The Book Against Death
By Elias Canetti
Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99
Elias Canetti is best known for his momentous non-fiction work Crowds and Power, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. This is a meandering collection of ponderings, aphorisms, diary entries, clippings etc on a subject with which none of us wish to be on familiar terms (“your single unchanging primal experience”, he says of death). Canetti began the book in 1937 but found no finishing point until his own death in 1994. It’s a strangely captivating and compelling read, with entries such as: “Perhaps the cost of the new bombs will save us from them,” and, “To carry the heart from autumn to autumn until it sinks into the leaves”. He leads you to a dark place, obviously, yet the author’s musings place a comforting hand around the flickering candle of life itself. NJ McGarrigle
Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books
By Kirsten Miller
HQ, £16.99
Miller has a modern take on dystopian ideas perfected in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 – if access to knowledge and information is controlled, what does it do to a society and culture? One person has confiscated the “inappropriate” books in a southern American town, and allows only the reading of those titles from her own small library; until it’s sabotaged with subversive volumes. It’s an ambitious novel, with a sweeping state-of-the-nation attempt at satire (“It was too hard to keep track of everyone who was out to destroy America.”) and it ambles along freely. But the book is overlong and overpopulated by characters that feel too one dimensional to give them weight and depth in the little place being held up as a symbol of a much larger one. NJ McGarrigle
The Secret Diary of Stephanie Agnew
By Angeline King
Self-published, £12
Angeline King journals the joyful, mischievous, innocent and infectious voice of teenager Stephanie Agnew, coming of age in the testing terrain of Northern Ireland in 1995. Stephanie has the same crazy dreams as many of her age: good grades and romance, and poetic ambitions as she delves deeper into a love of language, her locale’s fascinating history and an awakening to Ireland’s complex and shared history. Like many others of that time, escape is on her mind, too. You can’t help falling for Stephanie’s charm, nor her caring family that’s proud to be from the Orange tradition, thanks to King’s rich voice and sharp ear. A touching tale, with plenty of smart observational comedy on 1990s Northern Ireland that will appeal to fans of Lisa McGee. NJ McGarrigle
The Saved and the Spurned: Northern Ireland, Vienna and the Holocaust
By Noel Russell
New Island, €19.95
Germany’s invasion of Austria in 1938 prompted hundreds of terrorised and dispossessed Viennese Jews to seek to escape to Northern Ireland, where they pledged they would set up industries to cut the local jobless total of 100,000 (29.5 per cent). A “constant stream of letters came from Jewish men and women of every imaginable profession”, writes former BBC and newspaper executive Noel Russell in this harrowing and overdue chronicle. A small number established successful enterprises, but the “vast majority” of the would-be industrialists and craftspeople were rejected. At least 125 of the unsuccessful applicants were among the 65,000 Austrian Jews, most from Vienna, who were murdered in the Holocaust. Ray Burke
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Author’s musings on death place a comforting hand around the flickering candle of life
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The Siege: The Remarkable Story of the Greatest SAS Hostage Drama
By Ben Macintyre
Viking, £30
Times journalist Ben Macintyre’s latest book examines the “first ever hostage crisis to be relayed in real-time”. After six heavily armed gunmen took 26 hostages in London’s Iranian Embassy on April 30th, 1980, negotiations between the terrorists and the police hit a standstill after six days. When the terrorists began killing hostages, it sparked Operation Nimrod, the dramatic scenes playing out on TV screens, as the BBC cut from coverage of the world snooker final between Alex Higgins and Cliff Thorburn to broadcast images of the remarkable rescue mission. Macintyre paints a comprehensive picture of all involved – terrorists, hostages, police officers and SAS soldiers – as well as the taut political landscape of the time, with Margaret Thatcher under pressure to be tough on terrorism. While a little bloated around the book’s midsection, which gets bogged down in detail, the pay-off is worth it, with the incredible 41 pages covering the 11-minute siege as unputdownable as any thriller. John Walshe
Mr Churchill in the White House
By Robert Schmuhl
Norton, £25
During the second World War, Churchill visited the United States five times for bilateral meetings with President Franklin D Roosevelt. On each occasion, he stayed in the White House or at Roosevelt’s private residence at Hyde Park, New York. These meetings are overshadowed in the history books by the major conferences involving the two leaders (Newfoundland in 1941; Casablanca, Cairo and Tehran in 1943; and Yalta in 1945); Robert Schmuhl, professor emeritus at Notre Dame University, rescues them from obscurity in this book. He evaluates their importance in shaping the war effort. He also shows that Churchill, with his bizarre work habits and self-indulgent lifestyle, was the houseguest from hell. Felix M Larkin
