If advance word from the book trade is anything to go by, Peter Sheridan looks sets to become the Frank McCourt of 1999.
A few months back I mentioned that Macmillan had bought Forty-Four: A Dublin Memoir, by Peter (brother of Jim) for a six-figure sum and that the rights were also being bought in America and in various European countries. Now, with publication imminent, bookshops are tipping it as one of the likely runaway successes of the season.
Writing in the Bookseller, that bible of the business, Rob Cassy of Garden Books, London, admits he nearly overlooked it, "having suspected it of `oirishness' and `luvviness' in equal parts, but once I'd picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It's one of those hugely enjoyable books you could recommend to absolutely anyone but which sometimes gets over-praised for its literary merits when it's simply a damned good read."
Mind you, Mr Cassy does describe this memoir of growing up in Seville Place (off Sheriff Street) as a "novel", but then I recall the author telling me that the book was "about seventy per cent factual", so perhaps Mr Cassy is thirty per cent right.
He's not the only bookseller to like it. Patricia Britton of James Thin in Edinburgh is full of enthusiasm, too, describing Peter as "an accomplished writer" who will "inevitably be compared to Frank McCourt, but he has a different appeal. Despite a life of some hardship and tragedy, his tone is characterised by a lack of bitterness, making this a most enjoyable read."
Frank McCourt himself generously describes it as "a wild song of a book".
There are lots of significant literary anniversaries occurring this year, including a few centenaries. The most important of these are of Vladimir Nabokov (April 22nd), Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway (both July 21st) and Jorge Luis Borges (August 24th), but neither should we forget those of three writers who were always more liked by readers than by a sniffy critical establishment: Nevil Shute (January 17th), Ngaio Marsh (April 23rd) and C.S. Forester (August 27th).
J.D. Salinger and Iris Murdoch will be octogenarians this year; Keith Waterhouse, Peter Porter, Len Deighton, Thom Gunn and John Osborne will be seventy; Alan Bennett, Edward Bond and Beryl Bainbridge will be drawing their pensions; Germaine Greer, Alan Ayckbourn, Margaret Drabble, Melvyn Bragg, Clive James and Auberon Waugh will be reaching sixty; while that young turk Martin Amis will finally be hitting fifty.
And that's before we even consider Irish writers. Elizabeth Bowen's centenary is in June; Benedict Kiely, if you want to believe it, will be eighty this year; Brian Friel, John Montague and Ulick O'Connor will be seventy; Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Bernard Farrell will be sixty; Tom Paulin will be fifty; and Dermot Bolger will be forty.
Most of this information is inexplicably missing from Waterstone's otherwise excellent Desk Diary for 1999, which instead favours bizarre information on a number of writers.
For instance, instead of alerting us to Nevil Shute's centenary on Sunday week, it tells us that he died thirty-nine years ago next Tuesday; and rather than tell us that Ford Madox Ford died fifty years ago on June 26th next, it informs us that Pearl Buck was born 107 years ago on that day.
Still, a fine and elegant diary, nonetheless, and I wouldn't be without it.
What is it with these Irish comics that they all want to be novelists? Is it that the business of making people laugh somehow isn't a fit occupation for a grown person and that they yearn to be taken seriously instead?
That would explain the incursions into fiction first by Sean Hughes, then by Ardal O'Hanlon, and now by last year's Edinburgh Festival Perrier Award winner Tommy Tiernan.
Tommy, who is soon to have his own Channel 4 comedy show (you're nobody if you haven't), has just sold the world rights of his first novel to Headline in London. Or, rather, agent Dawn Sedgwick has done so on his behalf, Dawn also being Ardal O'Hanlon' s agent.
The novel is called The Gospel According to Thomas, it's described as "a doubter's view of religion", and it grew out of the comedian's observation that life on the road for a funnyman is like like on the road for a disciple. I'm sure he's right.