Books

Dermot Bolger edits a new anthology of poems and stories
from residents of south Co Dublin, who share their bittersweet reminiscences on the subject of home. By Erik Salholm

Richard and Judy have finished introducing their summer reading list, guaranteeing instant success for the featured texts. If you doubt us, take a look at the current UK top-six bestsellers, five of which come from their list.

Lionel Shriver, the American writer who won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005 for We Need to Talk About Kevin, has been complaining on her blog about book covers.

It is the year 34 AD and Bethan, the blind soothsayer of the settlement in the marshes, foretells an attack by the dreaded Vikings, led by the fearsome warrior nicknamed "The Bonebreaker".

Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-longlisted novel tells the parallel tales of an orphan girl in India, a 'shadow-class' immigrant in New York and other powerless characters living in the chasm between the modern East and West. By Pankaj Mishra

Books based on films are not my favourite form of writing but this adaptation has a life of its own.

A yeoman warder from the Tower of London, with a lot of time on his hands, has written the A to Z of execution.
By Neil Genzlinger

The memoir of a New York pickpocket in the 19th century has recently been discovered. Timothy J Gilfoyle, author of A Pickpocket's Tale, lets a ripping yarn get bogged down in the details. Review by William Grimes

The onslaught of soccer biographies continues, albeit to a more muted reception than their publishers might have expected while charting publication plans last spring. Like phosphorescence, World Cup fever burnt out as sharply as it had burnt brightly and past blanket media coverage has left every story seeming tired and all too familiar. Do you want to further feather these men's nests for a few hundred pages of unenlightened commentary on a competition that failed to live up to its billing?

A tale of two souls liberated but tormented by their brief affair, Aidan Higgins' classic Bornholm Night Ferry has just been reprinted. Review by Rosita Sweetman