The Christmas Club By Stephen Price New Island ¤15 223pps WHEREAS Price's first novel, the savagely satirical 'Monkey Man', was packed with caricature media types, the latest opens in 1988 and concerns a group of everyday young people who meet for a break in an old manor house in Co Donegal and winds down with the same group reuniting 14 years later and, of course, all of them during that period have accumulated burdens of disaffections. One character, Oona, show a disturbing tendency towards self-hatred. We are shown other significant failures of character, fractured lives, those who have been unsuccessful, those who have betrayed, the things done that can't be undone. Price is pitch-perfect at capturing varying voices.

You're History: How People Make the Difference By Michelle P Brown and Richard J Kelly Continuum Books ¤13 (approx) 401pps IN THE foreword of this diffuse read, Bob Geldof explains how the book to hand came to be. Following the year of Make Poverty History and Live8, he got the idea of an 'Intellectual Live Aid'. But it's rather disjointed because none of the contributors actually debates with each other, as if on a forum, and the result reads like a collection of speeches on such subjects as the Aids pandemic in parts of Africa, current policies on immigration into Ireland, how not to save the rainforests, and some other intriguing subjects, particularly the Yemeni cleric who has some sense to doll out to sympathisers of al-Qaeda.

After Gibraltar By Vincent Flood Bobdog Books npa 248pps YOUNG and innocent Dubliner Michael O'Brien emigrates to England to work the lump on the building sites.

This is done so authentically, you conclude that Flood has lived the experience. What follows in this debut novel is some raw writing, but with a satisfying amount of tension and atmosphere, particularly in the London pubs and building sites. The novel descends into a vortex of violence and death when Michael sets out to discover why his father disappeared. Seems that his father witnessed a horrific killing in Gibraltar in 1988. Not just witnessed, but caught the event on film. He had to be silenced, and now the roll of film is in Michael's possession.

The Bloodaxe Book of Poetry Quotations Edited by Denis O'Driscoll Bloodaxe Books ¤16.20 251pps USING the words of well and lesser known poets, O'Driscoll tries to freeze-frame, or pin down how a poem works. Poetry, by its very nature, is slippery stuff; like trying to catch moonlight in a jar. One of the poets quoted here says that if he knew where poems came from, he would go to live there. Oh, I don't know. Is romance poetry a thing of the past? Would your typical modern wife - babies, working outside the home - prefer to have a poem written about her or have the oven cleaned? Oh go on, guess. Another woman poet quoted here points out that life is short and so too, thank God, are poems.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers By Yiyun Li Harper ¤15 (approx) 201pps THIS is going to become a mini-classic collection of short stories. Running right through the collection is a China made new after the insanity of the Mao regime. The current school of writing can, at last, write freely of their experiences. In Li's collection, a woman is "honourably retired" from a factory. An old man continues to work in his office despite being relieved of his identity papers and meagre wage, and now he has to live off his family. Wonderfully inventive, with one slight quibble - there are some very odd grammatical constructions that require a second and sometimes third reading.