All Good Things Begin: New Irish Writing Edited by Yvonne Cullen Off Centre Publishing Euro12 258pp WONDERFUL to follow young writing talent as it takes off. Most of the writers here will be new to most readers. Certainly new to me were Tim O'Halloran with 'Relationship' in which a young lad tries to understand his girlfriend: "What brought all this on?" God love him. Marcella Moran should be picked out as equally as Joe Walsh for 'One For the Road'. An unnerving current runs through this. Two travellers gain access to a hotel on St Stephen's Day. The barman is a dry alcoholic, alone in the hotel. This may be his last chance to get back to normal living. But the travellers insist on one last one. "You're a kind man." Has he been naively kind? Are they going to wreck the place?

Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit By James Scurlock Harper Collins £13 241pp WILL Scurlock's engrossing look at how easy it is to acquire credit have the credit companies in a nervous tizzy? Not really, because it is in the nature of mankind that no matter how much people have, they always want more. There are examples here of people buying 'designer' jeans for $1,500, t-shirts for $500, diamond-encrusted mobiles. Most of this is acquired by credit card. If you can't pay the interest in time, you are on a treadmill. Soon you will be using a second credit card to pay the interest on your first. Scurlock introduces financial executives, one of whom, the CEO of Barclays Bank, stated he would never himself use a credit card.

Can Any Mother Help Me? Fifty Years of Friendship Through a Secret Magazine By Jenna Bailey Faber £17 329pp THE subtitle says it all. In 1935, a young woman wrote to a popular magazine looking for friends, saying how lonely she was, how she couldn't afford a radio. Women from around Britain replied. The lonely woman would have replied to them all, but the cost of postage was beyond her. Instead, it was suggested that they publish a magazine strictly for their circle. It was, I suppose, the chatroom of its day. It was also a social history of those times. One anonymous woman wrote startlingly of how her husband took her unawares and unwilling. She asked him to use 'precaution'. He refused and when she became pregnant, was absolutely furious with her. Good eh? Endlessly entertaining.

Hot Blood By Stephen Leather Hodder npa 375pp HAPPY endings are never an option in a Stephen Leather thriller. In the latest, a journalist is taken hostage by Iraqis. Worse, he is given The Da Vinci Code to read. The manner of his death is horrifyingly graphic. It is better you read it on an empty stomach. Enter, with a bound, Dan 'Spider' Shepherd, former SAS member turned undercover cop. One of Shepherd's old SAS colleagues, Geordie Mitchell, is taken hostage by the same group calling themselves 'The Holy Martyrs of Islam'. Martyrs in a pig's eye: this is all about money. They are thugs taking hostages and selling them to religious fundamentalists. The mission to free Geordie is organised by a group called The Increment and is led by Dan Shepherd.

As good as anything Leather has ever turned out.