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Lively look at the lords of the music industry

Cowboys And Indies

Ambitious historical novel starts with a murder

Retracing Gone Girl’s footsteps to sporadically chilling effect

Frog is a slog, even for obsessives of the Far East

Frog By Mo Yan: Hamish Hamilton, €24 The awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Chinese writer Mo Yan in 2012 provoked a curious class of controversy. Some felt it inappropriate, even a catastrophe, that a decidedly non-dissident Chinese would

More than quite a good memoir from lucid Lodge

Quite a Good Time to be Born A Memoir 1935-1975: By David Lodge Harvill Secker, €16.35 One of David Lodge’s claims to fame is that he invented a literary parlour game called ‘Humiliation’. Players are required to embarrass themselves by naming a clas

Baume shows off longform talent to its fullest

A quest to recover a fallen web empire

An erudite love story in early 1980s England

Their Lips Talk of Mischief By Alan Warner Faber & Faber, €19 Reviewed by Sara Keating

An Ulster crucible of creed and social class

The House Where It Happened By Martina Devlin Ward River Press, €17

Quiet, pithy tales in the Athenian sun

Outline By Rachel Cusk Faber, €21.50

How Irish politics really works: an insider’s manual

Paddy Machiavelli How to Get Ahead in Irish Politics

Cumming’s memoir lays bare a troubled childhood

Not My Father’s Son By Alan Cumming Harper Collins, €17

Take a leaf from a new book

Be the first to read the boldest and the brightest of the publishing industry’s projections for 2015. We take a look at the juiciest titles slated to hit bookstores

Stibbe extracts humour from miserable chaos

A rare talent born out of familial strife and sadness