By Cahir O’Doherty

Paula Spencer
By Roddy Doyle

In Paula Spencer, Roddy Doyle’s brilliant follow-up novel about one of his most indelible characters, we learn that his working-class heroine is now a 47 year old widow.

Paula’s still cleaning houses for a living, but now she’s fighting both to stay sober and to regain the love of her children after years of alcoholism.
Her two oldest children, alienated by years of neglect and helplessness, want little to do with her, and youngest daughter Leanne seems hell bent on replicating every mistake her mother ever made, finding her only solace in the bottom of a bottle.

Paula wants to connect with each of them, but her own sad history keeps getting in her way. Where her eldest children still remember her shortcomings, her youngest sees only her hypocrisy.

Doyle crafts his tale without a hint of sentimentality. Each of his characters is in a little battle for their own life and he spares nothing in the telling of it.

A bleaker work than the tales he became famous for, Paula Spencer is nonetheless a love story, or more precisely a love song to personal fortitude and family, and to whatever helps you make it through the night.

Despite her very obvious failings — this is a woman who gives her youngest daughter a bottle of vodka on her 16th birthday and then promptly passes out in her chair — you will find yourself cheering for her.

(Viking Press $24.95)

Tom Crean: An Illustrated Life
By Michael Smith

The photogenic Irish hero celebrated in this extraordinary pictorial history ran away from home in Co. Kerry at the age of 15 and ended up as one of the most important figures on three major expeditions to the Antarctic, alongside Ernest Shackleton and Captain Scott onboard the Discovery.

A hearty seadog of the first order, Crean was the ideal shipmate, full of courage and good cheer like a figure out of Kipling. He was an inspiration to his crewmembers and he saved the lives of many less able spirits. Loved and even revered by his crewmates, his legend is preserved in this remarkable book.

(The Collins Press $49.95)

A Great Feast of Light: Growing Up Irish in the Television Age
By Johnny Doyle

It’s impossible to understate the importance of television as an agent of social change in Ireland. That flickering box filled with light from other places turned the heads of an entire generation, bringing first rock ‘n’ roll and then (some would say) sex and drugs to the astonished citizens of a more innocent age. Or at least that’s the official story.

By day Doyle was schooled by the Christian Brothers, but by night television sent him a more subversive message. From the somber bells of the six o’clock Angelus to the mayhem of Monty Python’s Flying circus, it’s all here.

In this rollicking and evocative new memoir of an Irish childhood spent glued to the box, Doyle reminds us that fornication, surrealism and violence were as prevalent in Ireland then as they are today.

(Avalon Publishing $15.95)

Saxons, Vikings and Celts
By Bryan Sykes

Oxford University geneticist Bryan Sykes’ highly readable new book traces the genetic of the inhabitants of the British Isles and Ireland, asking questions that have previously been ignored.

Where exactly did these ancient inhabitants come from and how long have they been on the islands? How did the successive regimes of Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans alter the genetic legacy of both islands original inhabitants, the Celts?
Fascinating stuff and sure to delight the general reader.

(Norton & Company $26.95)

Robert Casey’s personal memoir of an Irish American life is also a book of his insightful reflections on topics as manifestly diverse as the Celtic Tiger, the Immaculate Conception, and even the nature and origin of the Klu Klux Klan.
Written in an admirably straightforward, conversational prose style, the author is an admired former Professor of History at Ithaca College.

(New Horizons Publish-ing $20)