If you read one zimbo book this year The Death of Rex Nhongo by CB George (Quercus)Very much MacGuffin territory, this complex, "factional" and chilling novel is structured around a gun found in a taxi. It has little to do with the death of Rex Nhongo, the nom de guerre of General Solomon Mujuru, the man touted as Robert Mugabe's successor and whose charred body was found in the razed farmhouse he had seized in 2011. Rather, it lays bare Zimbabwe's moral bankruptcy with a critical examination of five troubled and seemingly disparate marriages.The issueThe news that the ANC wants South Africa to withdraw from the International Criminal Court and that Sudan's Omar al-Bashir, a fugitive from justice accused of war crimes, has been invited back to South Africa to attend a forum on Afro-Chinese co-operation in December has heightened my interest in Edna O'Brien's forthcoming The Little Red Chairs (Faber & Faber).In this, her first novel in a decade, O'Brien tells the story of Vlad, a war criminal masquerading as a charismatic faith healer in an Irish village, and his sway over a woman, Fidelma McBride, who begs him for a child. When Vlad is arrested and his crimes revealed, the disgraced Fidelma flees her home to begin an emotional journey that ends at a tribunal in The Hague. O'Brien has described Vlad as "a composite of generic, warring despots", but the resemblance, according to The Observer, to Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic "is as perceptive as it is terrifying".Last month, when O'Brien, now 84, was honoured as a Saoithe of Aosdána, Ireland's highest literary accolade, president Michael Higgins officially apologised for the "pious, envious scorn" heaped on O'Brien by her native land, and the banning of her work. Higgins, a poet and author himself, praised her as a "fearless teller of truth" who had continued to write "undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, authoritarian hostility and sometimes downright malice".O'Brien's 2012 memoir, Country Girl, was voted one of the year's best biographies. Philip Roth, who has declared O'Brien the greatest living woman writing in English, has praised The Little Red Chairs as "her masterpiece".Crash courseAt almost 700 pages, this year's big rock memoir, literally and figuratively, is Elvis Costello's Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink (Viking). Critics appear stunned by Costello's literary skills - no ghostwriters employed here as is usually the case - and many have said his book's better than both the Keith Richards and Bob Dylan autobiographies. And it's full of lessons for would-be angry young men, like this: "If there is an apple cart, you must do your best to upset it."The bottom line"In countless small ways the world around us grows gradually shittier . . . I don't like it at all." - The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson (Doubleday)..