Poetic, brutal and thrilling

returning to the life he’s made for himself on Bute. Has it lived up to his expectations?

“I’m hoping Scotland is better,” he says. “There are differences – they’re licensing fracking all over the place in England and there’s a moratorium here. There’s active encouragement of the arts. There’s also little touches that we like, like the NHS – much better here. I’m not saying it’s perfect – there are problems – but it’s not the same problems as there are in England.”

Priest’s new life in Scotland has even made him question his opposition to Scottish independence. “When I lived in England and the Scottish independence debate happened, I fervently wanted it to fail,” he says. “I see Scotland as an integral part of Britain for all sorts of reasons, some sentimental, some practical. Now I live here, I’m not so sure.”

However, there is at least one problem he can foresee with independence, foreshadowed in all those border checks in An American Story. “Talk about the land border problems they have in Northern Ireland,” he says. “That would be nothing to Hadrian’s Wall!”

Set in Naples but reflecting a global trend, The Piranhas is based on Saviano’s experiences as a crime reporter with armed gangs led by 14- and 15-year-old boys. It focuses on Nicholas, who lives with respectable working-class parents and is bright enough to do well at school, but is obsessed with one day acquiring the status that will get him a private dining room at a nearby exclusive restaurant. Seeing life only as an arena where the strong lord it over the weak, he buys a gun, robs a few shops and bides his time until he can find a figure higher up the food chain to make an alliance with. “In Naples there are no paths to growing up: you’re born straight into reality, into the thick of it, you don’t get a chance to discover it a little at a time,” he reflects, and The Piranhas is a frightening but thrilling novel, alternately poetic and brutal.

Now in her eighties and a pivotal figure in British folk,

Peggy Seeger has led a remarkable life. Most of this autobiography is an intimate account of her rocky but enduring relationship with Ewan MacColl, but her reminiscences of childhood are arguably the most captivating part of the book. Seeger’s parents were a progressive couple, her mother an unrecognised composer, her mild-mannered father one of the founders of the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. Seeger’s childhood was full and active and she was never bored. These early chapters set the tone for a life of fearlessness, in which she made a new home for herself in the UK in 1956, wore her politics on her sleeve, playing the USSR and China at the height of the Cold War, and, to her surprise, fell in love with a woman at the age of 54. It’s a fascinating memoir, written with vividness, clarity and humour.

The third in this professor’s loose trilogy on Irish literature covers the period from 1922 to the global financial crash, and is no simple celebration of great writing but a stringent analysis of “the gradual expiry of the national project” and how writers responded to it. Working from the premise that “the country might have been stillborn” and that an independent Ireland merely replaced one elite with another, he explores the tensions between English and Gaelic, the disparity between language and thought, the weight of history and questions of nationhood and identity. In this context, he appraises authors whose aims would have made a restrictive, censorious state deeply uncomfortable: the likes of Seamus Heaney, John McGahern, John Banville and Edna O’Brien, with Joyce, although he isn’t dealt with directly, a constant, ghostly presence. Couching academic critiques in accessible prose, Kilberd is a brilliant essayist, unafraid of seeming idiosyncratic or contentious as he dissects a nation’s history and artistic soul.