Not Enough Hours by Owen Fitzpatrick

Poolbeg

Can’t talk to you! No time!
Disorganised, eh? Always catching up? Not oriented in time and space? You need this book.
Haven’t got time to read it! I just -
Less mouth, more ears! Owen Fitzpatrick, who wrote this, organises people on the RTE programme. Follow his guidelines and you’ll never be late again. All your work will be done perfectly, and on time. You’ll be happy -
All right, bossy-boots, what do I have to do?
“We are what we repeatedly do,” he says. “Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. (Aristotole)”
Say again?
Set up a routine and you’ll get things done. I know, don’t look at me like that - they all say that. But Fitzpatrick says different people need different ways of organising, to suit their own way of seeing the world.
Here’s my list
Let’s see: ‘get the toilet fixed, make more money, bring the dog to the vet, save mankind, get married’ -
Eeek! I’m late for work!
Fitzer says you have to look at how you see time. Is the past behind you or on your left? How do you visualise the present?
Go on outa that
He swears it works. Actually he got one person to change totally just by reversing the order of how she planned her day. Look at your own list - some things are more urgent than others. All of them need different actions. You have to do the urgent ones first - then concentrate most of your work on the ones that matter most to you.
It all sounds very… controlled
Nothing wrong with control, my girl. Fitz managed to untangle a couple of workaholics on his TV show, and get them back spending serious time with the family. That can’t be bad.
But isn’t workaholic good?
Nope. Not efficient to spend every hour of your life working - you use up time in a flurry of emails, phone calls, meetings. You get more done if you work shorter hours, but organise your work.
So I should read it?
Put it at the top of your list.
Author's site

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

Simon & Schuster

Sexy Italian romance set in New York? Mmm!
Oh yeah! Valentine comes home to Greenwich Village from the horror of a family wedding - everyone asking why she’s not married yet - and goes up on the roof to water the tomatoes, naked.
As you do. The roof?
Flat roof, silly. It’s a lush garden where Valentine and Gram, her gorgeous grandma, grow enough tomatoes to feed every mama’s boy in Italy.
But naked?
She’s hot. In both senses, it turns out - the man of her dreams, Roman Falconi, is looking at an apartment in the empty building opposite. He sees her raining the water down on herself and her plants, and thinks: “Oh Mama, that’s a hot tomato.”
Is Roman romantic?
Full bodied with a great nose - and he sends her red roses and branches of baby lemons to fill a room full of scent and earthy passion. Roman’s hands are soon roamin’ over Valentina in his kitchen - he’s a top chef with his own restaurant.
But the course of true love…
Never runs smooth. La Valentina bella is a craftswoman - she and Gram run the family business, making wedding shoes. But her brother Alfred -
Alfred? Not very Italian!
These are American Italians - Roman, from Chicago, says he’s Pugliese. Anyway, Alfred wants the building sold and Gram and Valentine making shoes as a hobby.
But love triumphs?
Not saying. But throw in a trip to Italy - where Gram meets her old love and Valentine is courted by the gorgeous Gianluca - and a contest to design fashion shoes for a world fashion leader…
Who’s this Trigiani babe?
Factoid: the bestselling writer shares her writing studio with Michael Patrick King, who wrote the Sex and the City series.
So it’s a buy?
Si, si. Valentine is a nice kid who values manners, hard work and kindness, and you’re rooting for her all the way. And this is just the first of a trilogy, so there are two more books in her story.

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

Simon & Schuster

Sexy Italian romance set in New York? Mmm!
Oh yeah! Valentine comes home to Greenwich Village from the horror of a family wedding - everyone asking why she’s not married yet - and goes up on the roof to water the tomatoes, naked.
As you do. The roof?
Flat roof, silly. It’s a lush garden where Valentine and Gram, her gorgeous grandma, grow enough tomatoes to feed every mama’s boy in Italy.
But naked?
She’s hot. In both senses, it turns out - the man of her dreams, Roman Falconi, is looking at an apartment in the empty building opposite. He sees her raining the water down on herself and her plants, and thinks: “Oh Mama, that’s a hot tomato.”
Is Roman romantic?
Full bodied with a great nose - and he sends her red roses and branches of baby lemons to fill a room full of scent and earthy passion. Roman’s hands are soon roamin’ over Valentina in his kitchen - he’s a top chef with his own restaurant.
But the course of true love…
Never runs smooth. La Valentina bella is a craftswoman - she and Gram run the family business, making wedding shoes. But her brother Alfred -
Alfred? Not very Italian!
These are American Italians - Roman, from Chicago, says he’s Pugliese. Anyway, Alfred wants the building sold and Gram and Valentine making shoes as a hobby.
But love triumphs?
Not saying. But throw in a trip to Italy - where Gram meets her old love and Valentine is courted by the gorgeous Gianluca - and a contest to design fashion shoes for a world fashion leader…
Who’s this Trigiani babe?
Factoid: the bestselling writer shares her writing studio with Michael Patrick King, who wrote the Sex and the City series.
So it’s a buy?
Si, si. Valentine is a nice kid who values manners, hard work and kindness, and you’re rooting for her all the way. And this is just the first of a trilogy, so there are two more books in her story.

Loser’s Town by Daniel Depp

Simon & Schuster

Daniel Depp? I know that name!
Johnny’s big brother, indeed.
Oooh, a babe?
Mmwell, when the talents were divvied up in Clann Depp, Johnny got a fair share of the handsome gene. Daniel has more of a Bilbo Baggins look - if you like ‘em short, plump and beardy, he’s the man for you. But he has a lovely personality.
Hmm. Can he write?
Hilarious and dark and heroic. ‘Loser’s Town’ is Hollywood - and Depp knows La-La-Land from the inside. As one of the characters, a gangster turned producer, says: “Movies make heroin and cocaine look like child’s play.”
Yeah, yeah. But is Johnny in it?
Heavens, no. Just a superstar called Bobby Dye.
Bobby Dye, Johnny Depp. No resemblance
Actually, no. Johnny Depp is a nice guy, from all accounts. Bobby is a weak little sniveller who’ll compromise his every friend for the sake of his career. And Hollywood is run by the Mafia.
So far, so noir
Yeah. Bobby’s getting death threats - “You’re going to Die, Dye!” So our hero - tall, taciturn, rock-like white knight David Spandau, a heartbroken former stunt man who’s now a detective - is brought in to help.
All so typically American
Ah, but there’s an Irish angle. Spandau’s sidekick is wee Terry from Derry, who learned martial arts in the IRA -
Eh?
- and now lives on a houseboat in Ventura, listening to Bach and reading Tolkien and longing for love. And overcoming big guys with magical kung-fu grace.
My kinda guy
Don’t get too attached. I warned you it was noir. But the writing is gorgeous. When a criminal psycho meets the girl he loves as he’s on his way to do a murder, he “felt happiness come over him like a cool mist”.
And funny too?
Really funny - full of bitchy cracks and crazy scenarios, and you like the characters - even the creepos. And written like a bullet: hard and fast.
Worth buying?
Run, don’t walk, and be first to grab it before it goes.
Publisher's site

The Insider by Ava McCarthy

Harper

A tense, riveting thriller?
Shh, I’m reading. Yeah, finished in a minute. G’way. I can’t put down The Insider, Ava McCarthy’s cracking first thriller.
With a lovely love story?
Far from. A story where you clutch the book, eyes bulging, tongue sticking out of the corner of your mouth, not realising you’re holding your breath until you gasp with horror.
Plot twists? Thrills?
More twists and turns than a property developer’s back pocket. More thrills than a day in Limerick. Geeky grrrl Harry Martinez is pursued by a maniac who signs threatening anonymised emails ‘The Prophet’, and kills her friends.
Can’t she, er, hack The Prophet back?
You’d think so - but the emailer knows all about the €12 million her father and his rogue trader pals stashed away in a numbered account.
Of course, €12 million goes nowhere nowadays
Oh yes it does - it appears in Harry’s own bank account, then, just as she’s arranged to pay it back to the bad guy, *pouf*, it disappears again.
Trouble coming every day. But a tough babe has her ways?
Oh yes. Harry would mind mice at crossroads - and hack into their user accounts while she did it. She follows the money all the way to the Caribbean - but I won’t spoil it.
Wait - what about the da? Wouldn’t he know who’s after the €12m?
He’s the last thing Harry wants to see - a gambler who lost the house when she was a kid, and now a thief. Also he’s due for release from Arbour Hill, and she doesn’t want to queer his pitch.
Blood will tell?
You might say. Harry has inherited his creative way with a problem, and he taught her to be a poker ace when she was in nappies.
The writer knows her stuff?
Yup; an analyst programmer for the London Stock Exchange’s trading division; she got a first in physics and a masters in nuclear medicine - and she can write.
Is it a buy?
Mos’ def. Right to the end - where there’s a fabulous final twist - she keeps you hanging on.

A Bit of a Scandal by Mary Rose Callaghan

Brandon €22.94

Holy God, she didn’t get off with a priest?
Fraid so - baby journalist and part-time waitress Louise in Mary Rose Callaghan’s hot novel A Bit of a Scandal slides into love with Father Peter.
The bold strap! Based on a mediaeval love story?
Supposedly. Abelard and Heloise.
She a pale rose, he a gallant knight?
Not quite - he a trendy philosopher, she a scholarly young wan; due to a tragic misunderstanding, her family castrated him.
Ouch. Well, families are like that.
Maybe your family.
And this happened in Dublin?
No, no, you’re not listening. Abs and Helly were back in 11th-century France. The pair in the darkly funny Bit of a Scandal are modern - well, fairly. They fell for each other in the mildewy Dublin of the 1970s - he a Canadian monk, she a freelance for a Catholic paper.
So she got off with him? Scarlet woman.
Ah now. There was a pair of them in it.
True love?
Sorta kinda. He’s wedded to the Church, but there are three of them in this marriage.
Sounds like a tormented thing - Brief Encounter for the 1970s?
Callaghan puts a funny spin on it. Fr Peter’s constantly trying to convert her. On a bus, he veers from “Oh, God, you’re sick? You’re pregnant!” to “You have to invite Jesus into your heart - if you did it’d blow your mind!”
Lovely.
On a visit to a German family, he follows her up the stairs, goatily touching her behind, then they go back to sing Grace to the tune of Eidelweiss.
Been there.
He patronises her - “Your degree? You never get beyond the empirical” - tells everyone else that she’s a recovering addict or alcoholic.
Oh. Haven’t been there.
This guy is some tulip. At one party, he pushes past her into the loo - “Oh my God, you’re wearing stockings!” and as they make out, he shouts hoarsely to the person pounding on the door: “I’m counselling Miss O’Neill, I’ll be down in 15 minutes.”
Saucy! So it’s a buy?
If you like it funny, it’s a definite buy.
Publisher's site

Hungry for Home by Cole Moreton

Curragh Press
Cole Morton's extraordinary prose has a light coming from it like the Atlantic light that suffuses the Blaskets.
His account starts with Seánín ó Cearna, a strong, wiry young man who came staggering down from his work on the hill on the Great Blasket Island just before Christmas in 1946.
Seánín was dying of meningitis, but his family - which extended through the families of the island through intermarriage - could get no help.
The Atlantic storms had come down on the island, and the radio telephone was not working. Since it had been installed, the wind-powered batteries had burned out again and again under the force of the terrible gales.
When the young man died, four of the young islandmen took a currach and dodged out into the sea during a brief moment of calm, rowing fast across the sound between the islands and Dunquin, to get a coffin to bring the body back to the mainland.
The people of the Great Blasket had come there in the Famine, but still sent their dead back to be buried in the old home places around the Kerry coast.
The trauma of the days-long wait with the body laid out on the kitchen table - washed and prepared by his young sister, their mother being dead - broke the islanders.
Soon afterwards, starving in a stormy winter, they were appealing to de Valera. Officially they were moved off the island and into the care of their government. Unofficially, there was a mass migration of the young to Springfield, Massachusetts.
It's a tragic story - no one in their sane senses would want to leave the beautiful place that was their home, if they had any choice, but the life on the Blaskets was too hard to be borne, and there was no help then from the government, and God knows there is little now.
But it is not just the story that makes this book essential to every shelf; it is Moreton's transparent and beautiful style. It is as if the writers and storytellers who grew out of the Blaskets had touched his shoulder as he wrote.
He takes the story from the death of the 24-year-old Seánín to the community that settled in Springfield with its smoky factories and 90-degree heat - where you'd know the islandmen because they still walked one after another in single file, as they had on the island.
And he follows it to the third generation, where the American grandchildren - children of those who had got educated, passed exams, done well - fled onwards across America.
Londoner Morton's writing puts you right in the middle. Here's the opening:

Christmas Eve 1946
This is the end of the world. The air is full of a terrible wailing. A gale scalps the waves, spilling foam. Gulls shriek as they tumble, caught between the spray, the rain and the low, dark clouds. A mountain stands alone in the sea, its back breaking the wind so that the invisible forces are scattered over its slopes as raiders from the north once were, howling and running down from all directions on to the shuttered buildings of a settlement.
Publisher's site