INTERNATIONAL WORKS NON-FICTION The first thing to note is that publishers in the United States are obsessed with Sept. 11. Books on its aftermath and consequences dominate their fall lists, if not in quality, then certainly in quantity. At BookExpo in New York this spring, one counted more than 60 titles; a glance through new catalogues bumps that number to more than 100. Some of these are instant books, eyewitness accounts by journalists, photographic paeans to the heroism of police and firefighters and the passengers who fought back on doomed Flight 93, or minute-by-minute recountings of the day (and days following). But amid what is sure to be heaps of dross, there do seem a few nuggets of promise.
Rudy Giuliani, roundly disliked by many New Yorkers before Sept. 11, rose to national-hero stature with his conduct in those dire days, making him Time magazine's Person of the Year. In Leadership (Talk Miramax), he puts his streetwise understanding of those events into print in what is sure to be a runaway bestseller. In American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), journalist William Lang- wiesche makes the case that the concerted cleanup effort at ground zero is evidence of how well Americans handle a crisis. Maybe.
More interesting are the efforts from some of the smaller presses, such as the leftish Verso, which has three titles from brainy Europeans, any or all of which could be anything from fascinating analysis to intellectual wankfest. The most prominent name here is the postmodernist philosopher Jean Baudrillard, with The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, which claims that the attacks were as much symbolic as real. No word as to whether it comes with a reader's guide. Yugoslavian theorist Slavoj Zizek weighs in (and we use the phrase advisedly) with Welcome to the Desert of the Real, in which he argues not only that the United States was complicit in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, but that the responses of the left have been grossly inadequate. In Ground Zero, French thinker Paul Virilio paints a gloomy picture of the relationship between Sept. 11 and contemporary values -- a sort of morally rudderless post-humanist dystopia. Sounds like fun.
And since we're once again in an age bedevilled by conspiracies and ideas of conspiracies, what would a season be without a book like An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King (Verso), which claims that King was assassinated by the government. Or how about Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy (Carroll & Graf), in which Gordon Thomas and Martin Dillon argue that the disgraced media mogul didn't fall from his boat, he was pushed by Mossad.
There will be something of a run of books on terrorism and matters Middle Eastern, as well. And there are some big names. Alan Dershowitz, the gadfly lawyer who's written on everything from Judaism to O. J. Simpson, has Why Terrorism Works (Yale University Press), which posits that religious-based terror groups with nuclear or biological weapons are the greatest danger the world faces. Thomas Friedman of The New York Times compiles columns and diary entries for Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); BBC correspondent Jane Corbin offers Al-Qaeda: The Search for the Terror Network That Shook the World (Thunder's Mouth). And if that doesn't scare you, Richard Preston, of The Hot Zone fame, is back with The Demon in the Freezer (Random House), a medical thriller about the possible return of smallpox. For more biological armaggedon, there's Michael Shnayerson and Mark Plotkin's The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug Resistant Bacteria.
But let's assume that you don't want to spend all your reading time being scared witless -- in which case there are plenty of less threatening titles.
Armchair travellers might curl up with Michael Palin's latest globetrotting opus, Sahara (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) or Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (Henry Holt). And Fergus Fleming, whose Barrow's Boys was an unexpected hit, is back with Ninety Degrees North: The Quest for the North Pole (Atlantic Monthly). In Allmylifeforsale (Bloomsbury U.S.), John Freyer recounts how he sold everything he had on eBay and then travelled through the United States, tracking it all down. Then there was the man who found everything. In Finders Keepers (Atlantic Monthly), Mark Bowden ( Black Hawk Down) tells the story of a Philadelphia man who came upon $1-million in unmarked bills from a casino.
Biography buffs seeking good writerly gossip might want to curl up with Roger Lewis's unauthorized Anthony Burgess (Faber & Faber), N. John Hall's Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life (Yale). One of the 20th century's most interesting and enigmatic writers, Bruno Schulz, gets his first biography in Jerzy Ficowski's Regions of the Great Heresy (Norton). Those who enjoyed the bald nastiness of Kenneth Tynan's diaries might find similar fodder in The Unexpurgated Beaton (Orion), the freshly revealed private thoughts of photographer-royal and fashion designer Cecil Beaton. And Brenda Maddox, nimble biographer of W. B. Yeats, gives us Rosalind Franklin and the Discovery of the Double Helix (HarperCollins), the intellectual biography of a woman who died young and whose science is often overlooked.
There doesn't seem to be a great deal of promising social history, but Paul Fussell's Uniforms: Why We are What We Wear (Houghton Mifflin) is sure to be an exception. And no season can be complete without a book or two from Christopher Hitchens. The usually acidulous bad boy of journalism champions one of journalism's very greatest in Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books) and then teams up with (on the right) Christopher Caldwell for Left Hooks, Right Cross: Highlights from a decade of Political Brawling (Thunder's Mouth). FICTION Few of the obvious big guns have new novels this fall, but everyone will be watching the sophomore performances of three exciting writers, two of whom haven't published for some time. It's been 10 years since Donna Tartt's sensational The Secret History, and her fans breathlessly await The Little Friend (Knopf), the tale of a nine-year-old girl trying to solve the murder of her brother. At BookExpo, the big buzz was for Jeffrey Eugenides's ( The Virgin Suicides) Middlesex, which has a teenage hermaphrodite attending a Michigan girls' school in the 1970s. Perhaps not for everyone, but then in the hands of a strong writer . . . The third member of this troika is Zadie Smith, the young Brit who two years ago, at the age of 24, won the Whitbread First Novel Award for White Teeth. Her new novel, The Autograph Man (Penguin), looks at the price of fame.
Among the books we're most looking forward to: Tim O'Brien's July, July (Houghton Mifflin), in which a Minnesota boomer college class of 1969 meets for a 30th anniversary reunion; Robert Coover's The Adventures of Lucky Pierre (Grove Press), an indescribable picaresque novel; and Kathyrn Davis's Versailles (Houghton Mifflin), a historical novel featuring Marie Antoinette.
Also be on the lookout for several works of fiction from Random House U.K.: A. S. Byatt's The Whistling Woman, Irvine Welsh's Porno, Anne Enright's The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and Marina Warner's collection, Murderers I Have Known and Other Stories. Internationally, Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago's The Cave (Harcourt) is about a potter who uncovers a terrible secret, and in Baudolino (Harcourt), Umberto Eco returns to the Middle Ages setting of The Name of the Rose.
Meantime, Maeve Binchy's legion of fans will be lining up for Quentin's (McArthur & Company), while mystery fans can look forward to new works from Ian Rankin -- a story collection titled Beggar's Banquet (Orion) -- and Michael Connelly ( Chasing the Diva, Little Brown), as well as a new Ken Follett Second World War thriller, Hornet Flight (Dutton).
And what would a season be without new work from John Updike ( Seek My Face, Knopf), Gore Vidal ( Creation, Doubleday) and, of course, Joyce Carol Oates ( I'll Take You There, HarperCollins). CANADIAN FICTION The new (and the relatively new): Your Mouth is Lovely (HarperCollins Canada) is Nancy Richler's second novel, but it couldn't be more different from 1996's Throwaway Angels. This is a Russian/Ukrainian family epic spanning the years of revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. Miriam is imprisoned in Siberia for her part in the 1905 uprising, and attempts to make contact with her daughter, who was taken from her at birth, by telling the story of her life, from her outcast years in an impoverished village to the slums of Kiev, where she witnesses the anger that will ultimately lead to the fall of the Tsars.
London-based Canadian Jean McNeil's Private View (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) is set in Shoreditch, a desirable neighbourhood in which gentrification is driving up prices and driving out the artists and writers who live in the area's lofts and apartments. The protagonists are the extremely odd couple Alex and Conrad: Alex is the sole survivor of an airplane crash that impaired her memory and her ability to make art; her roommate is Conrad, a bisexual New Brunswicker who is being eaten by his manias. Finally, they reach a point where they must make some decisions about their lives.
Camilla Gibb's The Petty Details of So-and-So's Life (Doubleday Canada). Blue and Emma Taylor share a sort of telepathic bond, although they are not much alike. And when their father suddenly disappears, they react in completely different ways: Emma sets out in search of a new family; Blue, despite their father's perpetual disparagement, begins a cross-country journey to find him.
Kristen den Hartog's The Perpetual Ending (Knopf Canada,) is her second novel, after the well-received Water Wings. This is the story of Jane and Eugenie Ingrams, mirror-image twins who are exact opposites, two halves of one whole, who are moved from smalltown Ontario to the urban bustle and stink of Toronto when their parents separate. A novel about decisions and consequences.
The Truth About Death and Dying (Doubleday Canada), by Rui Umezawa, is a generational epic following the Hayakawa family of Japan, as war and death play havoc with their lives, moving them to London and, eventually, Toronto, where the many strands of the plot collide with devastating effect.
Writers more or less in mid-career: Helen Humphreys's first two novels, Leaving Earth and Afterimage, were much honoured and awarded. Her third, The Lost Garden (HarperCollins Canada), is a historical fiction, a horticultural mystery and a love story. Gwen Davis is a 35-year-old horticulturalist in London during the Second World War. Eager to get out of the devastation of her beloved city, she joins the Land Army and is put in charge of a group of women who are trying to grow vegetables on a country estate in Devon. There, she discovers a lush but badly overgrown lost garden, and finds solace in restoring it. She also, much to her surprise, discovers love.
David Bergen't third novel, The Case of Lena S., follows the loves of 16-year-old Mason Crowe as he comes of age -- especially his obsession with the enigmatic Lena Schellendal, the smart, funny and sexually provocative daughter of an extremely religious father, who haunts Mason in ways he cannot begin to comprehend.
Terry Griggs's hilarious first novel, The Lusty Man, dealt with the power of love and obsession, and so does Rogues' Wedding (Random House Canada). This one begins in 1898, however, when Griffith Smolders is chased around the bedroom by ball lightning on his wedding night, and decides to take it as an omen. He flees, followed tenaciously by his bride, Avice, who has vowed revenge for the insult.
Gail Anderson-Dargatz, with A Rhinestone Button (Knopf Canada), her fourth book and third novel (her first was the charming and amazingly popular The Cure for Death by Lightning). Job Sunstrum -- who, not incidentally, has a condition that causes him to see sound in colour -- is a young man from an abusive, small town Alberta family. He works as a cook and a farmer until, at the urging of his brother, he dedicates his life to the Lord in the person of Pentecostal preacher Jack Divine. Ironically, the religious life leads Job to love of an earthier nature.
Rabindranath Maharaj's The Book of Ifs and Buts (a lonely island of original fiction in the sea of reprints that is Vintage Canada) is his second collection of stories, and his fourth book (including the novels The Lagahoo's Apprentice and Homer in Flight). Like his prize-winning first collection, The Interloper, these stories deal with the people who emigrate to new lives in strange lands.
In Andrew Pyper's The Trade Mission (HarperCollins Canada), his second novel, dot-com whizkids Marcus Wallace and Jonathon Bates, proprietors of the morality-based decision-making Web site Hypothesys, are kidnapped by bandits while on a trade mission to Brazil. The boat's crew is killed, and the party is thrown into a pit and -- except for one man -- tortured. Then they escape, and must make their ways back to civilization, and make their peace with what they have learned about themselves.
Ann Ireland returns with her third novel, Exile (Dundurn), after A Certain Mr. Takahashi and The Instructor. The narrator is Latin American journalist and poet Carlos Romero Estévez, who escapes political hot water, and his sister-in-law's basement, to become writer-in-exile at a university in Vancouver. There he endures such indignities as a sexual-harassment charge -- "Yes, it is entirely as the young lady has said," he tells the hearing -- and thinking about manual labour.
The Sea Birds, popular writer Marsha Boulton's first novel, is told through the voice of the youngest daughter of the Reverend Norman Mcleod, who in the first half of the 19th century ruled with an iron fist over the Gaelic-speaking Cape Breton community of St. Anns. In 1849, Mcleod, nearly 70 but as tyrannical as ever, received a letter from his long-lost son in Australia, and moved nearly the entire community 12,000 miles to New Zealand. It is said that much of the present-day population of that island is descended from these Scots "Normanites."
The real veterans: Police thriller-writer John Brady, with Wonderland (Orion), continues his wonderful Matt Minogue series, starring the troubled Dublin police inspector of that name. This time, things begin with a vicious double murder in broad daylight, and continue with a schoolgirl's overdose in a public park and gang warfare over drugs.
Eric McCormack's The Dutch Wife (Penguin Canada) begins when the narrator moves into half of a haunted mansion, where he becomes involved in the mysterious ancestry of his neighbour, the aging Professor Thomas Vanderlinden. Determined to uncover the secrets of the two Rowland Vanderlindens who married his mother, Thomas sets off on a search that takes him to a remote island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing (McClelland & Stewart) is set in 19th-century Canada, England and the United States. Charles and Addington Gaunt are searching for their brother, Simon, who has disappeared somewhere in the American West. They hire half-Indian guide Jerry Potts, a troubled man in his own right, and set out into British Canada, picking up a party of eccentric strangers along the way: sycophantic journalist Caleb Ayto; the wise, beautiful and vengeful Lucy Stove- all; Custis Straw, a Civil War veteran seeeking salvation; and saloon-keeper Aloysius Dooley, whose life has become entangled with Straw's.
Then there's D. R. MacDonald's All the Men Are Sleeping (Doubleday Canada). Cape Breton expatriate MacDonald teaches at Stanford University, to which he won a Stegner Fellowship in 1969, and has garnered many U.S. awards for his short fiction. But he only really arrived to the Canadian public with his novel -- incredibly, his first -- Cape Breton Road. These stories, some previously published in his award-inning collection Eyestone, deal with those whose lives -- or ways of life -- are changing incomprehensibly.
A veteran presence, though only a second-time novelist, Rick Salutin presents The Womanizer: A Man of His Time (Doubleday Canada). This is the life of a left-wing economist named Max, whose earliest memories include a stolen kiss -- at the age of 8 -- as defined by women and what he learned from them. This is an ongoing, four-deacde coming-of-age story, as narrated by a reluctant womanizer who seems doomed to repeat his mistakes.
Katherine Govier's Creation (Random House Canada) is her seventh novel. This time she tells the tale of John James Audubon, the dubiously born artist whose mission was to paint every bird in North America from nature. Audubon departs in 1833 with his son and a party of young gentlemen to sail for uncharted nesting grounds in the passage between Newfoundland and Labrador. Fogbound, he meets Royal Navy Captain Henry Wolsey Bayfield, and the aristocratic Bayfield becomes Audubon's confidant, confessor -- and judge.
And of course there's Wayne Johnston, with The Navigator of New York (Knopf Canada), in which young Devlin Stead is raised an orphan in St. John's, Nfld., until a life-altering letter arrives from explorer Dr. Frederick Cook. Devlin heads for New York to meet his destiny: Arctic adventure, urban romance and love.
Joy Fielding doesn't write "literary fiction," whatever that is, but she does write, and sell, a lot of books. In Whispers and Lies (Doubleday Canada), she continues her theme of ordinary people swept up into massive, life-changing events: In this case, Terry Painter is a 40-year-old single woman, a nurse at a Florida nursing home. Then young, vibrant Alison Simms moves into her life, bringing friendship, excitement and a new circle of acquaintances. But soon Terry finds there is a dark side to Alison's life, and that she is inextricably involved in it.
NON-FICTION This fall's Canadian book catalogues have an impressive collection of non-fiction both looking back at our national past and looking forward to our future.
In her debut book, The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die (Macfarlane Walter & Ross), Katherine Ashenburg does a little bit of both. Beginning with her own personal experience -- Ashenburg's 25-year-old daughter lost her fiancé in a car crash months before their wedding -- she explores all aspects of mourning in Canada and around the world.
One of Canada's pre-eminent biographers, Charlotte Gray, returns (her last book, Sisters in the Wilderness, a portrait of Susannah Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail was an enormous critical and popular hit) with a look at the complex and compelling life of poet and performer Pauline Johnson, Flint and Feather: The Life and TImes of E. Pauline Johnson, Tekahionwake (HarperFlamingo Canada).
In the world of politics, commentator and adviser John Duffy looks to our electoral past with his debut, Fights of Our Lives: Elections, Leadership, and the Making of Canada (HarperCollins Canada). Duffy examines five of our country's most critical elections to prove not only that elections matter, but that they are also utterly fascinating.
Then there are the political careers themselves. Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning reviews his own career in Think Big: My Life in Politics (McClelland & Stewart), and Don Martin takes a look at Alberta Premier Ralph Klein in King Ralph (Key Porter).
On an international scale, Romeo Dallaire writes of his own tragic time in Rwanda -- his unforgettable story of going to Africa on a peace mission and returning a broken man on the verge of suicide -- in Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Random House Canada).
Andrew Mitrovica looks at troubles closer to home in Covert Entry: Spies, Lies and Crime Inside Canada's Secret Service (Random House Canada). Stephen Clarkson takes a look at the state of our identity in Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism and the Canadian State (University ofToronto Press). Mel Hurtig questions our independence with The Vanishing Country: Is it Too Late To Save Canada? (McClelland & Stewart).
Daniel Stoffman, co-author (with David Foot) of Boom, Bust, and Echo, this time offers a book that is bound to be controversial. Who Gets In: What's Wrong With Canada's Immigration Program -- And How To Fix It (Macfarlane Walter & Ross) argues that our immigration policy is based on a couple of false premises. On the same topic, Diane Francis has Immigration: The Economic Case (Key Porter).
Mark Kingwell has another collection of essays, Practical Judgments: Essays in Culture, Politics and Interpretation (University of Toronto Press). And Naomi Klein brings together a couple of years of her writing on globalization with Fences and Windows: An Activist Journal from Seattle to Sept. 11 (Vintage Canada).
In time for this year's Remembrance Day, journalist Andrew Clark tells the compelling story of the last execution performed by the Canadian military -- in fact, the only soldier executed by Canadians in the entire Second World War, in all likelihood a wrongful conviction -- in A Keen Soldier: The Execution of Private Harold Joseph Pringle (Knopf Canada). J. L. Granatstein takes a broader look at our military in Canada's Army: Waging War and Keeping the Peace (University of Toronto Press). And Billy Bishop's son tells his own story in Brave Wings: My Story as a Spitfire Pilot in WWII (HarperCollins Canada).
A couple of Globe writers have serious contenders this fall. Sports columist Stephen Brunt has an original take on legendary Muhammad Ali, when he interviews those who have been in the ring against Ali (including a very rare interview with Joe Frazier) for Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In (Knopf Canada). Reporter Stephanie Nolen, whose book on Shakespeare's portrait was just published a couple of months ago, returns with Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race (Penguin Canada), in which she tracks down the surviving members of the "First Astronaut Lady Trainees," a group of women who were secretly trained to become astronauts in the late 1950s, only to have their program mysteriously cancelled despite the fact that many were better at their jobs than their male colleagues.
Julia Nunes and Scott Simmie have a new and different book about mental illness. In their first work, they detailed Simmie's breakdown and the rebuilding of their lives after he was diagnosed with an illness. In Beyond Crazy: Journeys Through Mental Illness(McClelland & Stewart), they bring together stories of all sorts of Canadians (including Michael Wilson, Scott Thompson and Margot Kidder) whose lives have been affected by mental illness.
In time for the film festivals, Michael Ondaatje brings us The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film (Vintage Canada), an inside look at how a film is put together. Patricia Phenix, who earlier chronicled the last days of Russian Grand Duchess Olga Romanov, turns her eye to one of our own imperial families in her family and social history, Eatonians: The Story of the Family Behind the Family (McClelland & Stewart).
For jazz fans, Geoffrey Hayden looks at a one-time Toronto concert that hosted the only joint appearance of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Max Roach and Charlie Mingus in Quintet of the Year (Macfarlane Walter & Ross). Also on the musical front, Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (Doubleday Canada) has a glorious selection of potraits of the piano man, some of them never before published.
Where would Canadian writing be without a sense of place? Alan Morantz re-addresses the infamous Northrop Frye question in Where is Here? Canada's Maps and the Stories They Tell (Penguin Canada), as he looks what maps tell us about ourselves. Rick Archbold looks at the sometimes turbulent history and cultural significance of our flag in I Stand for Canada: The Story of the Maple Leaf Flag (Macfarlane Walter & Ross).
A few writers weigh in from the water. Jake McDonald contemplates the country from his houseboat in Houseboat Chronicles: Notes From a Life in Shield Country (McClelland & Stewart). Diane Stuemer ventures around the world in a 40-year-old boat with her family and about six afternoons of sailing background in The Voyage of the Northern Magic: A Family Odyssey (McClelland & Stewart). Derek Lundy, a lawyer and amateur sailor, whose earlier book Godforsaken Sea was a big bestseller, re-creates the square-rigger voyage around Cape Horn that his great-great uncle took a century ago for The Way of the Ship: A Square-Rigger Voyage in the Last Days of Sail (Knopf Canada). Alexandra Pratt retraces the historical journey that widow Mina Hubbard took across Labrador, to finish her late husband's trip, for Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories (HarperFlamingo Canada). Roy MacGregor sticks to the land in his exploration of the wilderness in Canada for Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada (McClelland & Stewart). Poet David Zieroth writes about growing up poor on a Manitoba farm, with vignettes observed in the world around him (a calf struck by lightning, being snowbound), and reflections on memory itself, in The Education of Mr. Whippoorwill (Macfarlane Walter & Ross).
There's a new collection of letters by Robertson Davies -- Discoveries: Letters 1938-1975 (McClelland & Stewart). Paul and Audrey Grescoe have collected all sorts of personal letters from Canadians including Stephen Leacock, to Sir Sanford Fleming and Joey Smallwood for The Book of Letters: 150 Years of Private Canadian Correspondence (Macfarlane Walter & Ross). There's also a book of tributes from fans and friends of the late Peter Gzowski called, simply Remembering Peter Gzowski (McClelland & Stewart). And finally, Hal Niedzviecki and Darren Wershler-Henry make light of the Farmer's Almanac in The Original Canadian City Dweller's Almanac (McClelland & Stewart).