WHEN he felt his span was running out, 94-year-old Charles McGlinchey, weaver and tailor of Donegal, sat down with Patrick Kavanagh to talk about his life and times and this is the exquisite result. Very often a 90-year-old will have difficulty recalling last month but no bother at all recalling the events of his youth. Such is the case here. The recollections are summoned up vividly and in a language used descriptively and delicately by McGlinchey. A local man, for example, is anxious to get home before dark. So he says, "I wanted to take the light home with me." McGlinchey lived through 1916, two world wars, the atom bomb, and yet the entire book is totally immersed in the local: public hangings, evictions, landlords being topped. He provides an exact and lucid picture. Incidentally, the compiler here, Kavanagh, is a local school teacher and not the smelly, belligerent poet.

The Midnight Choir By Gene Kerrigan Vintage Books, 10.99, 341pp

SELDOM have there been so many good Irish crime writers. Top of the stack, among a handful of others, is Kerrigan. The setting for the book to hand is contemporary Ireland. A place, we are told, where one minute the people hadn't an arse in their trousers and the next minute two recent millionaires are haggling over who gets to pay way over the odds for a house "with a nice aspect." The story opens with the cops investigating a rape. The accused is Max Hapgood. With a name like that you can take it he don't come from Darndale. No, Maxie boy comes from an area with a "nice aspect." There's a jewellery robbery, an American tourist is attacked with a blood-filled syringe, and a cop with ambivalent attitudes towards the Provos . . . and we're only into page 60. At times a disquieting read, all winding down to a vicious murder where the wrong person gets it in the neck.

How the Irish Won the West By Myles Dungan New Island, 15, 304pp

WELL, of course they did no such thing. Dungan, a weathered student of US history, would know this, so we can take it that the book's title is given it by the publisher to nab the attention of browsers. The west was 'won' by many. Scots, English, French, Italians, Germans (especially Germans), they were all at it; rapine, pillage, land grabbing, ethnic cleansing, agreements ditched by the Great White Father in Washington, killing off the buffalo because it was the native American's food. The Irish involved included Thomas Francis Meagher, Fightin' Phil Sheridan, the Irish prostitutes who mined the miners, Johnny Healey (whiskey peddler), etc. Massacre followed massacre. A popular song summed up the worship of ordinance: "Cindy, Cindy, Cindy Lou / Love my Rifle more than You."

Filthy Shakespeare: Shakespeare's Most Outrageous Puns By Pauline Kiernan Quercus, 11.91, 302pp

WE KNOW Shakespeare the sensualist, the latenight boozer. But what of the Bard of Eroticism? This is the "filthiest, funniest gift book of the year, " the publicity blurbs crow. Well it may be, but don't gift it to your maiden aunt. Today, it's all cleaned up but back in Will's day his audiences were excellent at decoding sexual puns.

Over the centuries, whole lines were cropped, single words dropped: "her arse" became "her et cetera". Take a scene like that between Helena and Hermia in a Midsummer Night's Dream: "Like to a Double Cherry, seeming parted. . . two lovely berries moulded on one stem." What does that mean?

Kiernan explains in graphic language. Thank God we are spared pictures.

My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time By Liz Jensen Bloomsbury, 12, 305pp

MADCAP magic realism shifts from South America to the northern hemisphere. A feisty young Danish prostitute and an older woman who insists she is the younger woman's mother are hired as domestics in the house of Professor Krak. All right, settle down there at the back! In the basement of the Haus von Krak there is a time machine. After some tinkering, the two women are whizzed through time to 21st-century England, where the prostitute Charlotte . . . Charlotte the Harlot? . . . has some great craic, or Krak, as will the reader.

Extremely, fantastically funny.