Upcoming Fiction
Until now the answer would be a firm no, but 2007 brings Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (out now)—928 pages of addictively literary Bollywood noir about a Sikh police instructor and a gangster who has hacked his way to the top of Mumbai in the '80s and '90s, when the body count of crime syndicate shoot-outs emblazoned newspapers like some grim cricket score.
The book is so good that it can even headline above the return of Norman Mailer, who unleashes The Castle in the Forest (January 23), a portrait of Hitler in youth through the eyes of the devil's assistant. England's own mini-Mailer, Martin Amis, also looks back at fascism and anti-Semitism in his short new novel, House of Meetings (January 16).
From Turkey comes Elif Shafak, who weighs in on the damage of the Armenian genocide in her raucous new novel, The Bastard of Istanbul (January 18). Booker finalist Hisham Matar's debut novel, In the Country of Men (January 30) arrives on these shores, too, with a heartbreaking tale of a father's disappearance.
This winter is a busy one for Irish heavy-weights. Prolific Booker Prize-winner Patrick McCabe returns from a whopping two years off with Winterwood (January 23), the story of a man who descends from madness into murder. Colm Toibin offers up the stories in Mothers and Sons (out now), and John Banville makes his genre debut as Benjamin Black, author of the crime novel Christine Falls (March 6).
On the sunnier side of things, fans of The Office will find a literary equivalent of sorts in Joshua Ferris' debut, Then We Came to the End (March 1). Literate entertainment is also to be found in Jonathan Lethem's tango with the great American grunge novel, You Don't Love Me Yet (March 13) and in Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley's Hollywood novel Ten Days in the Hills (February 13).
After a big year in 2006, African storytelling will see another avalanche of superior fictions. Nuruddin Farah kicks it off with Knots (February 1), the story of a Somali émigré's struggle with adapting to life in Canada. Nigerian-born Helon Habila follows with Measuring Time (February 19), about twin brothers separated by a world of chance. Also keep an eye out for Aya (March 20), Marguerite Abouet and Clement Oubrerie's story about a 19-year-old boy who is about to experience the collapse of the Ivory Coast in 1978.
Upcoming Nonfiction
It's amazing how much difference an election will make. Or not. As this went to press, the Iraq Study Group Report was being shooed away, and troop-level increases were being hotly debated. Chalmers Johnson would say this is exactly the imperial overstretch that is going to bring America to its knees. The former CIA analyst makes this point and others in Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (February 7), the final volume in his Blowback trilogy. Soldiers coming home from the front have been telling their stories for a while now, but Joshua Key's The Deserter's Tale: The Story of an Ordinary Soldier Who Walked Away from the War in Iraq (January 28) is the first of its kind, a real-life version of Tim O'Brien's great Vietnam War novel, Going After Cacciato. There are hints of Cacciato in Tom Bissell's eagerly awaited memoir, The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam (March 6).
National Book Award-winner William Vollmann has been studying the effects of war his entire career, but he has finally narrowed in on its handmaiden—poverty—with Poor People (March 1), a cycle of true stories about the struggle of getting by. Bill McKibben has a few answers for how this problem has become so intractable with Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (March 6). Perhaps John Kerry and Theresa Heinz do, too. We won't know until their untitled memoir is released, scheduled for March 30.
Medical students and sawbones alike will have their hands full with two terrific new books about doctoring. Jerome Groopman is bringing out his most essential book yet, How Doctors Think (March 19), while Pauline Chen's Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality (out now) might reassure those going under the knife how seriously doctors take their responsibility.
Finally, though it was declared dead in the wake of James Frey, the memoir soldiers on. Robert Stone leads the year with Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (out now), followed by Palestine: A Personal History, (February 28), an attempt by writer Karl Sabbagh—part Arab, part English—to unravel the riddle of his family's history and the vanishing country they came from.