researched. Virtually every character is a historical person.
It's selling like crazy, and should, though it has a touch of the Chinese meal about it - you're completely pulled in as you read, but can be strangely dissatisfied after you close it.
But if you want a Christmas book that will take you out of the world of 2008 and recession, this is it.
Publisher's site

All Our Worldly Goods by Irene Nemirovsky

Chatto & Windus €22.94
WARS bracket the lives of the characters in All Our Worldly Goods: the Great War, which obliterates their home village, their factories and their fortunes; and World War II, which divides their country.
Irene Nemirovsky never saw this book published - she had died in Auschwitz, probably gassed as she was dying of cholera.
It is absolutely French, absolutely bourgeois.
Nemirovsky's family - Russian Jewish bankers - fled Russia during the Revolution when she was a teenager and settled in France, and she fatally adored everything about her new country.
Yet Nemirovsky's writing is Russian, and Jewish. She writes with the luminous observation of Turgenev, and her subject is family, seen with sympathy, humour and a kind of warm distance.
Here, her subject is the Hardelot family of St Elme, whose factory-owners have been the autocratic patriarchs of the village for generations.
They build nice houses for their workers, educate talented children and employ them at low salaries - but indignantly refuse requests for a swimming pool or a sports stadium.
The same indignation destroys the family, when patriarch Julien sets his face against his grandson Pierre for marrying the woman he loves, not the hard businesswoman Julian has chosen.
In a story that's gripping, funny and sad, this family will be familiar to all lovers of the Irish Big House genre.
Publisher's site

A Dance in Time by Orna Ross

Penguin Ireland €17.54

ISEULT Gonne's was an unfortunate second-hand life - half-acknowledged child of WB Yeats's muse; half-French, half-Irish; mistily involved with the married Ezra Pound; abandoned by Francis Stuart when he chose Germany and other lovers.
My mother once told me that Iseult was stunningly beautiful. When she walked into a room, every man went unconsciously to straighten his tie.
But as soon as her aged mother entered, it was as if Iseult had become invisible: Maud Gonne's blazing beauty obliterated her.
Orna Ross - teacher, journalist, literary agent, counsellor, writer - has wrapped Iseult's story within another.
The gigantic book is full of antique scandal: the sensational divorce of Maud Gonne and Major John MacBride is rehearsed here. MacBride, a hard-drinking soldier, denied the whispered charge of sexually abusing Iseult.
Ross, who is sick with cancer at the moment, used the relationship between Maud and Iseult Gonne and a fictional writer and her daughter, as a template for a meditation on the nature of daughterhood.
The book could have done with cutting by a third to sharpen the stories that really matter - but her style is so wonderful that even the dull in-between bits are almost a pleasure to read.
For anyone intrigued by the matching of art and idealism that gave birth to our state, this provide a fascinating insight.
Publisher's site

Arctic Chill by Arnaldur Indridason

Harvill Secker €17.39

ROAMING bands of adolescents spend their days in many Irish housing estates, as their parents work long hours, leaving them without supervision or help.
The same in Iceland, it seems.
Arctic Chill begins with the image of a stabbed child, frozen to the ground by his own blood, dead outside a deserted block of flats.
This is the latest in a series of haunting stories about Icelandic police investigating not just crime, but the chill sadness at the centre of their own lives.
As detectives Erlendur, Elinborg and Sigurdur Óli investigate the death of the half-Thai, half-Icelandic boy, everyone stymies them.
What kind of people are the family, Erlendur asks the interpreter, and she replies: "Very ordinary people. People like you and me. Poor people."
And immigrants.
And in Iceland, where people speak plainly and keep a distance from their neighbours, there's a certain distaste for incomers.
The police are halted at every turn, but gradually their work turns up leads: the seedy man with a computer loaded with pornography; the teacher who thinks "they shouldn't let those people into the country"; the feral middle-class children.
Written in a plain, down-to-earth yet lyrical style, Arctic Chill is a cool examination of our value for children - as well as a gripping, harrowing story.
Publisher's site

Second Chances by Martina Reilly

Sphere €17.39

REVENGE is sweet. Though less so when you're getting your revenge on the wrong person.
In Second Chances, Lizzie Walsh has fled Wexford for Dublin, where she won't be reminded of the murder of her sister, Megan.
Lizzie has made a life she loves. She has a great job raising funds for a charity, a gorgeous wannabe actor boyfriend, and she volunteers for a helpline.
But one day she sees Megan's murderer, Joe Jones, now free as air, strolling along Grafton Street without a care in the world.
Lizzie turns into a stalker.
Joe Jones is universally acknowledged as a nice guy, kind to his elderly neighbours and the oul' fellas at the pigeon racing club where he hangs out. What a sickener.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Lizzie's mother has discovered Megan's diary - and, as astute readers will have guessed, Joe's not the bad guy.
The story is told in parallel, Megan's diary gradually revealing the truth of her death as Lizzie tangles herself fatally in Joe's life, determined to repay the harm done to her family.
Poor gormless Joe is unwittingly spreading his sweetness on the desert air as he loves his neighbour and does good to those who hate him.
Second Chances is cosy, not plotty, a reassuring winter read for lovers of sedate chicklit.
Publisher's site