Book adventures in 2008

Escaping into the future

Justine Jordan picks the highlights among forthcoming novels

Justine JordanSaturday December 29, 2007

GuardianAutumn was a thin season for fiction, publishers fearing that novels would be drowned in the ever-swelling tide of zany stocking fillers and celebrity biographies; so it's a welcome relief to look beyond the Christmas turkeys to find the 2008 schedules full of good things.

The year begins with a notable follow-up: 12 years after the international smash The Reader, in Homecoming (Weidenfeld, January) Bernhard Schlink again wrestles with Germany's wartime demons. As a child, his narrator becomes obsessed with an incomplete manuscript about a German POW; as an adult, he goes in search of the missing ending - and his own father, also apparently killed in the war. It's a quest for identity, forgiveness and love.

It's been a long wait, too, for Adam Mars-Jones's epic Pilcrow (Faber, April), investigating the rich internal life of a boy confined to bed, and for Manil Suri's The Age of Shiva (Bloomsbury, March): after 2001's acclaimed The Death of Vishnu, Suri now turns his gaze on India in the aftermath of independence.

Meanwhile, Siri Hustvedt follows the elegant What I Loved with The Sorrows of An American (Sceptre, May), an absorbing study of family secrets handed down the generations. Hustvedt threads elements from a memoir written by her father about growing up in depression-era Minnesota with a tale of loneliness and love in modern-day New York, as a divorced analyst confronts traumatic memories from his immigrant roots. We'll have to wait until November for more Manhattan family secrets from Notes on a Scandal author Zoe Heller in The Believers (Fig Tree).

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (Canongate, February) is James Meek's follow-up to his acclaimed historical novel, The People's Act of Love. This is a contemporary tale of love, hubris and misunderstanding as a war reporter takes his own baggage to Afghanistan, hoping to turn the elusive, unpredictable Astrid into girlfriend material, and the turmoil of political events into material for a bestselling thriller. The world, needless to say, will not bend to his will, but the resulting novel is as gripping and acute as its predecessor.

There's fabulous escapism to be had as Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence (Cape, April) transports the reader to the 16th-century Mughal court, where a visitor from the Florentine world of Machiavelli wins the attention of the emperor himself. Rushdie sets up symmetries between east and west in a bejewelled extravaganza with shades of Borges.

Meanwhile, the dissident writer Ma Jian has written an epic novel about China's recent history in Beijing Coma (Chatto, May), in which a Tiananmen Square protester wakes from the 10-year coma caused by a soldier's bullet to find his country transformed.

In what looks set to be one of spring's most interesting novels, Gordon Burn is rushing the very recent past into print. From his award-winning debut novel Alma Cogan to his Fred West biography Happy Like Murderers, Burn has long blended fact and fiction, and in Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (Faber, April) he finds his natural subject: the news as entertainment. Twenty-four-hour rolling news, the blogosphere and digital interactivity feed our culture of speculation and spin. Burn takes a few highly charged weeks in 2007 - the summer of floods, terror attacks, the Blair/Brown changeover and the disappearance of Madeleine McCann - to investigate media manipulation and the boundaries between fact and fiction.

Back in time from Blair's long goodbye to the dawn of New Labour: Crusaders by Richard T Kelly (Faber, January) is an impressive debut. Set in 1996, it sees a young clergyman struggling to set up a church in a deprived part of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Kelly reflects in energetic, muscular prose on the history of the Labour movement and foreshadows the huge social change to come; this is a weighty book in both senses. Another northern epic also considers the changing state of the nation.

In The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate, April) Philip Hensher chronicles 20 years of British life from the mid-70s to the mid-90s through the interlinked fortunes of two Sheffield families. Expansive yet precise, it leads the reader from the minutiae of family life to broad public events with the surest of hands.

Hanif Kureishi also returns to the 70s, and the territory of his enduringly lovable The Buddha of Suburbia, with a much-tipped new novel, Something to Tell You (Faber, March). His narrator is an analyst looking back on the violence, confusion and first love of his youth, while deeply engaged in contemporary politics and culture: Kureishi's London landscape is a vivid kaleidoscope of larger-than-life characters.

Louis de Bernières's fictional worlds have ranged from Cephalonia to South America: in A Partisan's Daughter (Harvill Secker, March), set in north London during the Winter of Discontent, he comes closer to home. It charts the relationship between a middle-aged Englishman and a young Serbian woman, who tells him tales of her colourful past.
Two authors make literary journeys of their own.

Helen Dunmore continues the vogue for all things Latinate in Counting the Stars (Fig Tree, February), which tells the story of the poet Catullus's love for his secret mistress, set against the backdrop of Julius Caesar's Rome. Justine Picardie's Daphne (Bloomsbury, March) investigates Daphne du Maurier's fascination with the Brontë sisters' reprobate brother Branwell, in a literary mystery of stolen manuscripts.


To short stories, and Anne Enright follows her surprise Booker win with a glorious collection about women on the edge. Taking Pictures (Cape, March) is a compulsive series of vignettes, brimming with physicality and humour, which are desolate and witty by turns. Other collections to look out for include Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect (Cape, May) and Gerard Woodward's Caravan Thieves (Chatto, March). Woodward is known for his semi-autobiographical trilogy about a family of alcoholic eccentrics; here he adds a dash of surrealism.


Two novels that will appeal to adult and teenager alike show that "crossover" doesn't have to mean wands and wizardry. In Out of Breath Julie Myerson (Cape, February) conjures a spare, absorbing tale of children on the run from threatening adult reality into the summer nights of the English countryside and their own imaginations: her trademark combination of emotional honesty and supernatural suggestion makes it near-impossible to put down. In Submarine (Hamish Hamilton, February), young newcomer Joe Dunthorne's cheerfully peculiar 15-year-old narrator is a worthy successor to Adrian Mole.

Other debuts to look out for include a wonderfully assured first novel from Sadie Jones, The Outcast (Chatto, February), in which a troubled young man kicks out against the hypocrisy and repression of 1950s society, and Junot Díaz's energetic portrait of Dominican immigrants in the US, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber, February). In June, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif (Cape) weaves a fantastic narrative around the plane crash that killed Pakistani dictator General Zia in 1988, examining corruption, conspiracy theories and the road to 9/11; while there's a buzz building around The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson (Canongate, September), which features the storytelling skills of a 700-year-old former nun.

A Renaissance investigation into the nature of angels makes up another autumn curiosity, as Karl O Knausgaard's A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven (Portobello, October) breathes new life into Bible stories. And with novels also promised from Peter Carey, Toby Litt, Will Self, Margaret Atwood and David Guterson, there should be more than enough to see the keen reader through any thin winter months.


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