Greener by Gráinne Murphy (Legend Press, £9.99) Female friendships are having a moment in contemporary literature. Romance, the turning tide would seem to say, comes and goes, but friendships last forever.
Or do they? After 25 years apart, Helen, Annie and Laura are brought back together through the illness of Helen’s elderly father. Can they rekindle what was once an inseparable friendship? What follows is an exploration of care, loneliness and the space required for bonds to flourish (Helen’s family home would appear to be a fourth and essential dynamic in this friendship). The story is set during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the interiority of life during this period is evident in the dense, detail-orientated prose, where the action holds the weight and airlessness of a bleak period in history.
Brigid O’Dea How to Think Like a Philosopher by Peter Cave (Bloomsbury, £10.99) If your go-to spot for information and debate is social media and YouTube, rather than reading quality journalism (how very dare you), you’ll have noticed that philosophical arguments, even faux arguments, have not completely disappeared from public discourse. And if getting a sound, informed and succinct outline of various philosophies is important to you, this entertaining book by popular philosophy writer Peter Cave is definitely worth a look.
Cave offers an accessible retrospective of philosophers from Lao Tzu to Descartes and de Beauvoir to Iris Murdoch, while not dumbing down the theories.
