Book Review | Business Post

The Deluge: Complex chronicle of climate breakdown peppered with black humour and humanity

At close to 900 pages,

Tough guy: Ugly portrait of Norman Mailer’s descent into drunken debauchery and decadence

compelling biography, charting how a genius man of letters wasted both his celebrity and his talent, is a colourful but stomach-churning read

Slow-paced thriller fails to deliver in this soap-like crime mystery

The third instalment in bestselling author Jane Harper’s Aaron Falk series keeps the reader waiting too long for both thrills and answers

My Father’s House: Thrilling tale of real-life Irish priest who saved 6,500 people from the Nazis

Joseph O’Connor is in fine form with his fictionalised novel about the Kerry priest Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty who was stationed in the Vatican during WWII and put himself in the firing line to help targets of the Nazi murder machine

A Dangerous Business: Whodunit’s light touch at odds with weightier theme of women’s struggles

Sex-worker sleuths stumble incredibly across clues and corpses in Jane Smiley’s enjoyable but underwhelming murder mystery

The McCartney Legacy: Not a beat missed in retelling of McCartney’s post-Beatles career

Biography of the musical legend is one for the fans with no detail left out and it covers only the four years after the Beatles broke up

Harry’s memoir doesn’t Spare his dysfunctional family, but fails to see his own faults

Prince Harry's book has plenty of tantalising gossip about Buckingham Palace and his squabbling family but, with his many revelations about them, it’s hard to see how they can solve their differences

The World and All That it Holds: Fascinating novel a powerful exploration of love, memory and war

Aleksandar Hemon’s tale begins at the outbreak of WWI and, amid the horror of that conflict, the author explores the intriguing relationship between storytelling and history

We All Want Impossible Things: Tale of heartbreak and humour with a side order of morphine

Catherine Newman’s debut novel is a candid tale of lifelong friendship amid a terminal cancer diagnosis that is both hilarious and crushingly powerful

Bloodbath Nation: Auster delves into the roots of America’s obsession with guns

The novelist explores why the culture of gun violence is so embedded in the US and he does so with some personal experience – his grandmother shot her husband dead

Lansdowne FC: Colourful look at rich 150-year history of Lansdowne rugby club

Lansdowne FC had to endure British prejudice at the outset, but as Charles Ivar McGrath’s painstakingly researched and beautifully illustrated book shows, the club overcame that and other challenges

Matt Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries – Vanity project from a man who didn’t keep a pandemic diary

Matt Hancock’s account of the Covid-19 crisis while serving as British health secretary is a vanity project that feels deeply suspicious, and the ‘I’m A Celebrity’ contestant doesn’t miss the opportunity to settle a few old scores

The Best Days of Our Lives: Diamond’s latest family drama is weighed down by domestic minutiae

Intricate family drama story is somewhat plodding although it does deal well with the issue of family bereavement

The Game – Deep dive into the psyche that drives obsession for sport

Former hurler provides fascinating and sometimes cerebral insights of what makes sports mean so much to so many

Our Missing Hearts: Nightmarish tale where Asians become scapegoats for all US ills

In Celeste Ng’s tense dystopian novel, which portrays a world not unlike our own but in which Asians are subject to extreme racism and children removed from their families, it is hard to miss the references to recent events and to the words of a former US president

Stella Maris – Cormac McCarthy’s latest has all the darkness with no dawn

The renowned author’s nihilistic novel Stella Maris is crammed with painful mathematical and philosophical acrobatics – and that’s the easy part

Running Feet, Sharp Noses: personal reflections of our place among the animals

This anthology of contributions from a diverse selection of writers who contemplate their own position in the animal world deserves repeated reading

Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion: Tender story of growing up in a strict religious family in Queens

Bushra Rehman’s novel tells the story of a gay girl growing up in a conservative immigrant Pakistani family while being surrounded with western norms that clashed with those of her family

Quinn: Insightful narrative on the rise and downfall of Seán Quinn makes for a compelling read

Journalist Trevor Birney has a novelist’s eye for details as he traces the businessman’s journey from riches to bankruptcy in this authoritative biography

‘Diaspora Irishness is a different kettle of fish to actual Ireland’ – Seán Hewitt

Writer and poet Seán Hewitt, whose autobiographical Gothic memoir All Down Darkness Wide received widespread critical acclaim and won the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, grew up in an Irish family in Britain