IF you have already read about embittered Old IRA men turned into cruel fathers, gauche country lads furtively coupling in Dublin doorways, self-doubting schoolteachers in midlife crisis, Leitrim men heading back to Dublin's bedsit colony after a weekend home, chances are you are familiar with McGahern. For those who are not, this powerful collection of short stories will prove a rewarding opportunity to catch up. In one of the earliest a woman has a final fling before she enters a convent. In another, a man becomes the disgrace of his village after an act of petty theft. The title story . . . just finished before he died last year . . . is McGahern's final and bleak farewell to present-day Ireland. McGahern's gift was to write about pain with soaring beauty and mordant wit. This collection can also be read as an introduction to the novels.

Psychic Kids By Lynne Gallagher Mercier Press, 13, 315pps

THE gifted children of Gallagher's book can predict coming thunderstorms, sense presences and commune with the dead. We must ask ourselves here why would anyone of any age want to commune with the dead? A thunderstorm will arrive unbidden anyway and why would you want to frighten the hell out of yourself sensing an invisible visitor in the small hours? There is the implied suggestion here that anyone outside this gifted group is missing out. Which is unmitigated tosh. Some of the world's greatest writers had no such precognitive powers. Instead, they spent lifetimes attacking such notions. Also covered here is the belief that you can do anything if you try hard enough. Can an ill-equipped weakling win Olympic gold? Could a younger Lynne Gallagher have become leading goal scorer in Brazil? Well, then.

Corsair By Tim Severin Macmillan, 15, 347pps

NO starnger to epic sea voyages, Severin sets his latest fact-based sea epic in the mid-1600s. Empires have been established.

Merchant shipping carrying booty back to Spain and England are the prey of corsairs (pirates, not 1970s Ford cars). Not content with plundering ships, some corsairs drop anchor off the European coastline, come ashore and kidnap women and children destined for the white slave trade. Severin's yarn . . . based on fact . . . is a vivid version of how Algerian corsairs raided Baltimore, Co Cork, and made off with, what seems, a good number of women and children. Among them is the hero of the story, Hector Lynch, and his sister. What follows tells of how Hector teams up with a Turkish sea captain and sets out to find his sister. Gripping swashbuckler.

The Apple By Michel Faber Canongate �7.00 199pps

SO successful was Faber's last novel, The Crimson Petal and the White, it inspired Faber to dig into the reams of research he gathered for the book. The collection of stories to hand is the result of that dig . . . and it shows; they are very uneven in quality. The main character is Victorian prostitute Sugar. She is 17, an "old hand at the game". Sugar despises all men but not enough to stop her exploiting their weaknesses. As you would expect, the stories are peopled by some weirdoes, none more strange than the Rat Man, a client of Sugar. The collection gives the impression of being dashed off in the wake of the novel's success. An example of the cliched writing?

"She was his flower, his little treasure." Well, of course she was.

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History By Jonathan Franzen Harper, 11.99, 195pps

IN what ultimately amounts to a loose collage of personal and political reflection, Franzen's fascination with nature, his witty memories of trying and failing to learn a language because of his teacher's short skirts, heavier digressions on Bush Snr's war in Iraq and how it galvanised generations of US-hating jihadists, what emerges is a creative writer struggling to make sense of his inner nature and what formed it. The conclusion reader reaches is that of being drawn into a keenly observed world where a well-informed intelligence is at work.

That said, those unfamiliar with Franzen should have been given an insightful introduction.