Mind Your Manners: A Guide To Good Behaviour By Robert O'Byrne Sitric Books, £9.99, 240pp O'BYRNE'S advice is doled out in an archly whimsical manner. On meeting celebs, if you ever do, don't shout, "Oh, my God, there's Tom Cruise. . ." and do wait until Tom has left before remarking how short he is. If you meet Pamela Anderson, do not stare at her silicone status symbols; ask her how her essays on German Romance poetry are progressing. Well, Robert doesn't mention Pam, but that's the general tone. More advice: if you are off the fags, nobody cares! Don't go on about it, you will even bore the bores. Not funny enough, though the cartoons, by someone with the unlikely name of Merrily Harpur, are viciously comic.

Imposture By Benjamin Berkovits Faber, npa, 214pp BERKOVITS'S novel has to be the read of the week. In 1816, while holed up in a Swiss villa because of foul weather, Lord Byron's entourage relieved the boredom by telling ghost stories. The group was made up of Byron's lover Clare Clairmont, Mr and Mrs Shelley and Byron's travelling physician, John Polidori. Mary Shelley told the story of Frankenstein, which she later had published. Someone else told The Vampyre, later published in a magazine and of "ambiguous authorship". Why the need for anonymity? At the heart of this compelling read, written in the style of the period, lies the mysterious figure "of significant ability", John Polidori.

Song of Duiske By John A Ryan Lilliput, £4.95, 64pp SET in south Kilkenny, where the Duiske runs into the River Barrow at Graiguenamanagh, is one of the oldest Cistercian abbeys in the country. The book to hand is set amonst this monastic community in the year 1304 and lifts it atmospherically off the page. And, although it is a work of fiction, it stays reasonably close to dates, geographical facts. It evokes the harshness of the lives, the depredations, the loneliness . . . "no female foot is allowedf" . . . the dim, hooded shapes that flit along darkened corridors, the jostling reality of the outside world when the monks emerge. Written with great compacted elegance.

When The Light Fades By Kathy Rodgers Poolbeg, £6.99, 339pp THIS love story goes from rapture to rupture in five salutatory lessons. Hannah and David Joyce run a fair-sized hotel together, the Castletown Arms. We get a decent idea of what it can take to run a hotel of this size. Tensions, drunks, staff trouble, plus . . . something Hannah didn't need . . . her friend's husband, Vincent, is "getting his end off" with a little tartlet in one of the hotel bedrooms. Oh dear.

Actually, others too are getting their end off, at it like jack hammers they are.

Don't think it was meant to be, but I found it a wonderful laugh.

Enemy Of The Empire: Life As An International Undercover IRA Activist By Eamon McGuire O'Brien Press, £8.99, 304pp THIS is McGuire's jail journal. Written partly from a South African prison, it covers a great deal of ground in an entertaining fashion. Twenty years after he joined the Provisional IRA, McGuire was picked up in Mozambique by the CIA.

He had evaded capture with his chameleon-like cunning. This is ironic because he was arrested at a function to which he was invited, did not have to attend and where he must have known he would stand out as one of few Europeans. His chameleon characteristics finally failed. You remind yourself that McGuire is presenting a version of himself, but emotionally and historically it rings true.