Poetry
Carcanet has three exciting new titles to offer. Winner of last year's T.S. Eliot Award, Australian poet Les Murray will publish a novel in verse entitled Fredy Neptune, which is the story of a man who starts off in Eastern Europe during the second World War, then travels to America and ends up in contemporary Australia. There is also a new collection by one of America's foremost poets, John Ashbery, who is now 70: Wakefulness is a witty book which explores architecture and painting. Also due from Carcanet is Eavan Boland's new collection, called The Lost Land. Boland looks at the history of Irish exile, particularly as experienced by women. She is now something of a parttime exile herself, as she spends one semester each year teaching at Stanford University in California.
Forthcoming from Gallery is Shelmalier by Medbh McGuckian. This explores the legacy of 1798 - a history of which the poet had not been aware - in McGuckian's distinctive, quirky voice, which creates its effects through layers of daring, dreamy imagery and allusion. There is also a new book from the celebrated Irish language poet, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, as yet to find a title. The translations will be by Medbh McGuckian and Eilean Ni Chuilleanain .
Peter Fallon, founder and director of Gallery Press, is a poet in his own right, although this often tends to be forgotten because of his Trojan publishing work. His News Of The World, New And Selected Poems, will be published next year. From Bloodaxe comes Brendan Kennelly's latest work, The Man Made Of Rain, a collection of poems informed by the visions he had during his recent heart surgery. It will be published on his birthday, April 17th. Another new book to watch out for is by Carol Ann Duffy. Forthcoming from Anvil, and provisionally entitled The World's Wife, it is a hilarious collection of poems written from the unimpressed perspective of the wives of the world's famous men, from Mrs Midas and Mrs Lazarus, to Mrs Aesop and Mrs Darwin.
Biography
D.M. Thomas's biography, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century In His Life (Little, Brown) looks set to become one of the greats in this genre. Thomas is the acclaimed author of novels such as The White Hotel, and a Russian literature scholar to boot. His study of the Nobel laureate, which expands to examine the century, has benefited from the co-operation of Solzhenitsyn's first wife, Natasha. Another exciting new biography is Primo Levi (Hutchinson) by Ian Thomson, who conducted one of the last interviews with Levi before he committed suicide in 1987. Levi was the much-loved author of poetry, fiction and essays, but he is most deservedly remembered for his immortal memoir of incarceration in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man. Thomson draws on previously unknown archive materials and an impressive array of first-hand accounts, including an interview with the daughter of Levi's German superior at Auschwitz.
The director, Peter Brook (born in 1925), hailed as contemporary theatre's greatest inventor, has written his autobiography, Threads Of Time (Methuen). Candid and wide-ranging, the tale includes his love of cinema and his mould-breaking productions for the RSC in the 1960s, particularly his Beckett-inspired King Lear. C. David Heymann has written a biography of Bobby Kennedy (Heinemann) which is apparently the first full-scale life of Joseph Kennedy's third son. The book includes details of Bobby's career as presidential aide and attorney general during the Kennedy administration - claiming that Bobby was more conscientious than his brother - as well as his many affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Candice Bergen and Lauren Bacall.
Although journalist and novelist Julie Birchill was only born in 1959, she has already written her autobiography, I Knew I Was Right (Heinemann), wherein she freely confesses to lying about her lovers to make them seem more glamorous. Controversial and funny, it covers her youthful love of shoplifting, her giving Iggy Pop laxatives instead of drugs, and her reign as queen of the Groucho Club.
Still Me by Christopher Reeve with Roger Rosenblatt (Century) charts the life story of the actor who once played Superman. Paralysed in a riding accident in 1995, Reeve cannot walk or move his arms, but he has returned to cinema as a director and he has also raised millions of dollars for research into spinal-cord injuries.
Prize-winning novelist and biographer Peter Ackroyd has written The Life Of Thomas More (Chatto), about the humanist, author of Utopia, and one-time right-hand-man to Henry VIII. The book is both a study of More's life and career and an examination of the rapidly changing world in which he lived. Ruud Gullit, dubbed "the world's most charismatic football personality since Pele" has produced Ruud Gullit: My Autobiography (Century). Gullit, one of the youngest and most successful player/managers in footballing history, has conducted a personal crusade against racism and apartheid, and is a particular friend of Nelson Mandela.
Irish Fiction
Next year's apparently most auspicious debut in this category comes from Keith Ridgway. The Long Falling (Faber) is set at the time of the Xcase controversy in 1992, and is about Grace Quinn, a woman who leaves her brutal husband to follow her gay son to the city and a new life. Pat McCabe is publishing Breakfast On Pluto (Picador), a novel about Patrick "Pussy" Braden, an Irish transvestite who escapes to London in the 1970s, only to find himself embroiled in "the horror of a conflict he cannot run from".
Dog Days (Secker) is part two of the trilogy which Aidan Higgins began with his first volume of memoirs, Donkey's Years. Dog Days is an evocative account of two years spent in a bungalow near Brittas in Co Wicklow in an awkward tenancy with a schoolmistress who suffers from a bad back. There are flashbacks to a Dublin full of whores, Provos and writers. There is a new novel from Maurice Leitch entitled The Smoke King (Secker) which examines the nature of prejudice. It is set during the second World War in a small town in Northern Ireland. There is a US army staging camp nearby with black GIs, who are immediately under suspicion when a murder takes place. Mike McCormack, whose impressive collection of stories, Getting It In The Head, won the Rooney prize earlier this year, will publish his first novel with Cape in February.
Crowe's Requiem sounds like an intriguing mix: a love story, a Gothic fairy tale and a meditation on the nature of storytelling. Playwright Sebastian Barry is publishing a novel entitled The Whereabouts Of Eneas McNulty (Picador), set in the 1920s. McNulty is ex-British Navy, ex-RIC, and is forced to leave his home town of Sligo under threat of death.
Another fictional debut comes from the comedian Ardal O'Hanlon. Entitled The Talk Of The Town (Hodder), it is about Dubliner Patrick Scully, a young man full of suppressed rage.
Sad Bastard (Secker) is Hugo Hamilton's sequel to his novel Headbanger, published this year. Both feature the adventures and bizarre philosophies of Garda Pat Coyne, a disillusioned, temperamental malcontent who roams the streets of Dublin causing more trouble than he solves.
History
The 50th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel next year has prompted a rash of books. One of the more interesting is Israel And The Arabs: The Fifty Year War (Viking) by an Israeli and an Arab: Ahron Bregman and Jihan ElTahri, both journalists. Flagged as "the definitive insider's account of war and peace in the Middle East", the book will be accompanied by a BBC TV series. Next year is also the 30th anniversary of the culmination of the political, cultural and sexual revolution in 1968. This is marked by Marching In The Streets (Bloomsbury) by Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, which includes illustrations, poetry, diaries and cartoons to create a record of that momentous year.
Gitta Sereny is the acclaimed author of Into That Darkness (conversations with the commandant of the Treblinka death camp) and the multi-award-winning Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. Her new book, Cries Unheard, is shrouded in secrecy: "This may be the most controversial book of them all and Macmillan is unable to disclose the subject until close to publication".
I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer (Weidenfeld) were written by a German Jew who spent the second World War in Germany - and not in a concentration camp. This is a first-hand account of the history of the Nazi period from a new and very different perspective.
The Wealth And Poverty Of Nations (Little, Brown) by David Landes is a work of narrative history that examines the causes of the wealth and poverty of nations, finding the answers often in small, surprising details.
The Discovery Of The Grail (Century) by Andrew Sinclair is the full story of the Holy Grail, dating from pagan sacrifices in Babylon to the legends of King Arthur, and examining the many artefacts which have surfaced and been claimed to be the Grail.
Act of God: Moses, Tutankhamun And The Myth of Atlantis (Sidgwick and Jackson) is a wide-ranging investigation by Graham Phillips into Tomb 55 from Egypt's Valley of the Kings. It was sealed in a way unlike any other, and contained someone who was being punished by those who survived him, during whose reign "an appalling cataclysm" occurred.
Stalingrad (Viking) by Antony Beevor is about "the turning point of the war" in 1942, the outbreak of "the first major modern battle fought in a city, with thousands of civilians trapped in its horrors." Beevor uses primary sources never used before to give a narrative of the experience of the soldiers on both sides.
Popular Fiction
Jeffrey Archer's The Eleventh Commandment (HarperCollins) is about CIA man Connor Fitzgerald's double life, and how his boss has decided to destroy him. Irish-born author Josephine Hart, author of Damage and Sin, has produced a new novel entitled The Stillest Day (Chatto). It explores the transgressions of a young artist at the turn of the century.
Dame Catherine Cookson, the grandmother of them all, is publishing The Solace Of Sin (Bantam) next March, a novel about "a strong and independent woman" whose marriage has broken up and who moves into a new house, after which she begins to unravel various mysteries.
The Long Road Home (Bantam) is the new Danielle Steele, a story of child abuse and recovery. Not to be outdone, Jackie Collins is also publishing a novel, entitled Thrill! (Macmillan). It concerns the adventures of movie star Lara Ivory, her ex-husband and his new wife.
(Weidenfeld) by Julie Birchill is one of the more interesting-sounding of the products of the Diana industry, which has speeded up its output in such a sickening way since her death. Birchill writes her book partly in the "murder mystery" mode, but also attempts to deconstruct Diana the icon.
Truth or Dare (Arrow) is a lively sounding tale of two girls on the tear who lie and cheat their way through London, Edinburgh, Belfast and Dublin. It is the first novel by Sara Sheridan (born in 1968) who is a graduate of TCD. Animal Husbandry (Hutchinson) by Laura Zigman also looks like a good laugh. Its heroine, the disillusioned Jane Goodall, coins a term - New Cow - as part of her theory of romantic relationships. This boils down to explaining that men leave women and never come back because all they really want is New Cow.
Science
Paul Strathern has produced a series of science books for the layman reader called The Big Idea (Arrow). These aim to explain major scientific ideas in an accessible way. Titles include Oppenheimer & The Bomb and Galileo & The Solar System.
They sound perfect for those of us who feel a mental block as soon as the word science is mentioned. Flagged as a "scientific detective story" Purple Secret (Bantam) by John Rohl, Martin Warren and David Hunt sounds like a good read. Subtitled Genes, Madness and the Royal Houses of Europe, the book is based on the theory that King George III (he of The Madness Of King George movie) suffered from the rare inherited blood disease known as porphyria. Using recently developed DNA sequencing techniques, the authors trace the porphyria strain through Europe's royal dynasties and postulate that it played a key role in issues such as the outbreak of the first World War.
Body Story (Boxtree) by Dr David Williams is tied in to a Channel 4 series with a budget of more than £1 million. Working with a combination of microscopic cameras, thermal imaging and computer graphics, the series and the book will go under our skin to show the inner workings of our bodies - infection, pregnancy, bone repair - in a detail never before achieved.
Giants' Shoulders (Hodder) by Melvyn Bragg (which will link in with a BBC Radio 4 series) sounds like the ideal overview of science, including an account of the major figures in the field - from Newton to Freud - as well as interviews with the leading scientists of today. Carol Gilligan, author of the ground-breaking In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory And Women's Development, is publishing a new book next year entitled Recovering Psyche: A New Psychology of Love (Chatto). Professor of Human Development and Psychology at Harvard University, Gilligan has conducted a 10-year study of women's psychology, from adolescence to adulthood, and this book promises to be full of new insights.
Sounding fascinating, Randomness (Harvard University Press) by Deborah J. Bennett is a book which examines the science of probability and the history of the human urge to put ourselves into the hands of chance.
Q Is For Quantum (Weidenfeld) by John Gribbin is a book about the quantum world, where most of the greatest advances of the 20th century have been made. Gribbin explains the inner structure of everything from a DNA molecule to the laser that makes a CD player work.
The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence For Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago (Century) by Robert Temple is a book of scientific detective work. He investigates how it is possible for the ancient traditions of the Dogon tribe in Africa to contain detailed data on the star Sirius, which modern astronomers have only just discovered.
Crime
The title of John Grisham's new novel (Century) has yet to be confirmed, but we do know that it is set in the legal world. Widely believed to be the most popular author writing in the world today, Grisham has produced eight blockbusters, five of which have been made into films.
The Chimney-Sweeper's Boy is the new thriller by Barbara Vine (the pen name of Ruth Rendell). After the death of writer Gerald Candless, his daughter Sara embarks on a study of his life, only to discover he had hidden his real identity. Carl Hiaasen has written a new book, Lucky You (Macmillan), about a woman who wins the lottery by using the numbers of the ages she was when she dumped a series of burdensome men.
Right to Live (Hutchinson) is the new Richard North Patterson. It centres on a seven days in a closely-contested presidential primary, and raises questions about that hot topic of the moment, abortion politics. There is a new book from Louisiana crime writer James Lee Burke, entitled Sunset Limited (Orion), where his main character, Detective Dave Robicheaux, gets to the bottom of a case where two boys are murdered after allegedly raping a black girl.
The Last Best Hope (Hodder) is Ed McBain's new novel, apparently the last Matthew Hope mystery (or so the publishers warn us). In this one, Hope is approached by a woman who wants him to find her missing husband whom she wishes to sue for divorce.
Cold Heart
(Macmillan) is the new Lynda La Plante, featuring Lorraine Page, who investigates the death of mogul Harry Nathan, only to find that a sordid trail of video evidence implicates other leading Hollywood figures in the case. Film presenter Barry Norman has turned his skills to thriller writing and the result is Death On Sunset
(Orion), a story of "murder at the movies". The setting is Hollywood, and Norman stirs in the requisite mix of drugs, sex, money and the Mafia.
Travel current affairs
Veteran novelist and travel writer V.S. Naipaul has written Beyond Belief (Little, Brown). Here he revisits Indonesia, Pakistan, Iran and Malaysia, the countries through which he travelled for his momentous Among The Believers: An Islamic Journey. Sixteen years later he reviews his impressions of the Islamic world with his characteristic combination of political insight and narrative power.
Since 1990, Michael Ignatieff has been travelling the world's war zones, from Bosnia to central Africa. The Warrior's Honour: Ethnic War And The Modern Conscience (Chatto) is a reflection on what he has seen in places where ethnic war has become a way of life. He examines the role of moral interventionists, such as Red Cross delegates and diplomats, as well as the warlords and paramilitaries who have escalated contemporary warfare to a new level of savagery.
The View From The Summit (HarperCollins) is Sir Edmund Hillary's autobiography, covering his miserable childhood and his eventual historic ascent of Everest.
Under The Tuscan Sun (Bantam) is by poet and travel writer Frances Mayes, who tells the story of buying and restoring a villa in Tuscany.
Sorcerer's Apprentice (Weidenfeld) is a travel book with a difference. Author Tahir Shah sets out to train in Indian mysticism, and his travels take him to Calcutta and to India's greatest illusionist, Hakim ibn Feroze, who takes him on as an apprentice.
The Spiritual Tourist (Bloomsbury) by Mick Brown records the author's odyssey as he seeks the sacred on the verge of the new millennium. His journey spans the foothills of the Himalayas (to discuss reincarnation with the Dalai Lama) to a backwoods church in Tennessee (where he examines "Crosses of Light" which are held as evidence of Christ's imminent return to Earth).
The Spirit-Wrestlers (HarperCollins) is Philip Marsden's view of post-Soviet Russia. It includes a wonderful range of interviews, with Cossacks, wandering doctors, exiled Georgian princes and the Yezidi Sheikh of Sheikhs. Our Lady Of The Sewers (Little, Brown) by Paul Richardson is the story of the hidden Spain - mystic, unexpected and resilient - that still exists in spite of package holidays.