Mister Memory by Marcus Sedgwick (Mulholland, £8.99)
In fin-de-siècle Paris, Marcel Després, a cabaret artiste who performs astounding memory feats, shoots his wife when he finds her with another man. He is interned in a semi-catatonic state in an asylum, where a doctor and a police inspector are determined to reach an understanding of this intriguing man – the doctor because he thinks Després will seal his reputation, and the inspector because he believes there’s more to this shooting than meets the eye. The answer, though, must be retrieved from a memory which is virtually infinite and ranks all facts as being of equal importance. Late 19th-century Paris has always had a special allure, enhanced further by Sedgwick, who plays up the atmosphere of fear and violence still hanging in the air 30 years after the Paris Commune, and contrasts it with this odd man who has uncanny abilities and an otherworldly innocence about him. As detective novels go, it’s different, quirky and refreshing.
Bad News by Anjan Sundaram (Bloomsbury, £9.99)
Sundaram went to Rwanda to join a training programme to “bring together and professionalise Rwanda’s last free journalists, so they functioned as a skilled unit”. For a decade, the country had been calm, but President Kagame was nevertheless increasing militarisation and clamping down on possible sources of dissent, which naturally included the journalists in Sundaram’s class. He describes here their terror of offending the regime, personifying them in his friend Gibson, who planned to set up a magazine which would try to navigate the tricky middle ground between sycophancy and criticism, but who was hounded out of the country, a broken man. Sundaram includes a powerful description of a memorial ceremony for the victims of the Rwandan genocide which is designed to maintain a state of fear and hatred rather than to heal wounds. Bad News is a chilling and valuable account of conditions inside Rwanda which should act as a wake-up call to those Westerners who continue to fund Kagame’s regime.
Red Dirt by EM Reapy (Head Of Zeus, £7.99)
It’s not uncommon for young Irish people to take off to Australia on a two-year visa, and Red Dirt is the stuff of their parents’ worst nightmares. Reapy’s debut follows three Irish backpackers (Murph, Fiona and Hopper) who binge on drink and drugs, make temporary friends in seedy hostels and find work on gigantic farms or garlic processing plants until fate brings them together. Trouble starts when a freaked-out Hopper disappears into the outback. His companions abandon him to his fate, but when Murph seems to catch sight of Hopper hundreds of miles away, the vision is a precursor of worse to come. All three are seeking at least temporary respite from their woes back home, and they find beauty, exhilaration and freedom – but also dodgy characters, unforgiving landscapes and, when money runs out, the consequences of bad decisions. It’s curious that this tense, edgy novel, lauded in the Irish Book Awards, was initially rejected by 14 publishers.
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