Innocence by Gavin Corbett (Pocket Books, £6.99)

WOULD-be novelists with a drawer full of rejection slips giving reasons of "uncommercial viability" for not taking up your manuscript, read this... and weep.

Loathe as I am to criticise the work of another journalist (Corbett is a sub-editor living in Dublin) or anyone lucky enough to be a published author, this really goes nowhere; inspires no one.

There is no better exponant of the contemporary Irish novel as Roddy Doyle and Innocence is not even a glimmer on the horizon of the genre.

What starts out as a hopeful story of teenager Jerome Morris trying to come to terms with his father's death and his mother's disappearance years before, quickly turns to tedium with a rally that comes far too late.

Fifty pages from the end, Jerome is presented with a shoe box of memories and faced with a five-day suspension from school, he sets off to London in search of his long lost mother.

This turns out to be a a fast-moving, pacy section, with a teenager's eye for the attractions of a strange, sprawling city, but by then, I'd lost all interest.

I couldn't be bothered whether or not Jerome and his mother were reunited and to be honest, I think she did the right thing to walk out of the narrative when she did.

David Chapman