Literary Fiction
Plenty of big books to look forward to from the big guns during the year. Marriage and more besides will be under the spotlight in Don Delillo's The Body Artist (Picador), set in New England, while Regeneration author Pat Barker returns with Border Crossing (Viking). One of the literary talking-points of the year is certain to be James Kelman's Translated Accounts (Secker & Warburg). Set in an unnamed territory that appears to be under military rule, and written in foreign-office English, this is billed as a groundbreaking new novel from the 1994 Booker-winner.
There will also be a brace of books from the most fashionable of fabulists including Nick Hornby, who enters the eternal triangle from a woman's perspective in How To Be Good (Penguin); Hanif Kureishi, whose Gabriel's Gift (Faber & Faber) tracks a 15-year-old north London schoolboy from a broken home; and Irvine Welsh, returning to familiar subject matter with Glue (Jonathan Cape), the tale of four boys growing up in Edinburgh. Magnus Mills follows All Quiet On the Orient Ex- press with a story about a man who lives in a tin house, Three To See The King (Flamingo), and newcomer Toby Litt, who earned rave reviews for his blackly comic Corpsing, tries his hand at a rites of passage novel in Deadkidsongs (Hamish Hamilton). The world of lesbian love attracts the attention of the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami in Sputnik Sweetheart (The Harvill Press). Finally, stylish but enigmatic is almost certain to be the order of the day from Russell Hoban's Amaryllis Night and Day (Bloomsbury).
The top Irish authors are still going strong and as anybody who heard last year's series of radio adaptations will fondly attest, black and blacker is the only way to describe Patrick McCabe's Emerald Germs of Ireland (Picador), in which a serial killer looks fondly back on life with his Mammy . . . before she exploded. In Maurice Leitch's The Eggman's Apprentice (Secker & Warburg) a boy gets mixed up with gangsters in rural Antrim; the perfect family get mixed up with a less-than-perfect childminder in William Wall's Minding Children (Sceptre); and in the irresistibly-titled Cannibals (Jonathan Cape), Dan Collins offers random glimpses of the here and now in locations from west Cork to West Coast. In Seeds of Doubt (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), James Ryan takes as his starting-point the world of five sisters growing up in 1930s Ireland. Ciaran Carson's Sham- rock Tea (Granta) is a novel about mysticism and miracles; in the final part of his highly-praised trilogy, Peter Cunningham presents Love In One Edition (The Harvill Press); Kevin Myers's Banks of Green Wil- low (Simon & Schuster/Townhouse) sees the horrors of European history catch up with a young American woman; while a look at a strange and changing Dublin is promised in Keith Ridgeway's short story collection Standard Time (Faber).
Popular Fiction
Remember when there was no such thing as Irish popular fiction? These days there seems to be little else. Due on a best-seller list near you shortly will be Nuala O Faolain's My Dream Of You (Michael Joseph), the debut novel from the author of the highly-acclaimed memoir Are You Somebody, and another singlesomething saga from Sheila O'Flanagan, My Favourite Goodbye (Hodder Headline). January sees the debut of a new Irish comic talent, Damien Owens, with Dead Cat Bounce (Hodder & Stoughton), while actress Pauline McLynn returns to the fray with Better Than A Rest (Hodder Headline). And in the funny peculiar department, Father Ted writer Arthur Mathews takes a dim view of Oirishness in Well- Remembered Days: the Memories of Eoin O'Ceallaigh, a 20th Century Irish Catholic (Macmillan).
Thriller
Le Carre may have travelled to Kenya for his 18th book, The Constant Gardener (Hodder & Stoughton), but P.D. James stays in her familiar East Anglia for Death in Holy Orders (Faber), featuring old favourite Commander Dalgliesh. After the success of LA Confidential, James Ellroy must have thought he'd never need to write another book, but here he is turning his lens on the American nightmare again in The Cold Six Thousand (Century), while Douglas Kennedy's The Pursuit of Happiness (Hutchinson) strays out of thriller territory into the world of post-war New York and the McCarthy witch-hunts. Connoisseurs will be watching out for The Falls (Orion), Ian Rankin's 12th Rebus novel, and Robert Wilson's follow-up to his highly-acclaimed A Small Death in Lisbon, The Company of Strangers (HarperCollins).
Irish writers make a strong showing in the crime stakes, with John Connolly's The Killing Kind (Hodder) finding PI Charlie Parker investigating a mass grave in northern Maine, Colin Bateman's Shooting Sean (HarperCollins) travelling from Dublin to Cannes for a wacky movie biz adventure, and comedian Sean Moncrieff having a go at a gangster novel in Dublin (Doubleday), set in a Dublin "most of us wouldn't recognise". Just try us, Sean . . .
Biography
Northern Ireland provides raw material for two of the year's biggest biographies. Dean Godson's cheekily titled Himself Alone (HarperCollins) takes a close look at the life of David Trimble, while Ronald Anderson was granted sole access to private papers for his study of the man who masterminded the foundation of the state in the first place, Edward, Lord Carson (HarperCollins). The mother of the Indian state, meanwhile, is the subject of Indira: A Life by Katherine Frank (HarperCollins). Happily for biographers a successful public life often masks a disastrous private one, and Gijs van Hensbergen's Gaudi (HarperCollins) examines the little-known domestic world of the great Catalonian artist, who, having been rejected by the woman he loved, lived as a celibate hermit.
Another major force in European architecture, Edwin Lutyens, had a rather happier - or, at least, more productive - home life, for Lutyens: A Life (Chatto & Windus) was written by his grand-daughter Jane Ridley. Albert Einstein's disastrous marriage to the brilliant Mileva is recounted in feisty detail in Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by Denis Overbye (Bloomsbury).
The Bronte Myth, by Lucasta Miller (Jonathan Cape) reveals as much about the art of biography as it does about the literary sisters; and sisterhood of another sort is shown in Fiona Maddocks's stirring biography of history's only famous female composer, the medieval nun Hildegard of Bingen (Hodder Headline). Devotees of Bob Dylan who want to celebrate the songwriter's 60th birthday in 2001 should watch out for Down The Highway, by Howard Sounes (Doubleday): and just about everybody can enjoy the first biography in 15 years of the man who wrote "I want to be famous, not to be fed". Laurence Sterne: A Life by Ian Campbell is due from Oxford University Press in March. On the letters front there is Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons: Love Letters 1941-1969, edited by Judith Adamson (Chatto), the correspondence Woolf had with the feisty feminist, over 20 years his junior, whom he got to know after Virginia's suicide.
Memoir
The blurring of distinctions between fiction, memoir and biography has produced some stylish volumes in recent years, and Frank Viviano's Blood Washes Blood (Century) looks like being another. The seven-times Pulitzer Prize nominee was prompted to research this trip into his family's past after being kidnapped by Bosnian extremists; he discovered, among other things, that his namesake had been murdered at a deserted crossroads in Sicily 100 years earlier. There's plenty more murder and mayhem in Joseph O'Neill's Blood-Dark Track (Granta), the story of his two grandparents, one Irish, one Turkish, who were imprisoned during the second World War, while in Galloway Street: Growing Up Irish in Scotland (Doubleday), John Boyle recreates ethnic tensions in 1940s Paisley.
The Truth at Last is what's promised in the memoirs of Christine Keeler (Sidgwick & Jackson), the former call-girl at the centre of the 1960s political scandal which turned personal. Meanwhile, The Ulick O'Connor Diaries 1970-1981 (John Murray) casts a cool eye over Dublin in the Seventies and Eighties - and more besides. And in Journeys of A Lifetime (Simon & Schuster/Townhouse) Mary Russell sets her spectacular external travels against the backdrop of an even more dramatic inner voyage.
History/Politics
The new world order having, so far, proved to be just as bad as the old one, there's plenty of scope for intellectual analysis of the times we live in - which is precisely what you would expect from Noam Chomsky, whose A New Generation Draws The Line: Kosovo, East Timor and The Standards Of The West (Verso) examines Western powerlessness in the face of disaster, while in Unacknowledged Legislation (Verso), Christopher Hitchens explores the territory where literature and politics meet. In the final part of the trilogy which began with Provos and continued with Loyalists, Peter Taylor's Brits: The War Against The IRA (Bloomsbury) attempts to complete the jigsaw of recent events in Northern Ireland.
The inside story of the libel action taken by the controversial historian David Irving against Penguin Books is told in The Holocaust on Trial by D.D. Gutenplan (Granta Books), while Anna Politkovskaya's A Dirty War: Russian Reporting on Chechnya (The Harvill Press) is a frankly female view of the brutality which has reduced her country to rubble. Moving further back in time, John E. Wills's 1688: A Global History (Granta Books) ranges across an astonishing breadth of subject matter, moving from the court of the Sun King to the first contact between westerners and aboriginal people in north-western Australia. A century later, the new world was flexing its muscles and in A Few Bloody Noses (John Murray), Robert Harvey tells the extraordinary story of the American war of Independence.
Poetry
As well as Seamus Heaney there are plenty of other collections to cherish, among them Paul Muldoon's Poems 1968- 1998 (Faber & Faber), which promises the usual mix of fun, wickedness, verve and grace. Wendy Cope's If I Don't Know (Faber & Faber) will be her first book since Serious Concerns in 1992, while Down- river, by Sean O'Brien (Picador), is billed as a meditation on rivers that start in hell but fall later as rain. And Travellers (John Murray) offers many previously unpublished pieces by the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown, who died in 1996. The Nowhere Birds, a first collection from young Irish poet Catriona O'Reilly, is due in April from Bloodaxe.
Essays/Criticism
The challenge of the year 2001 seems to appeal to essayists: in particular, Elaine Showalter's Inventing Herself: Claiming A Feminist Intellectual Heritage (Picador) has been put forward by its publisher as "the first feminist classic of the new century". It is certainly ambitious in its scope, with chapters on texts as diverse as A Vindication of the Rights of Women and Scream 2. In Telling Lives (Papermac), a collection of biographical essays edited by Alistair Horne, the chaps - Roy Foster, Redmond O'Hanlon, Michael Ignatieff and Robert Kee - offer perspectives on writers from W.B. Yeats to Bruce Chatwin. In Grammars Of Creation (Faber) critic George Steiner looks, among other things, at how the altered status of death, sanitised by medical technology and rendered routine by casual brutality, enforces new understandings of "the gratuitous miracle of creation".
Science
Do we really have to choose between science and religion? Not according to the guru of the gnomic classes, Stephen Jay Gould. In Rocks of Ages (Jonathan Cape) he argues that in order to be fully human, we must have both. Bonding is another characteristic of hunmanity: when it works, it produces chanting sports crowds and family picnics; when it doesn't, it produces ethnic massacres and race riots. David Berreby tackles the topic in Members Only (Hutchinson), while in Rivals: Conflict As The Fuel Of Science (Secker & Warburg), Michael White reveals how some of the most influential of human discoveries have been fuelled by rivalry, races and plain old rage.
General
Histories of the Irish media have traditionally been anecdote-based, but as the title of John Horgan's Irish Media: A Critical History 1922-2000 (Routledge) indicates, this promises to be a discerning look which is both practical and readable. Also looking back in On Ilkley Moor (Picador) is Tim Binding (Picador), whose partly factual, partly intuitive and partly personal recreation of a Northern English town may tell us as much about the way we live today as the way people lived in the 1950s.
In Kind of Blue: The Making Of The Masterpiece (Granta Books), Ashley Kahn recreates the making of the Miles Davis album that changed the language of popular music, while in Buon Appetito, Your Holiness (Pan) Mariangela Rinaldi and Mariangela Vicini give a new spin to cookery books by passing on the secrets of the papal kitchens.
It's always a good sign when a writer doesn't fit into any obvious category. Such a one is Adam Phillips, and in his latest book of philosophical musings, Houdini's Box (Faber & Faber) he asks why human beings are so spellbound by ideas of escape - yet dismissive of escapism.
Travel
Another in the Great Questions Of Our Times series: why do people climb Everest and drag sleds from the Sahara desert to the North Pole? And why do books about them sell by the dozen? Because life has simply become too safe, argues mountaineer Simon Yates in The Flame of Adventure (Jonathan Cape). Reallife explorers are practically an extinct species, but Wilfred Thesiger goes on for ever, and A Vanished World (HarperCollins) is a series of portraits of tribal peoples.
Red Dust (Chatto & Windus) sees the Chinese photographer, painter and writer Ma Jian relive a three-year trek through deserts and cities, scenes of barbarity and landscapes of utter tranquillity. A rather more relaxing stroll is on offer in Edmund White's The Flaneur: a stroll through the paradoxes of Paris (Bloomsbury), the first of a series in which writers introduce cities they know well. And in the wonderfully-titled Noodling for Flatheads (William Heinemann) the brilliantly-named Burkhard Bilger examines moonshine, monster catfish and other curious comforts of the American south.
Business
Does dosh have a future? That's the question posed by Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money (Century). Real entrepreneurs have, of course, already moved away from filthy lucre through e-commerce to m-commerce, and in Get Big Fast (Random House), Robert Spector takes a look at Amazon.Com's pioneering online role, while How to Make Your Mil- lion from the Internet (And What To Do If You Don't) (Hodder & Stoughton), is Jonathan Maitland's account of his 12-month attempt to do just that. He didn't, presumably - or he wouldn't be writing about it.