From deployment in The Congo in the 1960s to present day operations in the Golan Heights Irish soldiers have found themselves in combat situations. Ryle Dwyer reads Dan Harvey’s book on our Blue Berets.

 

Since becoming Irish President in 2011, Limerick-born Michael D Higgins has proven a popular head of state. 

IT is now nearly 70 years since George Orwell’s fabulously dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was published and in that time it has become one of the most influential books ever written. 

A tough-minded wisdom permeates this story of two elderly neighbours. While the cover is garlanded with the bougainvillea flower it could as easily show a bed of nettles or a crown of thorns. 

Jon McGregor has made the Man Booker list twice and also won a €100k prize from the Impac, but he’s never been totally comfortable with such accolades, writes Sue Leonard.

This book is not just another book explaining why we do not speak our own language, and why we should, and how we might. 

Thick-skinned and fearless, Kajsa Norman goes behind the lines in Afrikanerdom, where she finds a racist, cultish and tribal people but, as Josephine Fenton discovers, she also finds some hope for a dying race

I Have No Secrets by Penny Joelson (Electric Monkey, €9.20) 

Jo Nesbo has been a professional footballer, economist, rock star, and most recently, a bestselling writer.

Available now Richard Ford, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Independence Day, explores non-fiction for the first time with a biography of his parents.

Five months pregnant with two toddlers already, Grace Holland is a 1940s housewife, trapped in a loveless marriage.

Katie Roiphe is a well-known essayist often appearing in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and other literary journals. 

As crime fiction of all genres has become a global phenomenon, no doubt there are those to whom the book will appeal. Personally, however, it’s just too dangerous a world for my head to inhabit.

It’s a thankless task, editing a poetry anthology — by their very nature they attract criticism for who makes the final cut and who doesn’t. 

Sally Phipps’ biography of her mother, the novelist Molly Keane is a work of art, says Thomas McCarthy who recalls Keane’s second coming as a writer in the 1980s. He savours every word of a wonderful memoir

Just over a year on from the death of Prince, his first wife Mayte Garcia is finally ready to talk about life with the flamboyant singer. She tells Hannah Stephenson about how the enigmatic star made her feel, the tragic loss that tore them apart, and coping with her grief.

Ella Queen of Jazz by Helen Hancocks (Frances Lincoln, €13.90 HB)

The narrator’s premonitions on a stormy night are given such a prominent part of this story that the reader could be forgiven for having starting out with a bad feeling about the book itself. 

Having a keen interest in the work of German spiritual teacher and philosopher Eckhart Tolle, I was somehow willing the universe to introduce me to the teachings of homegrown philosopher, John O’Donoghue. 

There are things that can’t be explained, the narrator of I’m Right Here tells us, such as magic, ghosts and the afterlife. 

Caribbean-born writer Sheena Kamal went on a journey from acting to stuntwoman before she decided to write. She talks to Sue Leonard.

It’s 2009, summer, and Ireland stands on the brink of catastrophic recession, or, as the very unreliable narrator of Ithaca puts it: it was ‘the summer after all the money disappeared’. 

David Cameron was prescient in his assertion that last year’s UK referendum on EU membership would ‘unleash demons of which ye know not.’ His remark reminds Josephine Fenton of Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’

Hug Me Please by Przemyslaw Wechterowicz (Words And Pictures, €14.20 HB)

The hugely popular film of The Lady in the Van, in which Alex Jennings played the writer Alan Bennett and Maggie Smith the eponymous lady, introduced Alan Bennett to a far wider audience. 

This is a warm hug of a book packed full of wise words of reassurance for millennials. 

Laura and her son Daniel have always been close, but for the past few years, he’s been away at university. When he returns home after graduating, she relishes spending time with him.

The year is 1988. FBI agent Joe Navarro picks up a typical assignment, an interview with ex-US soldier Rod Ramsay who has been linked with espionage in Germany.

Traumatised souls. Murderous housewives. Wise-cracking hitmen. Bloody revenge. It’s all there in this excellent collection of short stories from Irish crime writers.

An encounter between French filmmaker Francois Trauffaut and Alfred Hitchcock in 1955 helped persuade the English speaking world of his genius. Gerry McCarthy savours a reissue of the book that followed.

Michel Déon, novelist and member of the Académie francaise lived in Co Galway for the last 50 years of his life, and died last December, aged 97. 

4321 is immensely readable, at times compelling, sometimes saggy tale, says Noel Baker.

Paddy Armstrong’s account of his wrongful imprisonment as part of the Guildford Four is harrowing. As a politically disengaged teenager of the ’70s, he was always an unlikely IRA man, as Anne Lucey discovers.

SKELETONS tumble out of cupboards early on in Sam Blake’s debut novel, when the little bones of the title are found sewn into the hem of an old wedding dress owned by artist Zoe Grant.

Tackling a taboo subject in the shape of caring for an elderly relative was the inspiration for her cathartic novel, Kate Beaufoy tells Sue Leonard.

IN the light of Brexit and the talk of soft and hard borders, this is a topical novel as it is set on the blackthorn-hedged borders of Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Lift the Flap and Colour- Ocean and, Lift the Flap and Colour-Jungle by Alice Bowsher (Frances Lincoln, €7.10 each)

THE second novel in Norwegian author Samuel Bjork’s Munch and Kruger series exemplifies everything that is great about the genre of Scandinavian fiction.

WHILST feminism is widely celebrated, in the age of social media, there is still overwhelming pressure on women to be perfect.

BORN 100 years ago, surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington only died in 2011, making her a fascinating link to a long-gone world.

Justin Keating was Minister for Industry and Commerce in the early 1970s and a man of strong convictions, never afraid to voice his opinions. Ryle Dwyer reads between the lines of his collection of writings. 

The Legacy is the first in a new crime series from Yrsa Sigurdardottir, author of the Thora Gudmundsdottir books.

Nature in ‘health benefits’ shock! There is not much controversy in Florence Williams’s impassioned and thorough exploration of nature’s impact on our bodies, psyches and creativity — but that is not the point.