Paperbacks reviewed by William Leith

The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry (Faber, £7.99)

A sweeping story. An ageing, broken man tells us about his adventures in love, war and drink. He’s called Jack McNulty and is an intoxicating narrator; Sebastian Barry inhabits his mind superbly. Jack was torpedoed in the war when he was a sailor. Then, he tells you how he was, effectively, shipwrecked by other things. As a young man in the west of Ireland he fell in love — first with whisky and then with a woman. Then a third thing. This is a very good story about how one’s life can go wrong. Barry hits the perfect note of melancholy yearning and holds you from the start.

Young Skins by Colin Barrett (Vintage, £8.99)

These are stories about young people in the west of Ireland. In one there’s a description of some young people walking into a bar. The narrator, Teddy, looks at the old drinkers, “mostly fat men with dead wives, hefting pints into their bloated, drink-cudgelled faces”. Barrett takes us into the world of young men: the atmosphere of threat and pending violence, the way they are tormented by desire and misunderstanding. So they go into bars, or into the woods, and terrible things ensue. I don’t think I’ve ever read a better collection by somebody I had never heard of.

We Are Our Brains by Dick Swaab (Penguin, £9.99)

I have read many books on the brain and this is a very good general guide. Swaab was director of the Netherlands Institute for Brain Research. He’s an expert on why women think differently from men, and also on Alzheimer’s. He tells us about the brain in the womb and the way sexual orientation is fixed, about the female brain during ovulation, about memory, about trauma. And when we get Alzheimer’s, “we lose abilities in almost exactly the reverse order in which we acquire them” — at the very end we go back to the beginning. If you could only read one book on the brain, you might consider this one.