Byron in Love by Edna O’Brien

Weidenfeld & Nicolson €20.24
BYRON was a nasty piece of work. The son of Mad Jack Byron, he was trailed up by his awful mother, who stravagued around the country with him trying to get her claws on his inheritance.
Another of Mad Jack’s sprogs was Augusta Leigh, the poet’s half-sister, and perhaps his only real love.
A star of an international level undreamed-of by the Beatles, the febrile fatty loved nothing more than a girlish boy, unless it was boyish girls like nutty Caroline Lamb.
He traversed Europe like a one-man clap epidemic, the nasty thing, leaving a pustulating trail of syphilis and gonorrhea and miserable hearts in his wake.
Marrying a virtuous woman, he greeted his daughter’s birth with “Oh, what an implement of torture I have acquired in you” - a concept familiar to sadistic spouses.
His wife flouted him by running away, so his real instrument for torment was his ‘bastard’ daughter Allegra - neglected but bullied, passed from carer to uncaring carer.
A creative child with a mischievous smile, the toddler Allegra became increasingly disturbed, and died in the convent where her beast of a father had incarcerated her.
Edna O’Brien’s biography of the creep lacks the beautiful, ringing simplicity of her novels, but if you want to grind your teeth with rage, this is the book for you.
Publisher's site

The Paper Moon by Andrea Camilleri

Picador €10.79
SICILY is usually the place for Mob stories. But there are other stories there too.
In Camilleri’s latest cosy thriller about Inspector Salvo Montalbano of the Vigata police force, politics keep seeping into the investigation of murder.
The victim has been shot in the face and left with his mickey dangling, suggesting some kind of crime of passion.
But as Montalbano probes the crime - in between feasts at local restaurants - things begin to look a little less clear-cut.
The dead man had a hot-breathed, close relationship with his nun-like sister, a baggy woman with tempting violet eyes.
But there were lovers, and lovers of lovers. There’s an impotent husband who wants to hear all the details of the affairs of his wife - but becomes enraged when she has a bit on the side without telling him. That’s unfaithful.
And there’s the dead man’s profession - a pharmaceutical salesman, in an area where a series of upper-class men have been found dead, killed by badly-cut cocaine.
Inspector Montalbano is beloved of readers, as much a classic of mystery writing as Poirot or Maigret.
This doesn’t have the sprightly humour of the early stories - but it has its moments, as the police in the tiny station work their way through the clues, and work out how to sidestep the politics of the murder.
Publisher's site

Going it Alone by Clare Dowling

Headline Review €9.44
THE HORRIBLE truth is that Millie is 39. She’s had a great time as Andrew’s wife after the last 15 years of flitting and good-timing.
But now she’s married, and her biological clock isn’t just ticking, she’s being deafened by the alarm.
It’s time for serious action on the baby front. But Millie’s husband really isn’t co-operating as he should.
Fair City writer Clare Dowling is the mistress of feelgood stories, but here she’s dicing with danger. But she’s still funny even writing about a fraught subject.
What her heroine Millie hasn’t realised is the unfair rule that at 18 you only have to glance at the postman to be pregnant. But at 39 - when you can actually support the kid - your body’s snarling at you: “You had your chance, babe; forget it”.
And few things put a worse strain on a marriage than the infertility of either one of the partners.
Millie is getting familiar with terms such as ‘ovarian reserve’. She isn’t noticing how much more reserved her husband is.
As Andrew digs in his heels and Millie goes right ahead baby-hunting anyway, their marriage seems to be falling to pieces.
Dowling’s done it again with this entertaining story. Her fans will love it.
Author's site

Anything for Love by Sarah Webb

Macmillan €12.99
DIVINE Alice Devine is in the pits. No man, no real home, her adorable baby Adam to support.
And a sister who keeps helpfully getting her jobs.
So naturally she moves in with her sister, Grace, and takes the next job offered.
Working as an assistant fundraiser for a maternity hospital lands her into the world of the rich. Older men with younger wives, women built like busty stick insects - but all the same problems as the women whose husbands have less money and more hair.
Her boss is Maud Hamilton-O’Connor, wife of the famous Boothy, and the most famous of Ireland’s charity ladies who lunch. But a bit scatty: don’t let her near the slug pellets when she’s cooking.
Here’s where 93% of readers start guessing who’s who. The other 7% already know, I’d guess.
“Even I knew Boothy,” writes Sarah Webb in this latest hilarious novel. “He was one of Ireland’s richest men… He also had a larger than life personality with fantastic, controversial expressions for everything from SUVs (‘Dublin Dumptrucks’) to the bin charges (‘Sin Bins’), and he was always giving ‘state of the economy’ soundbites on the telly.”
Anything for Love is full of twists and tears and laughs, another solid bestseller-to-be for the Dun Laoghaire writer.
Author's site

The Girl who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson

Quercus €22.94
IF YOU want a book to take on your lifetime trip on the Trans-Siberian Railway, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl who Played with Fire is the one. Better to load it on your Kindle or iPhone if possible, though, because it’s a huge thing.
Larsson, a Swedish investigative journalist, brought his thriller trilogy to his publisher and promptly died of a heart attack at 50, is a hellish loss to literature.
The characters are the same as in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the first of the series, but they’ve grown up. Lisbeth Salander, genius hacker and a paragon of body art, is wandering the world, discarding her nipple and tongue rings but (weirdly) getting her boobs done.
Mikael Blomkvist, editor of Millennium magazine, is preparing to publish a book about sex trafficking - as Larsson put it, “the finances of rape”.
Salander discovers that this probe revisits her own violent past. When a series of brutal murders happens, she’s right in the frame, and becomes a tabloid star as Sweden’s answer to Psycho Killer.
The tension torques tighter and tighter, there’s a shock with every page you turn, and the characters are tightly written and very likeable. The best thriller I’ve read in ages.
Publisher's site

Friday Nights by Joanna Trollope

Black Swan €10.79
DULL isn’t usually a Joanna Trollope word. But she’s struck a less true note than usual with this story of an elderly woman who brings her lonely neighbours together for a weekly salon.
Eleanor sees widowed Lindsay and single mother Paula stravaging along the streets with their respective children, Noah and Toby, and invites them in, and their meetings grow into a circle as they bring in others.
Soon her flat is flocking with DJs and artists and businesspeople. Then Paula brings in a new boyfriend, the wealthy but manipulative Jackson. Bad move. Jackson wreaks havoc through the group, flirting and offering investment and bringing Paula’s son to cheer at a Chelsea match.
Trollope, queen of the Aga sagas, doesn’t work so well in this foray into literary gloom, which lacks the happy-ever-after chirpiness that’s her main selling point.
Everyone does, by the way, get a happy ending. But not before you have to follow them through a mass of deep thinking as they ponder without cease.
The characters are all too cut-out, and once they’ve been carefully outlined with characteristics, their predictable behaviour colours them in by numbers.
Trollope is a country girl, and writes most happily about rural life. Here, she seems walled in by the city, out of sight of the green.
Publisher's site

The 19th Wife by David Eberhoff

Doubleday €10.79
DOWN in the basement, Dad's playing Texas Hold Em and chatting online with DesertMissy when - blam! - someone takes off the top of his head with a Golden Boy .22.
Since the final lines of his online flirt refer to the person who's just come in as "my wife... #19", it's obvious that the technologically savvy polygamist has just been done in by one of his handmaidens.
And that's just the start of The 19th Wife, a bestseller in the US. How well it will do here is moot. This book is hard work, with interlinking narratives and a multiplicity of viewpoints and styles.
The main narrator is sweet, gay Jordan, who grew up hard and fast when the voice of God told the ma that she should abandon him on the road when he was 14.
Yes, that's the suspect, that mother #19.
Jordan is determined that the ma is innocent. And so she seems. Innocent, otherworldly and totally dim - the kind who's waiting for the Rapture.
Peeking out from between the story of Jordan's investigation into his father's murder is another story - author David Ebershoff's retelling of the factual story of Brigham Young's renegade 19th wife.
Hideously funny and way, way too long, this makes a perfect desultory Christmas read.
Publisher's site