NEVER forget, this magnificent novel tells us, the horrors, degradation and hopelessness of war. To Irish readers, in particular, it implores that they never forget those who fought in the first world war. One such is Willie Dunne, an 18-year-old who fought with the Dublin Fusiliers on the western front in the belief that Home Rule would follow victory. In one easy lesson, Dunne moves from military no-man's land to political no-man's land. While on home leave, Dunne witnesses the Easter Rising, sees 'his' soldiers firing on his people. By now he knows all about warfare, understands the impossible position of the Volunteers and the guts they showed.

This political ambiguity leads him to lose everything he holds sacred. The read is heart-aching but beautiful.

Utterly Monkey By Nick Laird Harper £8 344pp

IN LAIRD's debut novel we are reminded that it is one thing for a young lad to leave his home, but quite a different achievement to leave it behind him. Danny Williams is a social mountaineer who has recently moved into a ritzy London apartment and, to go with that, is settling into a position with a top law company.

To spoil Danny's perfect world, enter Danny's old mate, Geordie Wilson. Geordie just turns up unannounced on Danny's doorstep. The world Geordie has recently vacated is the same world Danny believed he had left behind; small town Northern Ireland, Omagh by the description. Furthermore, Geordie is on the run, not from the police but from a loyalist gang whose funds he has absconded with. It's both a witty and touching story of friendship.

Sharon and My Mother-in-Law: The Ramallah Diaries By Suad Amiry Granta Books £8 194pp

ANOTHER look at the absurdity of warfare, this time surprisingly amusing and unambiguously entertaining.

It is as if Suad Amiry said to herself, "the hell with all this agony and pain of life, " in the so-called Occupied Territories, "there has to be some relieving fun, otherwise people would go mad." In diary-form, then, she recalls the Israeli invasion of Ramallah in the spring of 2002 when her magnificently tigerish mother-in-law moved into the Amiry household and gave some Israelis what for. Amiry's darkly humorous account of life in the Occupied Territories also recreates the atmospheres, the tensions, the anxieties of trying to live a normal life under abnormal circumstances. A dog, for example, is granted a pass to enter Jerusalem, when tens of thousands of Palestinians are refused.

Tsotsi By Athol Fugard Canongate £7 239pp

PRIMARILY a playwright, this is Fugard's sole effort at prose fiction. He abandoned the effort in the 1960s, rediscovered the manuscript and had it published in the 1980s. It was recently made into a film which won an Oscar. Tsotsi is a man with no name. Only a nickname: Tsotsi, which means thug. He is well named. He is the leader of a gang. We begin by reading how he beat one member of his gang almost to death. He then sets out to rape a woman. No name, no nature, no compassion, no past, no future. Tsotsi just moves like an angry animal until he gets a glimpse of a possible future for himself. Fugard's creation, discovering he has a future and a redemption . . . in the 1960s . . . spoke aspiringly of the South African context from which it emerged.

Revelations: Personal Responses to the Books of the Bible Canongate £9 403pp

AS MEANINGLESS discourses far removed from today's realities, or as revelations with eternal verities contained within them, whatever the Books of the Bible may mean to different people . . . and there is a multitude of voices in these personal responses, from the celestial Dalai Lama to PD James who has no religious drum to beat . . . no one can deny their beauty or the beauty of the poetry. The Old Testament, after all, is a work of literature. And if nothing else, this loose collection should inspire even non-believers to visit the original texts. In the book to hand, they can read Piers Paul Read's take on the Wisdom of Solomon, or my own favourite . . . EL Doctorow on Genesis. Finally, clergymen looking to jazz up Sunday morning sermons could do worse than to lift some of the ideas offered here.

26A By Diana Evans Vintage £6.99 231pp

DIANA EVANS is a twin herself and her book concerns identical twins Georgia and Bessie, mixed-race girls growing up in London, with a Nigerian interlude, in the 1970s and 1980s. Their mother Ida fled Nigeria and an arranged marriage, falling into the arms of Aubrey, a maths geek on secondment in Africa. It's an unhappy marriage: exiled to England, Ida suffers what the girls call "d'stression" while booze is Aubrey's anaesthetic.

After Georgia is molested, an incident she can't share with anyone, a "world of separation" enters the twins' lives. Things come to a head years later when an acid trip brings Georgia's repressed feelings to the surface.

Evans has an interesting voice, accomplished enough to switch between the private world of the twins and the larger one that bears down on them from outside.

The Icarus Girl By Helen Oyeyemi Bloomsbury £7.99 336pp

THE most fantastical aspect of this debut is not that the central character, Jess, is haunted by a demonic doppelganger but that she is an eight-year-old who writes haikus and quotes Coleridge. Swallow that, and you'll be able to get on with the rest of an interesting piece of work. Jess is taken on a family trip back to her mother's ancestral home, Nigeria. It isn't a success;

mum and grandad are still working out a decade-long squabble and worse, Jess manages to pick up a spectral stalker. Tilly Tilly, as Jess names her, presents herself as another little girl, although the "narrow, dark eyes, so dark that, to Jess, lying on the ground, they seemed pupil-less, " are a bit of a giveaway. She follows Jess back to England where her behaviour takes on a nightmarish cast, but is she real or a symptom of a troubled mind? CW