EXTRAORDINARY that a man called Lundy should write so wonderfully and extensively about the divisions in Northern Ireland. The name Lundy is synonymous with the word traitor after Protestant Governor Robert Lundy supposedly attempted to abandon Derry during the siege in 1689. This is an even-handed examination of the statelet, region, country, territory, realm etc, call it what you will. This ambiguity is taken up by Lundy when he says that Ulster Protestants claim to be British to avoid admitting they are Irish. "This is an existential subterfuge and they know it." In a Western-type scene, silence descends on a Tartan pub when he enters. Explaining he is Maud Lundy's son home from Canada, he is greeted with backslaps and beer. A Catholic student he interviews is just as intransigent as any of the Protestant hardmen. Bigotry always belongs to the other crowd.

The Life of Reilly By Paul Burke Hodder �12 247pp

WE first meet Burke's comic creation, Sean Reilly, when he is 15 years old. His voice has just dropped and he sounds like Shere Khan in The Jungle Book. With a voice like that, he gets served in pubs, while the young wans are really impressed, too. From then on, his life would be led by his eh? larynx. When he marries Nikki and she grows emotionally remote, he learns that the opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference. He meets Lucy who is "caught single" in her 30s. She is the one he has been trying unwittingly to track down since his voice dropped. He will be "the lid to her dustbin". There are other meaningless phrases like that, but overall this is a genuinely comic read.

How to Read Joyce By Derek Attridge Granta �7 118pp

THIS little morsel reads at times like a masterclass, a guide, an over-the-shoulder gawk at Shem the Penman at work. From the straightforward early Portrait and Dubliners to the intimidation of Finnegans Wake. Why would you bother tormenting yourself?

Instead, read the four chapters on Ulysses. Stuff and inconsequential nonsense stuffed inside Bloom's head. Brown Thomas's window has a display of poplin. Sets Bloom thinking about Huguenots who introduced poplin into Ireland. From there to Meyerbeer, who wrote an opera called The Huguenots. The window display features pincushions. Must buy one for Molly. Which takes him onto sex. A revolutionary approach to structure that brought him to Finnegans Wake, where he lost this reader.

Bloodstains in Ulster By Tom McAlindon Liffey Press �12 174pp

THERE is no understatement in McAlindon's account of how Mary McGowan, a 54-year-old Catholic, was viciously assaulted in her Belfast home in 1949. She remained alive for three days, and as she lay dying, she identified her attacker as Robert Taylor, a young house painter from the Tiger's Bay area of the city. The police arrested Taylor, "a boyish killer". It seemed an open-and-shut case.

The first trial resulted in a hung jury. He was found guilty in the retrial, yet, the case was appealed on a flimsy technicality and Taylor walked free. That was Belfast in 1949. What we witness here is Northern Ireland on the edge of chaos. A chaos that was to arrive two decades later. Anyone could have seen it coming. Anyone, that is, except the hardline Unionists.

The Boy Who Fell Out of the Sky By Ken Dornstein Sceptre �8 355pp

THE title of Dornstein's memoir may sound metaphorical, an Icarus-like tale of a man over-extending himself. Actually, it is literally true. David Dornstein was on board the ill-fated flight 103 from Heathrow to New York that exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988. His brother Ken has produced a bizarre memoir-cum-investigation of sibling relationship, brought into sharp focus by death. He meets David's girlfriend and ends up in her bed. He trawls through David's extensive writings - David was an aspiring novelist - and finds vague references that David was sexually abused. He meets the alleged abuser with no conclusive result. Baffling but psychologically intriguing.