FICTION

● Minding Frankie, by Maeve Binchy, is published in hardback by Orion, priced £18.99.

The queen of Irish storytelling is not ready to hand over her crown anytime soon, if her latest novel is anything to go by.

Minding Frankie is a contemporary tale which draws the reader in like iron filings to a magnet.

Binchy fans will recognise some of the characters previously introduced in such novels as Quentins and Heart And Soul, but taking centre stage this time is Noel Lynch.

Unambitious and overlooked, Noel is an alcoholic trapped in a dead end job - until a surprise call from a former girlfriend turns his life upside down. He is to become a father... and the baby’s mother is about to die of terminal cancer.

Can he become the dad little Frankie so desperately needs?

And more to the point, can he convince social worker Moira that the child is safe in his care?

● Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, is published in hardback by Fourth Estate, priced £20.

In a 1996 essay, Jonathan Franzen lamented the apparent inability of literary fiction to any longer engage a mass audience.

In 2001 he released The Corrections, with its sales and string of awards proving him pleasantly wrong.

His first novel since, Freedom, again uses a dysfunctional Midwestern family as a lens through which to inspect America. Patty and Walter Berglund were the golden couple of their St Paul neighbourhood, but with time, the compromises of marriage led to cracks which were beginning to show.

Patty, the full-time home-maker, is lost with their children gone and Walter’s new job, which was supposed to be about putting his environmental beliefs into action, instead becomes a series of messy compromises. The pair are then tempted by infidelities – which they can’t entirely convince themselves are bad ideas.

A suffocatingly powerful read, Freedom anatomises a relationship and a nation in decline.

NON FICTION

● Sean Connery: The Measure Of A Man, by Christopher Bray, is published in hardback by Faber and Faber, priced £20. Available now.

As the original – and many would argue the finest – James Bond, Sean Connery remains one of the most iconic actors in British cinema.

In this biography, Christopher Bray examines the impact made by the actor and provides a detailed account of his career.

Much of the attention is understandably focused on Connery’s portrayal of the world-famous M16 spy. However, Bray – who has also written a book on Michael Caine – goes to great lengths to analyse his subject’s work away from Bond.

The author’s research is clearly extensive, however, he is hampered by a lack of information relating to Connery’s private life, which forces him to make assumptions in instances where a definitive explanation would be desirable.

● The German Genius: Europe’s Renaissance, The Second Scientific Revolution And The Twentieth Century, by Peter Watson, is published in hardback by Simon and Schuster, priced £30. Available now.

This hefty tome by Peter Watson offers nearly 1,000 pages detailing Germany’s monumental contribution to art, science and culture over the past 250 years.

It is replete with mouth-numbing words and some head-scratching concepts, but covers some fascinating ground and personalities – from music’s greatest genius JS Bach, to mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss and the revolutionary Karl Marx.

The scope of Peter Watson’s work is huge, and such is the plethora of talent and achievement crammed in, his brevity in places can leave the reader frustrated for more. Looming ominously over the relentless progress is the Third Reich.

Watson tells how the Nazis’ first artistic blacklist appeared just six weeks after Hitler assumed power in 1933 – and how his catastrophic handling of his intellectual inheritance has overshadowed the country ever since.