Arminta Wallace trawls through the catalogues for the likely success stories in the publishing world in 2003
Each year has its share of new books from the biggest names in contemporary fiction, and next year will see John Updike produce his 20th novel and 54th book, Seek My Face (Hamish Hamilton, April), about a painter's developing relationship with an interviewer. The hero of Don De Lillo's Cosmopolis (Picador, May) begins his day stuck in traffic in his stretch limo, while Carlos Fuentes's Ines (Bloomsbury, March) features love, art, death and a diva. The war novel Crabwalk (Faber & Faber, May) has been hailed as Günter Grass's most important since The Tin Drum and has already caused much debate in Germany, confronting as it does a hitherto taboo subject: the suffering of Germans during the second World War. The story centres on the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff and its refugee passengers by a Soviet submarine in 1945. Some 9,000 people, mainly women and children, fleeing from the advancing Red Army, went down in the Baltic Sea. Apart from being the deadliest maritime disaster of all time, in the novel the doomed ship embodies the denial of Germany's agony during the war years, a pain that remains a major untold chapter of European history. The fact that it will come out in English the same year as a work touching on the same terrain by the late W. G. Sebald - of which, more anon - will make the subject one of the dominating themes of the book year.
Loot (Bloomsbury, June) is the title of Nadine Gordimer's new collection of stories. In Good Faith (Faber & Faber, February), Jane Smiley examines 1980s America while Louise Erdrich's The Master Butchers Singing Club (Flamingo, April) takes an epic view of a German immigrant family.
In his first book since the Booker-winning Last Orders, Graham Swift concerns himself with the conscience of a female prisoner in The Light of Day (Hamish Hamilton, March); Tim Parks examines the unravelling of a black Crown Court judge in Judge Savage (Secker & Warburg, March); and Caryl Phillips goes beneath the skin of an English village in A Distant Shore (Secker & Warburg, May). The author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggars, has come up with another wildly idiosyncratic title in You Shall Know Our Velocity (Simon & Schuster, January), while James Wood, one of the great literary critics of his generation, tries his hand at fiction with The Book Against God (Cape, April). Toby Litt finds himself on the beach in Finding Myself (Hamish Hamilton, June), while the British poet laureate, Andrew Motion, offers a mystery/love story about a village doctor in The Invention of Dr Cake (Faber & Faber, February). Scottish fiction will be well represented with Andrew O'Hagan's Personality (Faber & Faber, April), a study of celebrity, Shena Mackay's Heligoland (Cape, March), set in a community of refugees and artists in London, and Ruaridh Nicoll's follow-up to the highly-praised White Male Heart, Wide Eyed (Doubleday, July) among the leading northern lights.
From the author of the wonderful Blue Bedspread, Raj Kamal Jha, comes another slice of Indian family drama, If You Are Afraid of Heights (Picador, May), while Welcome to Paradise by Mahi Binebine (Granta, March) sees the Moroccan painter and novelist paint a gritty picture of contemporary life in north Africa. And finally, film-maker Quentin Tarantino's first full-frontal venture into fiction will be - surprise, surprise - a gore-and-guts fest called Kill Bill (Fourth Estate, May).
Irish Fiction
The novel everyone wants to read, following his superb volume of stories, Standard Time, is Keith Ridgway's The Parts (Faber, February), a mystery involving pharmaceuticals set in and around Dublin - and that's all I'm saying. In Dancer (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, January), Colum McCann takes the life of the ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev as his starting point, while Glenn Patterson's Number Five (Hamish Hamilton, May) focuses on a house in Belfast. Gerard Donovan's debut novel Schopenhauer's Telescope (Simon & Schuster, April), set in an unnamed European village in the throes of civil war, has been compared to Kafka and Bernard Schlink, no less. And the comic novel is alive and kicking, so expect a slew of same, including Kilbrack (Simon & Schuster, March), "a comic novel of dark imaginings in rural Ireland", by Jamie O'Neill, acclaimed author of At Swim Two Boys, John Kelly's coming-of-age-in-Fermanagh story Sophisticated Boom Boom (Cape, April), and a batch of first-timers: Paul Murray's An Evening of Long Goodbyes (Hamish Hamilton, May), Jason Mordaunt's Welcome to Coolsville (Cape, May), Gavin Corbett's Innocence (Pocket/Townhouse, April) and Claire Kilroy's All Summer (Faber & Faber, May), a "poetic and menacing" tale based on the theft of a painting from the National Gallery from Kilroy, a Dubliner born in 1973.
Various writers are going back in time for their new novels, for instance Paris on the eve of revolution is the setting for Lara Harte's historical novel Wild Geese (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, February) while Catherine Dunne travels to 19th-century Belfast for her second novel, Another Kind of Life (Picador, February). Patrick Devaney's novel , set in pre-Cromwellian Ireland, Through the Gate of Ivory, is due from Lilliput in May.
Colm O'Gaora is back with a love story, Another Sky (Picador, June), while Martin Malone takes us to Lebanon in The Broken Cedar (Simon & Schuster, January), in which Khalil, a shop keeper on the Israeli-Lebanon border, wrestles with the lynching of an Irish UN peacemaker he witnessed years before and the sequence of events that followed it.
Watch out, too, for Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's selected short stories, Midwife to the Fairies (Attic Press, February), which features two new pieces and an introduction by Anne Fogarty.
Anita Notaro is being hailed as the new Cathy Kelly with Back After The Break (Bantam, April), while Catherine Barry examines the perennial problem of divorce in Null & Void (Pocket/Townhouse, March), and Kate O'Riordan's The Memory Stones (Pocket, March) focuses on mother-daughter relationships in Dublin and Paris.
Expect a blast of romance from Gill and Macmillan's Tivoli imprint, including a new book from Grace Wynne-Jones, Ready or Not?, and a first novel by Waterford solicitor Tara Heavey, A Brush with Love.
Biography
Is there anything left to say about Maggie Thatcher? Brenda Maddox thinks there is: her book Maggie (Hodder & Stoughton, March) will coincide with a major ITV series on the Iron Lady. In Mussolini (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, April), Nicholas Farrell rejects the standard version of the Italian dictator as a grotesque buffoon; and the South African novelist Christopher Hope undertakes a study of the mixture of terror and comedy that makes up modern tyranny in Mugabe: Perfume of the Tyrant (Macmillan, May). Another fiction writer who is turning her hand to biography is Bobbie Ann Mason, and Elvis (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, March) will see this chronicler of rural America writing about an American legend. Next year is the centenary of George Orwell's birth, so expect various studies of the man who dreamed up Big Brother, including Gordon Bowker's from Abacus in June, and D.J. Taylor's from Chatto & Windus in July.
How Kevin Kiely handles the controversial life of the late Francis Stuart will be revealed when his biography of the writer appears, publishers Irish Academic Press hope, in the spring.
Also on the horizon are an account of the life of Mary McAleese by the man who has been teaching her Irish since her inauguration, Ray MacMánais's Beathaisnéis (Cló Iar Chonnachta), a study of the man who founded the Mounties, Victorian adventurer William Francis Butler, by Martin Ryan (Lilliput, June), and a life of Jimi Hendrix by Marsha Hunt (New Island, February).
Travel/Reportage
Three hundred years ago mountains were regarded as a repellent form of landscape, to be avoided at all costs - now almost everyone, not least a veritable army of writers and publishers, seems hell-bent on scrambling all over them. The spring lists are crammed with tales of vertical derring-do: but in Mountains of the Mind (Granta, May) Robert McFarlane takes a broader approach, drawing on geology, Renaissance cosmogony and personal experience to explain the fascination. Meanwhile, Richard Grant tracks down some modern American nomads in Ghost Riders (Abacus, January), and Aidan Hartley chronicles the high-octane world of the African war correspondent in Dead by Tomorrow (HarperCollins, June). Last but certainly not least, watch out for some inimitable observations on life as she is lived from the whimsical Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom, who turns to the real world for a series of travel essays, Nomad's Hotel (Harvill, June).
Memoir
Few memoir writers this year will top the torrid tale of Derek Malcolm, the Guardian's film critic, who, rooting around in a drawer, came across a document which revealed that his father - or rather, the man he thought was his father - had once been put on trial for shooting his mother's lover. Malcolm tells all in Family Secrets (Hutchinson, March); and he's not the only one. Giving Up The Ghost (Fourth Estate, May) is part autobiography, part novel from Hilary Mantel, while Claire Rayner lays her personal agonies on the line in How Did I Get There From Here? (Virago, March). Hamlet's Dresser (Pocket, June) sees Bob Smith rescued from a difficult childhood by an unlikely guru - Shakespeare - while Home and Exile (Canongate, February) gives Chinua Achebe the chance not just to tell his own life story but to put forward a brilliantly-argued critique of imperialism in his first book since the Booker-shortlisted Anthills of the Savannah. As usual, Irish authors are not backward about coming forward: Almost There (Michael Joseph, June) is the sequel to Nuala O'Faolain's bestselling Are You Somebody?, while in A Day Called Hope, broadcaster Gareth O'Callaghan writes frankly about his recovery from depression. New Island will publish the memoir of a woman who lived secretly with a serving Catholic priest in the US - and their children - for 20 years. Called Under The Rose, the author is Flavia Alaya.
Finally, one of the most talked-about and much anticipated books on the Dublin literary scene is Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People (Fourth Estate, February), an account of a childhood world dominated by an often difficult Irish nationalist father and a German refugee mother.
Politics/ Current Affairs
Whither Western society? That's the modest question from George Monbiot, who puts forward a set of proposals for a new world order in The Age of Consent (Flamingo, June), and also from the editor of the Economist, Bill Emmott, who applies the lessons of the last century to the next 100 years in 20:21 Vision (Allen Lane, January). Guardian journalist Polly Toynbee gets close to the unpleasant underbelly of consumer capitalism in Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain (Bloomsbury, February), while the underbelly of the American Dream provides plenty of fodder for the author of Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser, whose Reefer Madness and Other Tales from the American Underground (Allen Lane, March) turns the spotlight on pornography, drugs and migrant labour in the US. China may be an infant consumer ecomony, but its bosses seem to be playing by the old rules, according to Fourth Generation: Inside the New Chinese Leadership (Granta, January), edited by Andrew Nathan and Bruce Gilley, which uses classified internal Communist Party documents to lift the lid on the rotten state of palace politics in Beijing.
Spindoctoring has been called the curse of modern politics and though it's mainly concerned with Britain, many media watchers here will be interested in The Wages of Spin by Bernard Ingham (John Murray, March). With 24 years experience as a press officer for Labour and Conservative governments behind him, it will be interesting to hear how he feels it all got out of control and how as he puts it "journalists colluded in their own corruption".
Back in our own back yard, there are two books to watch out for from professors from Queen's University Belfast: in History of Home Rule (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, March) Alvin Jackson begins with Parnell and ends with the Peace Process, while in Armed Struggle: a History of the IRA 1916-2002, (Macmillan, March) Richard English seeks to offer a "serious explanation" of that organisation and its aims, unhindered by romanticism or sensationalism.
The dodgy deeds of Irish finance will be held up to the light in Colm Keena's The Ansbacher Conspiracy (Gill and Macmillan, March), while the same publisher promises an eye-opening investigation into what really goes on across the Irish Sea in Colum Kenny's Fearing Sellafield (April). A major new spring series from Liffey Press will examine Pressure Points in Irish Society, with the first two volumes devoted to the topics of suicide and drugs, and Maev-Ann Wren's Unhealthy State (New Island, April) will take a long, hard look at our ongoing healthcare problems.
History
Hard to categorise, but absolutely unmissable, will be Joseph Roth's What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (Granta, February), an elegiac portrait which ventures beneath the official veneer of Austro-Hungarian culture to reveal a city of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty. Amos Elon takes an unusual approach to the Holocaust story in The Pity Of It All: A History of the Jews in Germany 1743-1933 (Allen Lane, February) by beginning with the arrival of Jewish cattle dealers and wandering peddlars in Germany in the mid-18th century. Iceland is the starting point for Victoria Clark's The Far-Farers (Macmillan, January), a trans-European pilgrimage which juxtaposes 11th-century Christendom and 21st-century Western Europe, while Fergus Fleming abandons the frozen north, subject of his last two books, for the story of the conquest of the Sahara and the two eccentric Frenchmen who made it possible in The Sword and the Cross (Granta, March).
Toby Barnard's Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1649-1770 (Yale University Press, April) will also be worth watching out for. And just in case anyone imagined for a moment that Casement had gone away, there is Roger Casement: From Imperialist to Revolutionary, a biography by Maynooth academic Séamas O Síocháin (Lilliput, September), who, incidentally, is on the side of the Black Diaries being genuine. The Changing Face of Sickness: a social history of the doctor-patient relationship in Ireland 1650-2000, by historian Tony Farmar is also forthcoming from A & A Farmar.
Poetry
Irish poets are well represented in next year's lists, with a new collection, Outliving, due from the Cork poet Bernard O'Donoghue (Chatto & Windus, April); July will see the unveiling of John F. Deane's spiritual exploration Manhandling the Deity (Carcanet), while in August the same publisher will produce Three Irish Poets: Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Mary O'Malley, an essential selection from each of these three very different voices. On the international front, Nine Horses is the title of the new book from the US poet laureate, Billy Collins, (Picador, March); Christopher Logue continues his celebrated account of the Iliad with All Day Permanent Red (Faber, March); and three of James Fenton's highly-praised libretti have been collected in The Love Bomb and Other Musical Pieces (Viking, April).
Poetry collections on the way from Dedalus Press include The Other Sea by the Augustinian priest from New Ross, Pádraig J. Daly, (March) and Chris Agee's new collection First Light (April), his first since In the New Hampshire Woods.
Crime/Thriller
More than 7,000 crime novels were published in the UK in 2001 - and if the catalogues are anything to go by, that number is sure to increase in 2003. Irish writers have been making their mark on the genre in recent times, notably, of course, John Connolly, whose new novel, Bad Men - set on an island in his beloved Maine - is due from Hodder & Stoughton in June. The Long Suit (Cape, February) sees Philip Davison's MI5 man Harry Fielding - soon to be played on TV by Ross Kemp - embroiled in a series of Long Island murders, while Paul Kilduff's The Headhunter (Hodder & Stoughton, March) follows a serial killer from Dusseldorf to Dublin; The Day of the Dead, by John Creed, aka Eoin McNamee (Faber & Faber, February), winds up in the uplands of central Mexico. Closer to home, Julie Parsons' thriller The Guilty Heart (Macmillan, May) opens with the disappearance of a child in Dublin.
Unholy goings-on in Seville will feature in the new book from Robert Wilson (HarperCollins, February); a homeless woman in Stockholm narrates Karin Alvtegen's award-laden Swedish bestseller Missing (Canongate, June), and Chad Taylor's Electric (Cape, January) is a stylish noir thriller from New Zealand. On the American side of the tracks, Elmore Leonard weighs in with a collection of killer stories, When The Women Come Out To Dance (Viking, February); George P. Pelecanos returns to the black ghettoes of Washington for Soul Circus (Orion, February); and Shutter Island (Bantam, May) sees Dennis Lehane on the trail of CIA mind control experiments. Finally, if you want to keep up to speed with the new generation of thriller writers, don't miss the Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide to Crime Fiction by Nick Rennison (Bloomsbury, February).
Literature/ Criticism
Children's literature is something we tend to accept rather than analyse, which makes Alison Lurie's book of essays on the topic, Boys and Girls Forever (Chatto & Windus, May) particularly welcome. Janet Malcolm takes an unusual approach to a great Russian writer in Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (Granta, February), in which close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov's life and framed by an account of Malcolm's own journey to Russia in the company of three women guides. There's a fly-on-the-wall view of the Oscar Wilde trial in Merlin Holland's Irish Peacock and Scarlet Marquess (Fourth Estate, April), which uses the actual trial transcripts, while literature, history and religion combine in Adam Nicholson's dramatic account of the creation of one of the English language's most influential works, the King James Bible, in The Power and the Glory (HarperCollins, April). A writer whose work always defied categorisation was W.G. Sebald, who died last year. His extended essay On The Natural History Of Destruction (Hamish Hamilton, February) promises not only to be one of the most eagerly anticipated works of literature to appear next year, but to rekindle considerable controversy about the effects of Allied bombing raids on Germany during the last years of the second World War. 600,000 civilians died when a million tons of bombs were dropped on cities and towns yet German writers were largely silent about that horror until Sebald explored what had been a dark shadow over his own life and work. Obviously ideal reading in conjunction with Nobel prize winner Günter Grass's forthcoming novel mentioned above.
Sport
Think it's all over? Not until you've read Tom Humphries's inimitable recreation of the sporting year 2002 - including, of course, the sensational Saipan saga - in Laptop Dancing and the Nanny Goat Mambo (Pocket/Townhouse, May). Those who pine for the Big Jack era in international soccer should check out Leo McKinstry's Jack and Bobby: A Story of Brothers in Conflict (Willow, June), which promises some unpalatable revelations about the Charlton brothers, while in Playing Away: the Life and Times of the Foreign Football Player (Scribner, May), Fiona Sax Ledger looks at how young men from impoverished backgrounds cope with being catapulted into a society awash with money.
Science
Maybe it's the new millennium, or maybe popular science is a particularly lucrative enterprise these days: either way, a veritable plethora of books will seek to explain to us everything from the end of the universe (The Alpha and Omega, by Charles Seife, Doubleday, June) to the volcanic explosion which killed 40,000 people in 1883 (Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester, Viking, June). Stephen Jay Gould's final attempt to reconcile science and the humanities, written shortly before his death last year, sports the intriguing title The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister's Pox (Cape, March), while the latest volume from Selfish Gene author Richard Dawkins, A Devil's Chaplain and Other Essays, is due from Weidenfeld & Nicholson in February. In The Natural History of the Rich (Heinemann, March) Richard Conniff studies the moneyed species as one would study, say, baboons, with predictably offbeat results, while in Adam's Curse, (Bantam, April) the Oxford professor of genetics Bryan Sykes asks whether men are headed for extinction. The good - or bad, depending on your point of view - news is that the answer, apparently, is "yes".
Music
The maestro of the mid-life melody, Nick Hornby, rifles through his record collection once again in 31 Songs (Viking, February), a book of essays about ditties of all descriptions, from Teenage Fanclub to "the sort of music you hear in the Body Shop" via - Puff the Magic Dragon - the reggae mix. The first volume of Bob Dylan's long-awaited autobiography Chronicles; Volume 1 - so secret all details are under embargo in the catalogue - is due in January from Scribner who boldly claim it is "the most awaited book of 2003". And an unusually meaty offering in this category is Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, (Bloomsbury, March) in which the Palestinian writer Edward Said and the Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim undertake a full and frank exchange of views on the topic of Western musical culture.
General
The Irish Times is the pivot of a collection of journalism from the 1970s by women such as Maeve Binchy, Mary Maher, Mary Holland, the late Christina Murphy and Mary Cummins and others who rattled cages and shone lights into unexpected corners of Irish life in a decade of great social change (Lilliput, April).
Edited by Elgy Gillespie, her own encounter with Muhammed Ali will be one of its liveliest features. Little did many of them know that with the turn of the century one of their number, Geraldine Kennedy, would be sitting in the editor's chair.
When Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between New York's Twin Towers in 1974, he never thought the buildings would be gone within 30 years. He tells the story of that stunt in To Reach the Clouds (Faber & Faber, February. Another potent symbol of American culture is put under the microscope in Where You At: Notes from the Front Line of a Hip Hop Planet (Bloomsbury, June) in which Whitbread award-winning novelist Patrick Neate looks at how the language and music of black teenagers has, quite literally, conquered the world.
One of the funniest books of the entire year, meanwhile, is likely to be Geoff Dyer's Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered To Do It (Abacus, April), described as "not as a self help book - rather, it is a book about how the author himself could do with a little help". Denis Cotter's hugely successful Café Paradiso cookbook is to have a follow- up from Atrium, a full-colour, cutting-edge vegaratian extravaganza called Paradiso Seasons. Still on culinary matters, Seamus O'Connell, chef-owner of the Ivory Tower, will take up the pen instead of the spatula for Soul Food (A & A Farmar), based on his forthcoming RTÉ TV series. There's a wry and witty travelogue from Gabriel Rosenstock, Ólann mo Mhiúil as an nGainséis, in the pipeline from Cló Iar Chonnachta.
Finally, for dedicated Ross O'Carroll-Kelly followers there will be The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years as told by Paul Howard "the mind behind the mouth that is Ross O'Carroll-Kelly, doyen of D4 life" in which Ross confronts the fact that though he has the Golf, the Job and the Girls, things just really aren't adding up.