"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood," writes Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes. "Worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." Welcome, then, to the pinnacle of the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to recent Irish immigrants Malachy and Angela McCourt, Frank grew up in Limerick after his parents returned to Ireland because of poor prospects in America. It turns out that prospects weren't so great back in the old country either—not with Malachy for a father. A chronically unemployed and nearly unemployable alcoholic, he appears to be the model on which many of our more insulting clichés about drunken Irish manhood are based. Mix in abject poverty, and frequent death and illness, and you have all the makings of a truly difficult early life. Fortunately, in McCourt's able hands it also has all the makings of a compelling memoir.

Gigantic meteor impacts have been a familiar SF cliché for decades. Jack McDevitt (whose first SF novel appeared in 1986) rings the changes with a two-stage disaster. A sun-grazing comet from deep space becomes visible only during the 2024 eclipse: it's a planet-killer, too big and fast for interception, and impact is in just five days. The twist is that it's going to hit the Moon. Lashings of drama follow as our lunar base—just opened by the US Vice-President, who's still there—is desperately evacuated by a Dunkirk flotilla of moonbuses, spaceplanes and a prototype Mars ship. At last the incoming monster, 180 km across, smashes into the Moon: as though this were a violent first break in snooker, random fragments fly everywhere. With grim plausibility, McDevitt shows the US government initially spin-doctoring the problem as nothing much to worry about. Then the sky begins to fall ... 37 chunks of Moon spawning fireballs and floods, and a massive 38th that threatens global extinction. The last-ditch effort to tackle this—not using nukes—attracts a sabotage strike from US militia loons who reckon it's all a government plot. McDevitt mercilessly cranks up the tension, and the pages turn faster and faster. A highly competent technothriller. —David Langford

Jack McDevitt's debut novel was The Hercules Text in 1986; since then he has published further thoughtful science fiction and the disaster blockbuster Moonfall

Slow Lightning comes with an enthusiastic plug from Stephen King, but is still straight sci-fi, exploring the ever-fascinating theme of alien contact and whether the universe is as empty as it seems.

It's early in the 31st century, life is good, humanity has reached the stars, there are thriving colonies on other worlds and the long, unsuccessful search for alien neighbours is faltering. The last hope, detonating suns as message beacons, is surrounded by both controversy and apathy. Perhaps we have reached our limits and are going into retreat?

But 27 years earlier—as indicated in the prologue—something extraordinary happened, since very carefully covered up. Everyone who returned from a four-person interstellar mission is dead or vanished, leaving only abandoned houses, rumours of ghosts and a model spacecraft of unfamiliar design. McDevitt's attractive heroine Dr Kim Brandywine scents something profoundly odd, and stubbornly investigates even though repeatedly told to stop making waves or lose her job as a fund-raiser for big science. She is enjoyably resourceful, finding talents for trespass, disguise, impersonation, fraud and burglary as she follows a trail leading to a bizarre massacre and to the star Alnitak—where contact with the unknown was shockingly but very humanly bungled.

Despite hair-raising sequences in which Brandywine barely escapes with her life, she still presses on to a satisfying resolution. This is a solid sci-fi thriller with realistic underpinnings. —David Langford

Deepsix is concerned with the motivating force that drives all scientists—the quest for truth, for expanding the limits of human knowledge. How much are we willing to risk for that moment of discovery, of knowing what no other soul yet knows? Our time? Our reputations? Our careers? Our lives?

The premise is this-just weeks before the planet Deepsix will be destroyed by a collision with a gas giant, ruins are detected on its surface, suggesting the presence of civilisation. The Academy diverts scientists from the nearest spaceship to go down and explore, and they are joined by their century's Ellsworth Toohey: a misogynistic, sanctimonious gadfly who has never before been off of Earth's surface. The party's landers are destroyed in an earthquake induced by the approaching gas giant, so now they must find a way to get off Deepsix before it is destroyed by the collision. Needless to say, their excavations are placed on the back burner.

The science and technology, both the physics describing the space travel and the archaeology used to reconstruct the lost culture of Deepsix, are interesting and explained well. There is plenty of action and suspense-will the party survive? And the evolving characters and group dynamics are more complex than those usually found in science fiction books, making Deepsix a worthwhile read. —Diana Gitig, Amazon.com