If we're snowed under by winter, can spring, as the poet wrote, be far behind? And in the rosy-hued world of publishing, spring begins right now, so we thought some modest guidance to its bookly offerings might be in order.
We're looking at spring only, so you'll have to wait to hear about fall books such as a new Jon Stewart (plenty of grist these days for his dark, satiric mill) or The Big Short, a take on our economic woes by Michael Lewis, who chronicled a previous decade of swinish greed in the estimable Liar's Poker. Fans clamouring for David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King will remain on tenterhooks until April, 2011.
It looks like a blooming season for fiction, with new titles by Guy Gavriel Kay (Under Heaven), Russell Smith (Girl Crazy), two-time Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey (Parrot and Olivier in America), Anne Tyler (Noah's Compass), Martin Amis (The Pregnant Widow), John Banville (The Infinities, nominated for a Bad Sex Award in Britain), Roddy Doyle (The Dead Republic), first-novel award-winner Joan Thomas (Curiosity) and A.L. Kennedy (What Becomes). Not to forget new fiction from mega-selling Jodi Picoult, William Boyd, U.S. Canadaphile Howard Norman, Fay Weldon, T.C. Boyle, Keith Oatley, Robert Coover, Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe and Irish village chronicler Patrick Taylor. And I'm sure there must be something on the way from Joyce Carol Oates and Alexander McCall Smith. There always is.
The classics-meet-monsters genre inaugurated last year by Seth Grahame-Smith in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (now available as a graphic novel!) grows with Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, which netted Grahame-Smith a reported advance of $575,000 (U.S.). Oddly, I always thought it was Lincoln who looked a bit cadaverous and, well, undead.
But very much alive are the following 10 books, all of which I mean to, er, investigate (not forgetting historian Max Hasting's book on Churchill as a war leader and James S. Hirsch's biography of baseball immortal Willie Mays).
Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel (Knopf Canada, April)
Easily the book event of the season, the novel we've been awaiting since Life of Pi , nine long years ago. In what is billed as a Holocaust parable, a struggling writer who's also a taxidermist (so many are) does not kill animals but preserves them, including howler monkey Virgil and donkey Beatrice.
Cigar Box Banjo, by Paul Quarrington (GreyStone, May)
Having been diagnosed with lung cancer, the writer and musician extraordinaire recounts a life experienced from inside the music, his own journey (he's now lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Porkbelly Futures) and the meaning and making of songs.
The Value of Nothing, by Raj Patel (HarperCollins, January)
One response to the financial crisis is to cast a new critical eye on consumerism: what, why and how much we buy. Acclaimed economist Raj Patel takes things a step further, looking at how and why we price and value things. For instance, he pegs the real cost of a Big Mac at $200.
Solar, by Ian McEwan (Random House Canada, April)
A satirical novel by the masterful McEwan that is at once about climate change and about the ambitions and self-deceptions of an aging Nobel Prize physicist.
Nomad, by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Knopf, April)
This third memoir-cum-manifesto by a heroic refugee who fled her ordained female role describes her efforts to reconcile her Islamic heritage with her passion for Western values.
Point Omega, by Don DeLillo (Scribner, Feb.)
DeLillo has been our most prophetic novelist, taking on conspiracy theory, cover-ups and 9/11. In this novella, he probes the secret manipulations of American war strategists.
I Know I Am, But What Are You?, by Samantha Bee (Simon Spotlight, April)
Can't wait until September for Jon Stewart, or just a fan of The Daily Show? Either way, pleasure is promised, and more than a few laughs in this memoiristic collection by Canadian trouper Bee. Think David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell.
Absence of Mind, by Marilynne Robinson (Yale University Press, May)
The brilliant American novelist (Housekeeping, Gilead) turns her attention to the science-versus-religion wars, and finds individual consciousness the key to getting past all the rhetoric.
Jane's Fame, by Claire Harman (Holt, March)
Austen wrote six completed novels, each a masterpiece. Harman takes us through her very full afterlife, her seesawing reputation and the current Jane-mania, with its hundreds of hundreds of pale parasitic pastiches – and a few good movies.
Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It, by Anna Lappé (Bloomsbury, March)
Following in the oven mitts of her mother – Frances Moore Lappé wrote the hugely influential Diet for a Small Planet – Anna Lappé proposes ways to help save the Earth by changing radically what we eat and how we produce it.
