GILLECE is acquiring an accelerating reputation, a reputation that brings a confidence to her writing. For example, the book to hand opens with a prologued warning: "In the event of my deathfthis is a novel that should never be publishedfbut it is done now." The story unfolds of a playwright to whom duplicity comes easily. His career is on the downward trajectory. He will do literally anything to get any degree of creativity going again. Then, when a woman who has been savagely attacked looks to him for support, he sees her multi-layered story as a new narrative. Instead of offering simple succour, he will use her unusual story for his own ends. Despite the pink cover and the 'heart' in the title, this is no women's romance derivative. Gillece is going to become a fixture on the Irish and international book market.

The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superstar
William Kalush and Larry Sloman
Simon and Shuster 13.4

COMING in at a hefty 600 pages, Harry Houdini must have had a lot of secrets to hide. What he had, instead, and what he opted for, was complete lack of privacy. Houdini (aka) Ehrich Weisz, the legendary escapologist, was a great publicist. He loved the crowds.

He loved the press. He loved his Mammy. He hated tight fixes, from which he always escaped. He escaped from coffins, cabinets of water, strait jackets, prison cells with the press always in attendance. The authors have come up with no new secrets (Harry was never a spy), but he did provide great fun, particularly in his encounters with spiritualists, most notably Conan Doyle who believed Houdini possessed supernatural powers. Silly man. Harry just loved money. As Leonard Cohen reminds us, he can't have been all that bad because he loved his mammy.

Dreams From My Father A Story of Race and Inheritance
Barack Obama
Canongate 13 (442pps)

BILLED as a memoir written when he was 33 (a little young to be a memoirist? ), this is more of an emotional odyssey that sees the black (he uses black throughout) US senator travel to Kenya to visit his father's family. His father was black, and died early. So this is also a meditation on an absent parent. His mother was white. So America's dishonourable racial history also imbues the book. He writes about third world farmers and the people who buy from them and sell the produce at 100 times the cost. About the poverty of the Chicago where he lives with wife and children. This is a searingly honest read. It was written a long time before he considered going into politics and it leaves you wondering if he would be as honest today as he was disarmingly so back then.

The Mercurial Emperor The Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague
Peter Marshall
Pimlico 19.36 (276pps)

RUDOLF'S reputation will never be the same again. At least not to this reviewer. My Chambers Biographical Dictionary has him down as a "bigot, indolent". Marshall has him as being renowned for his "encouragement of religious tolerance" and his seat in Prague "provided an oasis of intellectual security at a time of growing religious conflict" . . . the late 16th century. Could he have been indolent, this monarch who gathered about him the most gifted, subversive minds of the period, in order to obtain power through knowledge, to push back the frontiers of science? To lay down the touchstones and form the foundations for the coming Age of Reason? Marshall sounds entirely convincing to me with this beautifully researched life of a Renaissance Magus and the cabal that encircled him.

Tribes Triumphant Return Journey to the Middle East
Charles Glass
Harper 14.89 (472pps)

TO GIVE an insight into Glass's tenacity for his subject, of which he writes insightfully, when he first visited the Middle East he was captured by a Shi'ite tribe and held captive for three months.

When, of all times, did he return to America? In September 2001, in the immediate wake of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers.

Undaunted, he travels through one of the most violent parts of the world. All right, so he seems to have holed up in luxury hotels, and spoke in the main to politicians, yet he is a gifted observer and listener who goes a long way to explain the mess the region is in today.