First thoughts

Newly published this week

Circles Around the Sun In Search of a Lost Brother

Molly McCluskey

Penguin, £14.99; Kindle £7.49

Review: Sean Hickey

PERHAPS the most telling moment, at least for the author, in Molly McCloskey’s moving and well written and constructed memoir comes towards the end of the book.

An astute psychiatrist friend in Paris, after listening to her talk about her own fears of psychotherapy and what it might reveal about her, whispers to her: ‘We are all crazy.’

While the focus of the book is on her brother Mike and his descent into, and near lifelong struggle with, schizophrenia, it is also a history of a family throughout the American 20th century, and an examination of how families work and don’t work, and how they make us what we are.

She writes with candour about her fears for her own sanity and her battles with alcohol addiction — a battle she wins after a last binge in Sligo. The reader learns much about schizophrenia, most importantly, perhaps, that there is still much that is unknown about the illness. Why, for example, if the disease has a genetic component, do identical twins not have the same risk of contracting it?

The narrative jumps backwards and forwards chronologically but this is no way lessens the impact of this sad and frightening, but not hopeless tale.

Free Radicals: The Secret Anarchy Of Science

Michael Brooks

Profile; £12.99

Review: David McLoughlin

SCIENCE and scientists are, to many people, complicated and boring respectively.

Science writer Michael Brooks (who holds a PhD in Quantum Physics), has spent many years trying to make science cool and groovy. And with this work he succeeds.

Brooks paints scientists as human, colourful and deeply flawed individuals who make you laugh with their sheer audacity. And Brooks himself frequently courts the controversial.

Free Radicals is an illuminating, well-researched and genuinely funny read.

Professor Stephen Hawking relating his meeting with Pope John Paul II and failing to tell him about how he had just disproved, according to him, the need for God’s intervention in the ‘Big Bang’ as he did not want to share the same fate as Galileo, is a particularly gleeful moment.

A splendid read!

A Dance With Dragons

George RR Martin

Harper Voyager; £25

Review: Alex Sarll

HBO’s adaptation of A Game Of Thrones has introduced thousands of newcomers to George RR Martin’s brutal fantasy vision. Four books further into his epic Song Of Ice And Fire series comes this much-delayed instalment; mercifully, it justifies the wait.

What remains constant is Martin’s deft characterisation, evocative description, and compelling plotting.

Even as multiple plot strands interweave and twist, no development feels forced; everything unfolds with the terrible inevitability of history.

Mystical and fantastical elements have gradually played a larger part as the series has unfolded, but the lands of Martin’s imagination have always retained a sense of realness and solidity rarely found in fantasy — or any fiction.