The Emigrants Farewell By Liam Browne Bloomsbury �8.00 THOUGH the novel opens with the death of a child, Browne lifts it from the melancholic with a story within a story. The child's father Joe finds relief from grief as a researcher gathering information on Derry's glorious shipbuilding past, and particularly about the 19thcentury shipbuilder William Coppin. Joe and Coppin have one thing in common: Coppin's daughter also died young. The two stories overlap spookily when the spirit of Coppin's daughter visits her siblings explaining the mysteries of explorer John Franklin's doomed efforts to chart the passage across Canada's famed Northwest Passage. The children relay the story to Coppin who becomes obsessed with it. A debut from a very promising young writer.

Anybody Out There By Marian Keyes Penguin �8.00 592pps EMOTIONALLY blighted and physically maimed, Anna Walsh is not the generic everywoman of romantic fiction "who has everything. . .

but". For one thing the children on her street call her Annie Frankenstein. She is that woman who gets the word "poor" before her name. When the yarn opens she is living in the palliative presence of her parents in Dublin, but she yearns for the life she once had in Manhattan with Aidan who has gone AWOL. We are on the borderlines of chick lit here, yes, but there are no easy epiphanies that are chick lit's stock in trade. Indeed the grim subject and the harsh realities of her life lift the novel out of the genre. Lightness comes in the guise of her sister, Helen, a private detective who gets caught up in Dublin's criminal underworld with hilarious results.

The Oyster House Siege By Jay Rayner Atlantic �11.00 330pps SET in a posh London restaurant on general election night in 1983, Bobby and her staff and customers are made hostages by two gunmen - one bad, one good - trying to escape from a jewellery heist gone wrong. During the four-day siege, one of the hoods - the good one - discovers a hitherto unknown talent for cooking, while his mate's skills are in terrorising the staff and customers. Knives and forks are used; one customer has an eye poked out, others are shot dead. Then, when a restaurant critic is scalped, it dawns on the readers that what we have here is dark satire.

So, you take some vicious thugs, add terrified customers who seem, oddly, to be interested in the outcome of the election, spice it with misplaced black humour and serve it up as a dog's dinner. A well-cooked dog's dinner, admittedly, but a dog's dinner nonetheless.

Nothing Like a Dame: The Scandals of Shirley Porter By Andrew Hosken Granta �10.00 374pps WOMEN MPs have had a remarkably scandal-free history in British politics. Shirley Porter is the sole, vile exception. A classic Tory.

Running councils on light budgets, delivering services sparingly, encouraging home ownership. She cynically manipulated political wards, turfing people out of council homes into guest houses.

Beautifying those flats into apartments for yuppies who would vote Tory, the evicted tenants were forced into already strong Labour wards. Next she tried to move families - who presumably voted Labour - out of marginal wards. One move too far. In the North they call this gerrymandering. She was ordered by the courts to repay a total of �43 million. She coughed up �12 million and left Britain.