Book Previews 2007:From fiction to philosophy and from politics to poetry, Arminta Wallaceselects some titles to look out for in the coming year.
NOVELS
The tragedy of war and its aftermath emerges as a leitmotif in next year's fiction lists. In The Castle in the Forest (Little Brown, Feb) veteran Norman Mailer takes on the family saga from hell as he blends fact and fiction to bring to life three generations of Hitlers.All the marriages, incestuous couplings, abandonments and deaths that lead to the birth of Adolf in 1889 are all delineated by the twice Pulitzer-prize winning American veteran writer now in his 80s .Thomas Keneally's The Widow and her Hero (Sceptre, March) tackles the question of survival guilt in a story that begins with a wedding in Australia in 1943. Prompted by a sense of the anonymous suffering of the war widows Keneally saw in his childhood, its theme is the terrible cost of war. Rachel Seiffert's Afterwards (Heinemann, Feb) examines the troubled conscience of an ex-soldier who killed a man while on duty in Northern Ireland. Though cleared of wrongdoing, residual guilt can linger for one who has blood on his hands. The debut novel from short story writer Peter Ho Davies, The Welsh Girl (Sceptre, April), sees a German-Jewish refugee sent to Wales to interview Rudolf Hess, while in The Song Before it Is Sung (Bloomsbury, Feb) Justin Cartwright weaves his tale around an infamous historical film of the final moments of one of the conspirators who tried to kill Hitler in 1944; hunted down and hung from meat hooks, his execution and that of his confreres was filmed. The dead also intervene in the present in a very real way in Fireproof (Picador, Feb), the new novel from the author of The Blue Bedspread, Raj Kamal Jha.
The American Civil War and its ending is the starting point for Joseph O'Connor's new book, Redemption Falls (Harvill Secker, May), which begins when the daughter of two passengers from the famine ship The Star of the Sea - his novel of that name has sold more than 700,000 copies - sets out on a walk across a devastated US in search of a child she hasn't seen for four years - one of the hundred thousand children drawn into the war.
Moving away from doom and gloom, Justine Picardie's Daphne (Bloomsbury, May) is a novel about the novelist Daphne du Maurier researching a book about Branwell Brontë; and Douglas A Martin's Branwell (Brandon, March) is a novel about the Brontë brother, darling of his parents, who became not a writer or a painter, as they hoped, but a notorious libertine. The centenary of du Maurier's birth next year will also see the publication of The du Maurier Companion, edited by Helen Taylor (Virago, May) and a new edition of du Maurier's Rebecca (Orion, May). Three British "old masters" are due to produce new books next year. Ian McEwan's novella, On Chesil Beach (Cape, April) is set in a hotel on the Dorset coast in the early 1960s; Graham Swift's Tomorrow (Picador, April) is narrated by a woman who's lying awake on a hot summer's night in 1995; and Sebastian Faulks's Engleby (Hutchinson, May) sees the author of Human Traces take a very different tack, with an anti-hero who rises through "Thatcher's England and scorches through the blandscape of New Labour". A not dissimilar backdrop meanwhile features in South of the River by Blake Morrison (Chatto, April) who explores the lives of a set of dysfunctional characters leading their lives out in Blair's Britain.
Families are a perennial source of fictional inspiration. Anne Enright is back with a new take on the traditional Irish theme of the wake in The Gathering (Cape, May).The nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin after the death of their wayward brother, Liam. Though drink has hastened his end there is also the lingering effect of what happened to him as a child in his grandmother's house in 1968. A family epic of how memories warp and family secrets fester.
Winterton Blue from Trezza Azzopardi (Picador, April) sees a successful career woman returning to Norfolk to look after her temporarily disabled mother; while Anita Amirrezvani's The Blood of Flowers (Headline Review, May), follows a young girl in 17th-century Iran when she goes to live with grumbly relatives after the death of her father.
Marina Lewycka, she of the hilarious Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian sets her follow-up, Two Caravans (Fig Tree, March), amid a multi-culti bunch of strawberry pickers in the fields of Kent. Rose Tremain's latest hero, Lev, is working in England and sending money back to eastern Europe in The Road Home (Chatto, June). Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann (Quercus, April) is a mammoth bestseller from Germany that recreates the lives of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt and the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss; Julius Winsome (Faber, June) the new book from the Irish author of Schopenhauer's Telescope, Gerard Donovan, is about revenge and wilderness after a man's dog is shot in deepest Maine; Sujit Saraf's The Peacock Throne (Sceptre, Feb) tells the story of one crowded street in Delhi on the day Indira Gandhi died- and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse (Picador, March) is set in a futuristic US where there's no science, no social cohesion, no technology - just the plague of the title, and love between two unlikely people.
POLITICS
Three words sum up next year's Irish political offerings: election, election, election. Noel Whelan, presumably, won't be the only person who'll be wanting to know whether it's Showtime or Substance: Election 2007 (New Island, Feb). There are also questions to be asked about the performance of the Labour Party, and Niamh Puirséil addresses them from a historical perspective in The Irish Labour Party, 1922-73 (UCD Press, May). The Irish Times's Stephen Collins takes a close look at the personalities who have dominated politics in this country over the years in People, Politics and Power: From O'Connell to Ahern (O'Brien, March), and there are two in-depth studies of individual political lives in Gerry Fitt: Political Chameleon by Michael A Murphy (Mercier, Feb) and Michael Davitt: Freelance Radical and Frondeur by Laurence Marley (Four Courts, May). BBC journalist Mervyn Jess has a go at stripping away some mysteries and myths in The Orange Order (O'Brien, May). Sounds like we need to arm ourselves in advance with Eoghan Corry's compilation of Irish political quotations, I'm Glad You Asked Me That (Hodder Headline Ireland, April). Drawn from a century of Irish political life, it may give us our only political smile of the season.
BIOGRAPHY
The name may conjure up gilded-age New York society: the real story, according to Hermione Lee in her major new biography, Edith Wharton (Chatto, Feb), is of a brave and startlingly modern novelist whose life was filled with remarkable friends such as Henry James, Bernard Berenson and Aldous Huxley. Lee, author of a majestic life of Virginia Woolf, shifts the emphasis towards Europe, through which Wharton travelled adventurously before settling in Paris. The life of the Donegal writer Seosamh Mac Grianna is traced by the Irish-language editor of The Irish Times, Pól Ó Muirí, in Seosamh Mac Grianna: Míreanna Saoil (Cló Iar-Chonnachta). Something to Hide: A Life of Sheila Wingfield (Lilliput, Feb) by Penny Perrick is a portrait of memoirist, Anglo-Jewish heiress and "poetess wife" of the last Powerscourt to live on that estate, a woman whose complicated life brought her into contact with some of the major literary figures in early 20th-century Ireland.
Cuba continues to be a hot topic on the shelves, and the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Ignacio Ramonet, has persuaded Fidel Castro to talk at length in Fidel Castro: My Life (Allen Lane, March), in which the veteran leader looks back to the Bay of Pigs and gives his view on the current crop of head honchos. Another Cuban book worth watching for is The Boys From Dolores, by Chasing Che author Patrick Symmes (Constable & Robinson, Feb); this one is a kind of Buena Vista Social Club of Castro's classmates.
Callow youth, poet, idealist and romantic - that, according to Simon Sebag Montefiore, is Young Stalin for you (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, May). In Plutocrats: A Rothschild Inheritance (John Murray, March), George Ireland delves into the depths of the Rothschild family and argues that, actually, money isn't the root of all evil. "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" has been dubbed the most legendary celebrity interview in history - albeit the shortest - but who was explorer Henry Morton Stanley, the man who coined the phrase? Tim Jeal finds out in Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer (Faber, March), which is also billed as a timely re-examination of post-colonial guilt.
SHORT STORIES
Could a young writer get a greater accolade than being hailed as the true successor to Alistair MacLeod and John McGahern? Well that's what critic Declan Kiberd said of Wexford writer Claire Keegan. Now she's following her debut collection Antarctica with Walk the Blue Fields (Faber, May ). "A long-haired woman moves into the priest's house and sets fire to his furniture . . . " says the catalogue, giving a flavour of what's to come. It all sounds like vintage Keegan, in a collection Faber says has its author observing an Ireland wrestling with its past.
The Faber Book of Best New Irish Stories 2006-2007 (Faber, April), edited by David Marcus, is a major Irish literary event. This one will showcase previously unpublished authors alongside such names as John Banville, Sebastian Barry and Joseph O'Connor. For something completely different, Strange Times In Persia: An Anthology of Contemporary Iranian Literature (IB Tauris, Feb), edited by Nahid Mozaffari and Ahmad Karimi Hakkak, is a collection of 40 Iranian writers - men and women - spanning three generations. The Third Shore (Brandon, Feb), edited by Agata Schwartz and Luise von Flotow, offers an overview of eastern European writing, with work by 25 women from Lithuania to Romania and Slovenia to Ukraine. And in a world where everything is getting faster, it's not surprising that the short-short has taken off in a big way; in New Sudden Fiction (Norton, Jan) editors Robert Shepard and James Thomas present 60 pieces of fewer than 2,000 words each by, among others, Yann Martel and Tobias Wolff.
CRIME/THRILLER
Crime fiction has moved into serious overdrive, with many publishers now investing heavily in this lucrative genre; as a result there are bound to be more dodgy crime novels around, so it's a case of buyer beware. But the new force on the UK indie scene, Quercus, has a mouth-watering list, including two award winners - Officer Down by Theresa Schwegel (Feb), which won the Edgar award for a first novel in the US last year, and Peter Temple's White Dog (Feb) three-time winner of best Australian crime novel of the year. If anyone ought to know about crime, it's Reggie Kray's widow Roberta - and she makes her debut with The Pact (Constable & Robinson, Feb), billed as a Lynda La Plante-style mob job.
Some familiar faces make a welcome return to the international scene, including Gothenburg DI Erik Winter in Ake Edwardson's Frozen Tracks (Harvill Secker, June), Moscow renegade Arkady Renko in Stalin's Ghost from Martin Cruz Smith (Pan, Feb), and the inimitable Fr Anselm, star of The Sixth Lamentation, in William Broderick's The Gardens of the Dead (Sphere, March). And watch out for a brace of tartan noir novels in the wake of Ian Rankin and the ever-popular Rebus, including Lin Anderson's Torch (Hodder & Stoughton, April), the follow-up to Driftnet, named by the Scotsman newspaper as one of 20 Scottish books everyone should read.
The Dublin noir front is also doing nicely, thank you, with a new Ed Loy book, The Colour of Blood (John Murray, April), from the much-praised Declan Hughes; another slice of Arlene Hunt in Missing Presumed Dead (Hodder Headline Ireland, June); the second book from Glenstal monk Andrew Nugent, Second Burial (Headline, March), brings a Nigerian restaurant on Parnell Street to vivid life; Charlie Parker's on the case when a psychologist goes missing in Maine in John Connolly's The Unquiet (Hodder & Stoughton, June); and the actress Tana French tries her hand at a chopper-chiller in In The Woods (Hodder & Stoughton, March).
ENVIRONMENT
The UK director of Friends of the Earth, Tony Juniper, makes an impassioned plea for action on climate change in How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take to Change a Planet? (Quercus, April), which is composed of "95 articles" - Martin Luther-style - for comfort, security and survival. In a detailed study of our systematic persecution of the unfortunate animals we have designated "vermin", Roger Lovegrove examines The Silent Fields (OUP, Feb), and David Beerling points out that our planet is not really blue, but green - or at least, it used to be - in The Emerald Planet (OUP, Feb), a study of the crucial role plants have played in driving and recording climate change. There's plenty more doomy, gloomy stuff in David Strahan's The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Immanent Extinction of Petroleum Man (John Murray, April). For every barrel we discover, we now consume three, he says.
MEMOIR
Stories - some horrifying, some inspiring - from strong women seem to loom large on the horizon for next year. The Somalian-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Muslim who was working with Theo Van Gogh on the film that offended his murderer, tells hers in Infidel (Simon & Schuster, Feb). Mukhtar Mai's In The Name of Honour (Virago, February) describes how she was gang-raped in Pakistan in 2002 and, instead of taking her own life as expected by cultural norms, took her rapists to court.
Closer to home there's an update on the life of Lyn Madden, the former prostitute who left Ireland after her ex-lover and pimp, John Cullen, was sentenced to 18 years in jail in 1984 in Lyn: Life After Witness Protection (Cork University Press spring). And Noreen Mackey, the barrister who gave up a successful career to join an enclosed order of French nuns - and left again after 18 months, only to find herself investigating the Ansbacher affair in the Cayman Islands - gives a full and frank account of herself in The Crystal Fountain (Columba Press, spring).
They say even the dogs in the streets have written misery memoirs at this stage - and sure enough, in Buster's Secret Diaries (Weidenfeld, June) Roy Hattersley's dog writes about the strain of living with the big man. Pete Doherty's mammy, Jacqueline, has turned the genre on its head by writing about the misery her son has inflicted on the family in Pete Doherty: My Prodigal Son (Headline, March). Not to be outdone, Pete strikes back with his Journals (Orion, March), a series of 20-odd - some, no doubt, very odd - books filled with poems, lyrics and collages.
And there's a rock chronicle for the Britpop generation in Bit of a Blur (Little Brown, June), in which Blur bass player Alex James confesses to drinking a million pounds' worth of champagne. Bit of a blur - geddit?
POP SCIENCE
Physics has lost its way: so, controversially, says top physicist Lee Smolin, who argues the case against string theory and predicts the Next Big Thing in The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next (Allen Lane, February). We've known that the earth is a sphere since the fourth century BC, so where did the idea of a flat earth come from? Christine Garwood investigates in Flat Earth: The History of An Infamous Idea (Macmillan, April), while in Six Feet Over (Canongate, May) Mary Roach takes a quirky look at what - maybe - happens when we die.
Two spectacular books tell the 13.7 billion-year-old story of the birth of the universe: super-science writer John Gribbin in The Universe: A Biography (Allen Lane, Jan) and, with the help of some extraordinary illustrations, Giles Sparrow in Cosmos (Quercus, April). Life on earth may have started on coral reefs, which gives genetic professor Steve Jones his starting point for Coral (Little Brown, March), which links science with history and literature on a journey from Montpellier to Madras.
Whether mind is, in fact, matter is one of the hottest topics in intellectual life, and in Moral Minds: The Science of Temptation and Control (Little Brown, Feb) Marc D Hauser marshals the latest research in cognitive science, developmental psychology and "evo devo".
Cosmologist Marcus Chown touches base with the latest, weirdest scientific ideas in The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead (Faber, Jan). And if all that leaves you a bit weak at the knees, in Octet: Eight Big Ideas You Need To Understand in the 21st Century (Weidenfeld, June) Ben Hammersley trots through all the biggies, from computation theory to zero distance, in a mere 300 pages.
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Looks like Tony Blair's troubles continue as the author of The War on Iraq and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter accuses him of being a cowardly Bush stooge in Target Iran: The Truth About the US Government's Plans for Regime Change (Methuen, Feb). The president of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, never seems to be out of trouble now that the Pakistanis have been labelled the good guys in the war against terror - and also the bad guys. Veteran commentator Zahid Hussain analyses how Pakistan went to war with itself in Frontline Pakistan: The Struggle with Militant Islam (IB Tauris, Jan). For a different perspective on Afghanistan, try Deborah Rodriguez's The Kabul Beauty School (Hodder & Stoughton, May). She went to Kabul with her Afghan husband, a beauty degree and a desire to help; now she's training a generation of Afghan woman as beauticians, and telling their stories to boot.
The sorry reality of our health-care system is the subject of Emergency: Irish Hospitals in Chaos (Gill & Macmillan) by "the Eddie Hobbs of the health service", Marie O'Connor, who claims that hospitals have been designed around the needs of health professionals, not patients.
HISTORY
At last - an anniversary to cheer about. Two books celebrate the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in 1807: James Walvin's The Trader, The Owner, The Slave (Cape, March), which is about the Atlantic slave trade, and the third book on the subject by historian Robin Blackburn, The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Americas. (Verso, March). Next year also marks the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, and in Guernica and Total War (Profile Books, March), the poet Ian Patterson takes the theme of systematic attacks on unprotected civilian populations right through to 9/11 and Iraq.
There's more bloodshed and mayhem in Chris Bellamy's Absolute War: Soviet History in the Second World War (Macmillan, April), a chunky study of one of the most terrible land conflicts of all time.
Ireland's neutrality is explored in That Neutral Island: Ireland and the Second World War (Faber, March) by Clair Wills; drawing on letters, stories and diaries from the literary figures of the 1930s and 1940s, including Seán Ó Faolain, Flann O'Brien and Elizabeth Bowen, Wills evokes an era when legends of Nazi spies roaming the country made Ireland seem a haven for Hitler's friends - a time of rationing, censorship and the threat of invasion, of people trying to make sense of the horror of what was happening in Europe, often through a lens of antagonism to Britain, the former colonial power.
The complexities and contradictions of Adolf Mahr's career as curator of the National Museum - he was a Nazi organiser, but also a man of deep compassion - are related in Gerry Mullins's Dublin Nazi No 1: The Life of Adolf Mahr (Liberties Press, spring), while Annie Ryan follows her successful study of the Easter Rising through witness accounts by applying the same technique to Comrades: Inside the War of Independence (Liberties Press, spring). And if you're planning a trip to the site of the Battle of the Boyne at Oldbridge next summer, you won't want to go without Harman Murtagh's The Battle Of The Boyne 1690: A Guide To The Battlefield (Boyne Valley Press), which uses maps, illustrations and aerial photographs to chart the course of the battle.
LIFESTYLE/HEALTH
Can man, or indeed woman, live by wine alone? Pretty much, says Roger Corder in The Wine Diet (Sphere, Jan) - so long as you eat plenty of chocolate as well. I kid you not. Jill Fullerton-Smith, for her part, promises to tell The Truth About Food (Bloomsbury, Jan) in a tie-in with a big BBC telly series. Sticking to seasonal food from local producers seems like a good culinary way to go - and Darina Allen shows how to do it in A Year at Ballymaloe Cookery School (Kyle Cathie, March). Gillian McKeith is on the green leafy vegetable trail in Gillian McKeith's Health Food Bible: The Complete A-Z Guide to Getting Well and Staying Healthy for Life (Michael Joseph, June).
Some would say our obsession with longevity has reached ridiculous levels, and Sunday Times columnist Bryan Appleyard takes a wry look at the business of immortality in How To Live Forever Or Die Trying (Simon & Schuster, Jan). If you're looking to send your children to the right school, you'll find a complete list of every secondary school in Ireland, along with advice from parents and school principals, in Choosing a School: A Guide to Second-Level Education in Ireland by Deirdre Raftery and Catherine Kilbride (Mercier, Jan). And when it comes to sending ourselves up, few do it better than Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, whose satirical Guide to South County Dublin (Penguin Ireland, June) wins the award for sharpest subtitle of the year: How To Get By on €1,000 a Day.
MUSIC
Do great artists have an obligation to pass on their skills to future generations? The cellist Mstislav Rostropovich - who taught several generations of Russian talent as Professor of the Moscow Conservatoire for more than 25 years - believes they do. He's 80 next year, and in The Legend of Class 19 (Faber, April), the controversial biographer of Shostakovich, Elizabeth Wilson, examines his teaching philosophy. Garth Cartwright spent a year traipsing around to see if he could figure out what makes Roma musicians tick. He tells all in Princes Amongst Men: Journeys With Gypsy Musicians (Serpent's Tail, June). The story of the woman who is arguably the biggest music star of our time, is told in Diana Ross: The Unauthorised Biography, by J Randy Tarraborrelli (Sidgwick & Jackson, Jan). All our stories will be chronicled in Leabhar Mór na nAmhrán (Cló Iar-Chonnachta), edited by Micheál Ó Conghaile, a collection of all the songs in the living tradition of sean-nós today. The book includes words to all the songs as well as information about their origins, a comprehensive discography and notes by well-known singers and scholars.
PHILOSOPHY
The massive sales notched up by Does Anything Eat Wasps? is bound to give rise to a rash of question-mark book titles, and here's a good one: What Is the Opposite of a Lion? (Sceptre, May). Alexander George is in the editing chair as 40 leading thinkers tackle questions from ordinary sods. Terry Eagleton takes an idiosyncratic look at the ultimate question in The Meaning of Life (OUP, Feb). "The meaning of life is a subject fit either for the crazed or the comic, and I hope I have fallen more into the latter camp than the former," says Eagleton, who invokes a galaxy of writers and thinkers along the way, including Marx, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Sartre and Beckett. Anthony Appiah resurrects an ancient philosophy which, he says, can be updated to allow warring cultural factions to put aside their cultural differences in Cosmopolitanism (Norton, Feb) and Julian Baggini delves into the absolutely average in Welcome to Everytown (Granta, March). Having calculated the most statistically typical location in the UK - and come up with postcode S66 on the outskirts of Rotherham - he thought it would be a good idea to spend six months there. Philosophers - don't you just love 'em?
ESSAYS
There are big collections due from literary giants JM Coetzee and Mario Vargas Llosa next year. Coetzee follows his highly acclaimed Stranger Shores with a second volume, Inner Workings (Harvill Secker, March), in which he explores the work of, among others, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett and Nadine Gordimer. Vargas Llosa's Touchstones (Faber, March) sees him air his views on 20th-century fiction, from Heart of Darkness to The Tim Drum; the collection also includes art criticism and political pieces on 9/11, the war in Iraq and the terrorist attacks on London and Madrid. In The Curtain: an Essay in Seven Parts, novelist Milan Kundera gives his personal view of the history and value of the novel in western civilisation (Faber, March).
Hilary Lennon is the editor of Frank O'Connor: Critical Essays (Four Courts Press, March), which investigates unexplored areas of Frank O'Connor's work, including his autobiographical writings and his representation of the civil war.
ECONOMICS
Economists like nothing better than to be asked to predict the future, and Will Hutton consults his crystal ball in The Writing on the Wall: China and the West in the 21st Century (Little Brown, Jan). According to David Smith, the centre of global culture is shifting faster than we think, and in The Dragon and the Elephant: China, India and the New World Order (Profile , May), he wonders how we westerners will react when China and India are in charge of life, the universe and everything. Meanwhile, the director of the Earth Institute and anti-poverty activist Jeffrey Sachs turns his attention to the problems of cultural conflict, over-population and environmental stresses in Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (Penguin, July).
TRAVEL
Why has nobody written this book before? Fearless Philip Nolan has hopped around Europe using Ryanair destinations as his route planner, and Ryanland (Hodder Headline Ireland, April) is billed as a no-holds-barred account that brings us face to face with the good, the bad and the very, very ugly of low-cost air travel. Staying put for a year sounds easy by comparison - but maybe not if you're staying put on a remote glaciated island with a German professor you've met in a bar. Marie Tieche makes it all sound quite appealing in Champagne and Polar Bears: Romance in the Arctic (Summerdale, Feb). In Driving Over Bratwurst (Little Brown, June), Ben Donald offers a witty guide to the delights of post-World Cup Germany. A best-selling Dutchman by the name of Geert Mak has been hailed as the new WG Sebald for In Europe: Travels Through the 20th Century (Harvill Secker, March), in which he criss-crosses the continent looking to define the condition of our culture using diaries, newspaper reports, memoirs and the voices of both prominent and forgotten people. So - no pressure then, Geert.
SPORT
The GAA has been riding high since the completion of Croker - so it's obviously time for it to be taken down a peg or two. Darragh McManus's GAA Confidential (Hodder Headline Ireland, April) is billed as a Nick Hornby-esque look at the history, the haircuts and the horrors of Rule 42. One man who hasn't been riding high is the flat jockey Kieran Fallon, banned in the UK for the moment, and in Kieran Fallon: The Biography (Orion, May), Andrew Longmore tells the story of racing's most controversial character. The perennial search for a British tennis superstar will resume at Wimbledon 2007, and the boy who hid in the headmaster's office at Dunblane while 16 of his friends were massacred tells about his terrifying experience at the hands of the tabloid press in tennis champion Andy Murray's My Life So Far (Century, June). And what's this? A guide to Irish surfing dudes? It's our newest national sport - and in Surf Nation (Simon & Schuster, May) Alex Wade looks at who's doing it, where, and why.
RELIGION
There's more to them than you might think - and Silvia Evangelisti gives nuns a rare opportunity to speak for themselves in Nuns (OUP, Feb), in which a diverse group of women speak of their ideals, frustrations and their attempts to reach out to the societies around them. Shenanigans in the Vatican is always good news for authors - and readers - and David Yallop gives the late Pope John Paul II a wallop of the investigative crozier in The Power and the Glory (Constable & Robinson, April). Details are being kept under wraps, but it will be published on the second anniversary of the pope's death and aims to "disentangle some disturbing facts from the fiction that surrounds his life and legacy".
CHICKLIT
Here's a nice angle on the old "boy meets girl" story. When the straitlaced heroine of Stephanie Lehmann's The Art of Undressing (Hodder & Stoughton, March) falls for a fellow student, she's forced to seek advice from her mum, who makes her living by selling sex toys and teaching the fine art of striptease.
Clare Dowling writes about last-minute pre-nuptial cold feet in No Strings Attached (Headline Review, Jan), and Pauline McLynn spills the beans on the theatrical agency business in Bright Lights and Promises (Headline Review, May). Three girls give a dilapidated Dublin house a major makeover in May Need Renovation (Mercier, March) from Pamela Rowan, aka Terry Prone, while Niamh Green's debut novel, Secret Diary of a Demented Housewife (Penguin Ireland, May) is about a young mother trying to be superwoman - and failing spectacularly. Sound familiar?
POETRY
Collections due next year from the biggest names on the international poetry scene include John Burnside's Gift Songs (Cape, March), an exploration of the Shaker idea that a good song is a gift from God, and John Ashbery's A Worldly Country (Carcanet, Feb), which seeks to portray the haunted, ambiguous landscapes of the 21st century. Fans of the novelist Paul Auster will be intrigued by the selection of early poems, translations and composition notes in his Collected Poems (Faber, Feb).
Irish poets are, as usual, well represented in the lists. The year kicks off with Micheál O'Siadhail's Globe (Bloodaxe, Jan), published to coincide with his 60th birthday; Maurice Riordan's The Holy Land (Faber, Feb) takes the form of 18 idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s; and in Domestic Violence (Carcanet, March) Eavan Boland explores the drama of women's lives. Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's New and Selected Poems is a 40-year retrospective published jointly by Gallery Press and Faber.
For his first book with Dedalus, Gabriel Rosenstock explores the mystical traditions and possibilities of poetry in Bliain an Bhandé/Year of the Goddess (Feb), new poems in Irish with his own translations; and in The Mirror Tent (Dedalus, Feb), Gerard Smyth's sixth collection, the Dublin poet's relationship with his native city is one of the themes of the book, which also includes an elegy for the late Jerome Hynes.
New takes on old favourites include The Collected Poems of Seán Ó Ríordáin (New Island, March), selected and translated by Greg Delanty, and a selection of Thomas Kinsella's best-loved poems, together with photographs and reminiscences, in A Dublin Documentary (O'Brien, March). The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, edited by Peter McDonald, born in 1962, the year before the Belfast-born MacNeice died, comes from Faber next month. For a mammoth poetic labour of love, check out Rand Brandes's Bibliography of Seamus Heaney (Faber, June), a list of everything the Nobel prize-winner has ever published, including interviews, recordings and broadcasts.
CULTURAL HISTORY
Everyone who's interested in local history will be interested in The Big Houses and Landed Estates of Ireland (Four Courts, Feb), Terence Dooley's research guide, which is packed with practical advice regarding the availability of primary sources, their locations, their strengths and their weaknesses. Those of us who live in Dublin may look to Neil Hagerty's Dublin: A Biography (Piatkus, Nov) to focus on the bigger picture around issues of development in our fast-changing city. At the other end of the cultural scale, Brian Mac Aonghusa's Hidden Streams: How Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Was Shaped (Currach Press) delves into the detail of one Dublin borough and its history. And finally, the changes wrought by our booming economy are examined in Immigration and Social Change in the Republic (Manchester University Press, May) by Bryan Fanning.