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We all have our odd individual quirks and daily rituals, some we probably aren't even aware of or consider as anything out of the ordinary. Some routines around the home are comforting, reassuring, even precautionary, making sure things are switched off, closed, locked up. Some habits however are just strange and don't mean anything to anyone except ourselves. It's only when something changes, like another person coming in and upsetting the routine, that you might realise that they aren't always rational or easily explained to outsiders, but also bring an awareness that the motivations behind the behaviours might have deeper implications than you might think. Since it's entitled Rituals , and since Joan's little quirks, customs and habits are detailed at the outset, you expect that to be a significant and interesting theme to explore in this short novel, but there is a lot more to derive from this simple domestic situation that Joan finds herself in when as a si...

Frédéric Paulin is a French writer of romans noirs , a different kind of policier from the more common police-detective crime thriller, one more involved in current affairs and geopolitics. I'm not familiar with this genre, the only other one I can think of that I've read in French is Jean-Patrick Manchette whose works date back to the 1970s and the world has moved on since then ...and not necessarily for the better. I'm not aware of many notable authors writing in this genre in English. The closest I can think of - and he is a writer I greatly admire for his knowledge and insights into the human within state affairs - is Gerald Seymour.  La nuit tombée sur nos âmes (literally 'The Fallen Night on Our Souls' or perhaps 'Dark Night of the Soul'?) deals with the events surrounding the protests and riots at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, a blend of real life political figures on the fringes and fictional characters involved in the central conflict betwe...

Cool Machine is the third book in Colson Whitehead's Harlem trilogy, a series that in its second installment was already shaping up to have as important a place in the author's depiction of the experience of the black community in America as his other Pulitzer Prize winning works. Perhaps even more so for the manner in which it extends that vision across the decades of the 60s in Harlem Shuffle and the 70s in Crook Manifesto . through to the 80s now in Cool Machine . The central figure who is witness to the changes and challenges that the years bring is principally Ray Carney in his efforts to become a legitimate businessman selling furniture in his own Harlem store despite the tug of the criminal underworld coming to his door seeking his services as a fence for stolen goods. It's not just underworld connections that Ray has to navigate his way though, some of them genuine friends that he is helping give a leg up through the challenges of trying to survive as a black pers...

Ludovic Deblois, to judge by his previous novel Inversion - a frighteningly realistic portrayal of technological innovation and advances when placed in the hands of corrupt powers - doesn't have a particularly rosy outlook on the future. His latest novel Il suffit parfois d’un cri… (which you could maybe translate not literally as 'A Cry in the Wilderness' or 'A Voice in the Wild'?) is again set in the immediate future and, inspired by animal life and our relationship with nature, you would have to say it does not appear to be any more optimistic about our future. And you would have to conclude that it might be for a good reason. Concerned about the climate and mankind's lack of willingness to confront serious ecological and environmental issues, the author's lates novel again forces us to think seriously about some important matters that, having seen how quickly things have changed in the last few years, might not be that far away from becoming reality. B...

Neil Jordan's novels often (always?) feature figures dealing with trauma, loss, the past, each struggling with a disconnect in their lives. He has explored this through a number of variations including metaphorical or literal ghosts. In his latest novel, Jordan writing in the realm of futuristic science fiction for the first time, he deals with a speculative scientific approach where memories and trauma can be genetically altered, but the past and the future are linked in other ways that aren't so easily erased. Written in Jordan's familiar, evocative literary style, his latest novel is enriched by his extension into new realms. The novel is divided into two parts. In part one, the story takes in two timelines, one in the past in 1886, the other 200 years in the future in 2086, both periods lined by two figures from the Cartwright family. They are linked, Jordan style, by innumerable connections, by family evidently, but also by landscape, buildings and memory that is imbue...

What? is a curious novelisation of by Roman Polanski's 1972 film What? , but then What? is a curious film. Preceding Chinatown , it was poorly received on its release and for years remained largely forgotten. Its reputation hasn't been enhanced over the years, not least because of the accusations and charges laid against the filmmaker arising from this period that is not helped by the dubious taste of some of this film's content and subject matter. That said, What? is not as bad as its reputation suggests, but I suppose that's a matter of taste and opinion. Some might think it hasn't aged well, but I think it falls in well enough with the free-form self-analytical style of European filmmaking exemplified in Fellini's films from this period ( Juliet of the Spirits , Roma ). If it's a self-reflection of the filmmaker's own personal obsessions - although there is no reason we are led to believe it is - it's hard not to see more than a whiff of misogy...

If there is one good thing to come out of the Troubles - and I say that as someone who lived through them and finds it hard to see any positive side - it's that the period makes for a great television or movie drama. Or more often a bad one riddled with clichés, to be honest, but even then it provides lucrative work opportunities for local actors, extras and media people. It's sad but it's funny at the same time and Séamas O'Reilly recognises both sides of that equation. It adds up to an entertaining and thoughtful read, one that relies itself on the stereotypes, but with a sense of black humour that has an essence of truth to it. Prestige Drama doesn't try to revive the past, but is more firmly rooted in the industry and the people trying to get something out of it. There's Diarmuid, the writer for 'Dead City', a forthcoming edgy Northern Ireland Troubles TV drama "inspired by real events". He lives in England now of course, but is currently ...

Tomás Nevinson opens, as you might expect in a novel by Javier Marías, with a long preamble to set the scene. It's not an uncommon subject that he contemplates, but one that has been thought about and speculated upon by many others. What if someone has taken one of the many opportunities or been successful in an attempted assassination of Hitler before he became responsible for the deaths of millions of people? But how could anyone have known what he would become?  There is a good reason why this subject might be of interest to the narrator of Tomás Nevinson - who is Tom himself - and the reason you could say was already proposed by a longer preamble to this book, although I doubt there is any way that anyone could consider the author’s previous novel (which would turn out to be his penultimate work), Berta Isla as merely a preamble. As far as Tomás Nevinson is concerned however - the book and the husband of Berta Isla that is - his activities as an undercover operative, spy, ag...

If it were any other writer, you would consider Tom’s Version a follow up to the author's last book, The Runes Have Been Cast , but Robert Irwin is an unusual case. His books, from The Arabian Nightmare onward, are intrigued with the idea of life as a story: as the book before the last made explicit in its title, My Life is like a Fairy Tale . Seen in that light, The Runes Have Been Cast , which was by no means straightforward itself (although less convoluted than some of Irwin's work) almost becomes enfolded within Tom's Version , a story within a story. Or maybe I'm just over-thinking it. Nonetheless the clues and references are scattered throughout Tom's Version . Now in 1970, following the late 1960s' story of the two Oxford academics in The Runes Have Been Cast , at the end of chapter one here, the narrator observes that " London was so full of stories " and the encounter group that Tom joins sounds promising of new experiences “ in the City of ...

As a former employee of Hewlett Packard, Company is another of Max Barry's early books dealing satirically (ie. wholly realistically) with the absurdity of business corporate interests and trivial office politics (or perhaps trivial business interests and absurd office politics). I was going to say that he has moved on from that, but if you look deeper even into his SF adventure Providence , you can see that the office and corporate experience is still there, so it goes deep. In Company however it's completely - and I mean completely - immersed in the world of business. We get full-on corporate speak, mission statements and productivity targets for Zephyr Holdings, a company that delivers training packages. Its business objective however is not as you might expect to increase productivity and sales, but to make the business look lean and competitive in the financial market for its shareholders - or at least that's how it appears. Hence one of the four sales reps in Zephyr...

Liadan Ní Chuinn's debut collection of short stories has been proclaimed by The Irish Times as a "remarkable debut that deserves to be considered among the best Irish books of the 21st century", which kind of sets a high bar for any reviewer coming along and reviewing the collection's UK publication this month from Granta. Making it a little more complicated is the fact that the author using the name Liadan Ní Chuinn is unknown: no biographical information has been provided on them other than the claim that they were born in 1998 in the year of the Northern Ireland Good Friday peace agreement and they are not doing any interviews or publicity for the book. Conspiracists have already been claiming the stories were written by AI, but anyone who has actually read the book will find it reassuring that AI will never be able to write a book so steeped in the essence of humanity as to be able to distil that lived experience into a remarkable collection of stories that do ind...

Nicci Cloke's Her Many Faces takes a little time to get its murder mystery drama going, but ultimately that's because it has other factors and relevant contemporary issues to raise that are to prove to have a significant impact on the case. Those issues feel just a little 'manufactured' in terms of the plotting, and it all seems a bit too neatly and novelistically constructed. Those are minor reservations however, and once you get past that, the courtroom drama that follows really takes on a momentum this makes this a hard book to put down. An initial difficulty, for me, is its choice of perspective. What we have are five different viewpoints, all of them men, all of them focussed on their experience with Katherine Cole, a young woman who has been arrested and accused of the murder of four extremely wealthy, important and influential men. Katherine was the only waitress working at their private members club when the men were served a poisoned bottle of brandy. Since Ka...

John Ironmonger is a wonderful and unique writer. Let's just get that out of the way. In fact he has just got better with every book he has written (I haven't read The Coincidence Authority , but will have to remedy that; even though by my above assertion it's not going to be quite as good as later works, but it will still be brilliant I imagine). His second novel, after his debut The Notable Brain of Maximilian Ponder , was the wonderful The Whale and the End of the World (or Not Forgetting the Whale ), a quirky book with a serious message set in a little Cornish village during a worldwide pandemic; the novel a marvel of English character, wit, superstition and deeply felt humanity, features that took on an international flavour in The Many Lives of Heloise Starchild . Ironmonger, I'm very pleased to discover, has returned to St Piran with some quirky English characteristics for another timely work that encapsulates all the same qualities in order to approach another ...

Back before I had even read any of her work, I nonetheless had the impression, mainly based on the accounts of The Gathering , that Anne Enright wrote mainly about women and difficult family situations. Despite the acclaim and awards, that didn't strike me as a subject that I would find interesting and when I finally got around to reading The Green Road it turned out to be a mostly accurate view of her typical subject matter but it was also clearly just a brilliant piece of writing. Having got past the inaccurate impression of it being an off-putting subject then, Actress seemed a more approachable book. A fictional account of a writer's memories of her mother, a once famous Irish actress who caused a scandal at the end of her carer by shooting a film producer in the foot, it seems again like the familiar territory of women in difficult family relationship, but in the hands of Anne Enright it's also much more than that. The story focusses on this as a central point, as if...