Eleanor Birne

The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is centred on a wake for a man who has died early: an alcoholic who was betrayed as a child, part of a large, chaotic family. So far so Irish. But there are new things too. There is nothing clichéd about the language (Enright treasures words; she polishes them, puts them on display). The narrator is someone new too; part of the new Ireland. She is Veronica, the dead Liam’s (slightly) younger sister, who lives a comfortable middle-class existence, and is trying to work out where she fits in with all this – with their combined past, and Liam’s death.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2004), was ostensibly a coming of age story. A teenage girl is abused by her repressive Catholic father and, following a political upheaval, moves in with her aunt, at whose house she has a fuller life and discovers her own sexuality. But the novel’s backdrop was the changing face of Nigeria. Adichie was born in a small...

Ron Mueck sculpts mottled skin, wrinkles, hairy forearms, calluses, double chins, freckles, bumpy nipples, yellowing nails and lined foreheads. His work depends on detail. He wants his meticulously constructed figures to be more human than the living things. His babies, adolescents, pregnant women, parents, isolated adults, old people are all intensely, studiedly, obsessively realistic. The...

Julie Myerson believes in hauntings. She has spent the last 13 years writing variations on the same novel. She writes repeatedly about the death of babies and children, and the impact that death has on the parents. In Me and the Fat Man (1998) the baby dies in its pram. In Something Might Happen (2003) a daughter is washed off a beach into the sea. Deaths occur when guilty mothers’...

It’s a rare feeling to be swept up by a book in the childhood way, but when it happens it’s extraordinary: deeply familiar and strangely unsettling. I was staying in a large house in the middle of a French field when I first discovered Rebecca at a ridiculously advanced age. The house seemed to take on the same eerie feel as Manderley as I read on into the night. At about three in...