GAA Confidential . . . Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know About Gaelic Games By Darragh McManus Hodder Ireland npa, 231pp TROUBLE with McManus's undergrad humour is that you never know when he is joking or serious. First off, the undergrad humour: A television, for example, is "a cathode ray thingie." Where does all the gate money go? To a "gaelic version of an Ansbacher account." He points out that hurling was once so popular in Argentina that a suburb of Buenos Aires is still called Hurlingham. Yet he doesn't tell the story of why Maradona's club, Boca Juniors, line out in the Tipperary colours. He recalls how Nicky English pulled off the "Cruyff-like" dribble and sidefooted a goal. Yet omits to explain how Paul Flynn managed that magnificent dipper goal against Cork in the 2005 Munster final.

Death of a Murderer By Rupert Thomson Bloomsbury �13, 249pp BILLY Tyler is holed up in a hospital mortuary with a corpse. No ordinary corpse, mind. "What he learned that night would alter him forever." I'll say. The corpse, a woman, is so reviled that she is referred to throughout as "her". Her is none other than Moors Murderer Myra Hindley. The novel attempts to expose the workings of monsters by allowing them to speak. Risky stuff. During the night Hindley's ghost appears and has an understated talk with Billy. "Come on, Billy. This is your big chance." As the spectral scene unreels, we are introduced to the human Hindley. The Hindley, Thomson reminds us, who was human. An example of what human beings are capable of doing. Yet she remains a horror: Billy: "why couldn't you have broken down in court?" Her: "I'm not an actress."

Jack of Jumps By David Seabrook Granta �9, 367pp MORE GORE: Between 1959 and 1965, a serial killer operates in west London. He murders eight prostitutes. Becomes known as Jack the Stripper because he leaves his victims naked.

This is a brutal read. All the more so because Seabrook shows not one bit of sympathy for the women. Indeed he is unnecessarily hostile: One of the women, for example, goes on the town with a quarter bottle of whiskey in her bag, Seabrook smirks "start slurring your prayers, girl."

He catches London as it was then. Smoggy, Wimpy Bars, Lyons Tea Houses. Lost times. Lost Souls. What the women got up to will leave a bad taste in your mouth.

Lost City Radio By Daniel Alarcon 4th Estate, �13, 257pp AS A civil war in a nameless South American country tails off before the next one, people emerge from the bush. One of them, a lad called Victor, beguiled by a beautiful voice he heard on radio, seeks her out. She is Norma whose chore it was to read out the names on air of all those "disappeared" people of the war.

Sometimes a reunion is brought about.

Victor is bereaved, homeless, lost. Their lives become entwined. They reveal to each other their pasts. Hers is none too happy, either. All the colour that you would expect from South America is here. It is easy to see why Alarcon is shortlisted as a Best Young American novelist.