THERE is a line of dialogue from the screenplay of Lawrence of Arabia in which an Arab monarch remarks that "Englishmen seem drawn to remote, empty places", A glib why? Perhaps to turn them into corners of the empire? That said, our Englishman, Tim Robinson, cartographer, painter, writer, never set out to colonise Connemara. Instead, he seems obsessed. This is his fourth book on the place, and for once a cliche can be used as evidence; in a place of stones he leaves few uncovered. His research is truly impressive: Evocation of place, folklore, unflinching history (particularly on The Great Famine), little lemony asides about the "Costa del Sod"; the boreens have been widened to take the SUVs. Every visitor to the place should buy a copy. The index is a lesson to other publishers.

House Don't Fall on Me: A Memoir
By Maidhc Dainin O Se
Mercier Press /13 224pps

HERE is your quintessential Kerry man: forever noising, a chatterbox, ribald, a problem with booze but gets over it, a singer, a musician, a rover with, thankfully, yarns to tell. He guides us chatteringly along the twisting road he has chosen. At school he is confronted by a huge, raw-boned inspector: "the inspector had a big head of meat on him". In another incident, he props a ladder against a house in a night-time attempt to liberate a young wan and gets a savaging from the Bean an Ti: "Quit off out of here! This is a no kip shop! !" We can take it that the attempted liberation would have ended innocently because later, in London, a 17-year-old Maidhc is in female company and is bemused when he notes that "the more she drank, the more she kept shoving into me". Charming read.

Winter's Bone
By Daniel Woodrell
Sceptre /11.91 193pps

IGNORED for too long in the States, the qualities inherent in Woodrell's latest offering means that is about to change. The setting is deep in the wintry Ozarks. A family faces eviction because the father jumped bail leaving the family home as surety.

His daughter . . . Ree Dolly, a wonderful creation . . . has one month to find him. Or his body. If she fails, the family gets turfed out the house into a savage world (remember the movie Deliverance? ) where a person's life is as cheap as that of a farm animal. Far as I know, Woodrell is a native, and his familiarity with custom, jargon and dialect is effortlessly applied. If you have a weak stomach, skip the three paragraphs where Ree is savagely beaten. By women. Ignored not for much longer.

Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
By Lucy Moore
Harper Books /13.40 464pps

MOORE'S study of the naive attempts by late 18th century French women to gain 'freedoms and equality' by stoking up controversy, can also act as primer for those new to the French Revolution. If I were to name and title all six women, half the review would be taken up. Generally speaking, then, those who headed up the Revolution, finished up as others would after them; they suppressed the same freedoms they claimed to be championing. Here it was a case . . . as with Stalin and Hitler (who wasn't a revolutionist) of women being consigned to the kitchen and the bedroom and even denied access to public affairs. Well argued and engaging.

In the Blood: A Childhood Memoir
By Andrew Motion
Faber /14.89 326pps

CHILDHOOD generally ebbs away over a series of years and events. For Motion the startlingly swift conclusion came with the sudden death of his mother. He was 16, an age when he was about to shed childhood, when his mother fell from her horse during a hunt leaving her in a coma. She would remain comatose, taking 10 years to die. What had strengthened the bond between mother and child was the absence of father. An affecting read, what lifts it above standard issue is Motion's writing and observations: The British and their famed love of animals . . . "they said they loved animals but spent most of the time trying to kill them."