Gate of the Sun By Elias Khoury Vintage £8 501pps A GREAT start to any book is to realise that you are in the hands of a true storyteller. At the beginning of this monumental piece, one of the characters sets out to write a book that has no obvious opening and definitely no end. A Palestinian epic, set on the outskirts of Beirut, a doctor does what he can to relieve the suffering of those confined to a makeshift hospital for refugees. He also tells stories. When a Palestinian fighter who has retired from the fighting is admitted in a coma, the doctor gives him more of his time by telling him stories than he does to the others in an effort to communicate and so ward off death. Spellbinding storytelling.

The Saint: My Autobiography By Ian St John Hodder £8 336pps BILL SHANKLY . . . and there can be no discussion about 1960-70s Liverpool football without mentioning him . . .

believed in a team having a strong spine. In 1961 he bought St John from Motherwell in Scotland. St John, an out and out striker, would spearhead that spine for 10 years. "What will ye do when the Lord comes?" asked a wayside pulpit. And a Scouse wag daubed the answer: "Move St John to inside left." St John wasn't moved, he was sacked. "A wind of change was about to blow through Anfield, " he says, "and I was standing in its path." Cliched but dramatic.

Islam in the World By Malise Ruthven Granta Books £13 502pps HOW is it that a nation, Iran, that claims to be the first country in the Middle East to create a parliament and embrace democracy, can place a murderous fatwa on an author who has merely questioned orthodoxy? Other paradoxes abound;

many Muslims seem to shut themselves and their wives away from prying western eyes and yet, we are told, they are at their most hospitable when first meeting outsiders. How can a religion preaching peace be used as an ideology of hatred by a few? Renewed interest in Islam has launched a whole spate of informative books on the subject; this one is highly insightful but a bit dry.

Galway and the Great War By William Henry Mercier Press /20 318pps HENRY'S defiantly unsentimental history (the fact that the youngest 'soldier' to be slaughtered was a lad of 13 years gets barely a mention) opens on an amusing scene in Eyre Square and ends on a doleful note on the sepulchral plains of western France. Eyre Square first. A crowd of gawkers have gathered to see two pregnant nuns, bogus ones, paraded around the square. The recruiting sergeant bellows: "These poor nuns have been raped by the Bloody Hun. Soon he will be here to rape your daughters! Enlist Now! !" On the last day of the war, Henry reminds us, dejected German troops marched back to the Fatherland believing they had not been defeated. They had.

But within a few decades the fighting would depressingly begin again.