Books Donal O’Donoghue offers some book choices for Christmas
Donal O’Donoghue suggests some of the best book- shaped stocking fillers for this Yuletide season
Thriller
The House on Vesper Sands by Padraic O’Donnell ( Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Something foul is afoot in the shadowy streets of Victorian London in this ripping mystery yarn with its fabulously named characters, Sherlock Holmesian twists and comic brio. It is February 1893 and the daily news pamphlets carry strange tales of the Spiriters while the harried officers of New Scotland Yard are puzzled by a series of curious deaths and mysterious events. O’Donnell lets some wonderful characters loose in his story, not least the hard-bitten, straight-talking Inspector Cutter. There is also the ingenious device of Gideon’s police notes (occasionally redacted) which not only impel the deliciously torturous plot but add to the comic and highly entertaining cocktail. (DO’D)
Comedy
The Importance of Being Aisling by Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen (Gill)
It began as a bit of a lark in 2008, when flatmates Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen started sharing ‘Aisling-isms’ with their friends. A Facebook page followed but it was the phenomenally successful 2017 debut, Oh My God, What A Complete Aisling, that had the tills ringing and the critics lauding the duo as Ireland’s answer to Bridget Jones. Now with the equally bestselling second book, subtitled, ‘Country Roads, Take Her Home,’ we hook up again with Aisling, now 29 and still a complete Aisling as she heads home to Ballygobbard following some shock news. (DO’D)
Fiction
Normal People by Sally Rooney (Faber & Faber) As with Rooney’s lauded debut, Conversations with Friends, this second novel reveals a keenly attuned writer with an ear for what people say, don’t say, and the spaces in between. Normal People is a love story with all the messy bits. Marianne and Connell are friends from a country town in the west of Ireland. In school, Connell is the popular one, while in college in Dublin the roles are reversed. Rooney brilliantly nails those Fresher years, the alienation and loneliness, the need to be liked and the desire to be cool. Beyond that though, is an aching desire to belong and be loved no matter what you are or what people think you are. (DO’D)
Science
Brief Answers to the Big Questions by Stephen Hawking (John Murray)
The big questions in this slim book include such headscratchers as ‘Is There a God?’, ‘How Did It All Begin?’ and ‘Is Time Travel Possible?’ In many cases, the answers are far from conclusive (science has yet to catch up) but Hawking makes compelling arguments, stimulating further queries and cracking a few dry jokes along the way. In his introduction, scientist Kip S Thorne reiterates two lines from his eulogy at his friend Hawking’s interment at Westminster: “Newton gave us answers. Hawking gave us questions.” Those lines resonate throughout a book which does not have all the answers or even all the questions but still packs a punch. (DO’D)
Thriller
The Woman in the Window by A J Finn (Harper Collins)
This thriller The Woman in the Window by US author AJ Finn (the pseudonym of Dan Mallory, vice president at publisher William Morrow), is cut from the same cloth as The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl, a tale of a woman who may have lost her mind and whose account of events can’t be trusted. This time it’s delivered perfectly: Anna Fox, once a successful child psychologist, lives alone (due to agoraphobia) in a Harlem townhouse and spies on her neighbours. Expect to hear a lot more about this author. (Janice Butler)
True-Life Crime
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara (Faber & Faber)
Earlier this year, a 72-yearold police officer called Joseph DeAngelo was arrested and accused of committing serial rapes and murders across California in the 1970s and ’80s. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which was published posthumously – McNamara died in 2016 – before DeAngelo’s arrest, is a chilling account of the search for an elusive killer by a woman driven by a sense of justice and purpose. Michelle McNamara devoted many years trying to unearth the identity of the serial killer. All of this is shoehorned into this book, as much a photo-fit of a violent and clever criminal mind as it is a personal odyssey to unmask evil. (DO’D)
Fiction
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (Penguin)
Booker Prize-winner Pat Barker is celebrated for writing about war: not necessarily the battles, but the aftermath of conflict and the associated trauma. With The Silence of the Girls Barker offers us both a different conflict and a different gaze. In this case, it’s the Trojan War and the gaze is provided by Briseis, a proud queen whose lands are ransacked by the Greeks. She is held captive by Achilles as a trophy and sex slave. While many novels have focused on the men who fought at Troy, The Silence of the Girls gives a voice to the women and girls who are usually consigned to the footnotes in this well-worn story told through a new and fascinating prism. (Michael Doherty)
Poetry
100 Poems: Seamus Heaney with an introduction by Catherine Heaney (Faber & Faber)
Some five years after the Nobel laureate’s death comes a new collection of his work that echoes with a personal chime. 100 Poems: Seamus Heaney is an anthology introduced by the poet’s daughter, Catherine, but involving the considered curation of all his family, wife Marie, and his two sons, Michael and Christopher. It opens with ‘Digging’, closes with ‘In Time’ (for Síofra), from 1966 to 2013, from Seamus’s father to his granddaughter, a collection that is a celebration rather than a memoriam (as Catherine puts it) of a vital life. (DO’D)
Fiction
How to Be Famous by Caitlin Moran (Ebury Press)
They say that if you remember the mid-1990s you are either a Blur or an Oasis fan. Caitlin Moran was, you suspect, both. With her second novel, loosely based on her own life as a trail-blazing rock journalist, we hook up with 19-year-old Dolly Wilde, a teenager from Wolverhampton who strikes out for London to make her fame and fortune as a pop scribe. Moran looks back with a certain nostalgia but also in anger at a time when women were cannon fodder in a culture dominated by knobs and knockers. The result is a pop fable with bite, even if wrapped with a fairytale ending. (DO’D)