Literatura: what not to miss in 2009
Set 2666 by Roberto Bolaño
The first big hitter of 2009 is large in every sense: it's a 900-page, five-part epic set in a fictional city on the US-Mexico border where hundreds of young female factory workers have mysteriously disappeared. Bolaño, from Chile, has long been recognised as one of the greats of late 20th- and early 21st-century fiction, but it's only now, five years after his death, that he's getting his full due in the UK. Hailed by the New York Times as "a landmark in what's possible for the novel", this sweeping book makes a triumphant finale to his career.
• Picador, Jan.
Darwin's Island by Steve Jones, Darwin's Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore
The bicentenary of Darwin's birth looks set to spawn a pondful of reassessments. First in is Jones who, not content with updating The Origin of Species, now sets himself the task of looking at the great biologist in his native habitat - the Kent countryside. Meanwhile, Desmond and Moore have turned detective to track down the origins of Darwin's belief in evolution from a common ancestor. They argue that the answer, which they tracked through a lifetime of correspondence, lies in his passionate hatred for the slave trade.
• Both Allen Lane, Jan.
Hackney, That Rose-red Empire by Iain Sinclair
You don't have to live in east London to be a fan of Sinclair. So influential has his "psycho-geography" movement been that you could say we are all psycho-geographers now. His shtick is to regard the cultural and physical history of places as one and the same - in this spirit he has given us a pedestrian's view of modern Britain from the M25, and an impression of the 19th-century poet John Clare based on his walk from a lunatic asylum in Epping Forest back to his home near Peterborough. In a book he describes in typically genre-busting style as "documentary fiction", he recounts the history of the London borough he has lived in for the last 40 years - a hothouse of non-conformism, on the point of being forced into line for the 2012 London Olympics.
• Hamish Hamilton, March.
Journey Into Space by Toby Litt
Having set himself the challenge of working from A-Z with the titles of his books, at the age of 40, Litt has arrived at J. He is one of the most versatile novelists writing today and this 10th novel promises to be purer science fiction than we have seen from him before. It's set aboard a vast spaceship carrying humanity from an exhausted Earth to a new planet many generations away. In this limbo of perpetual travel, people are born, procreate and die, until one day two of them rebel.
• Hamish Hamilton, March.
In the Kitchen by Monica Ali
Ali's Brick Lane was one of the most sensational debuts so far this decade, which achieved the tricky double plaudit of being both longlisted for the Booker and feted by Richard and Judy. After the relative disappointment of her second novel, set in a Portuguese village, all eyes are on this third, which takes her back to her home turf, London. The location this time is a classy international hotel, where a mysterious death in the cellars throws a plumb line down from the cosmopolitan clientele all the way to the shifting population of casual workers on whom their comfortable lives depend.
• Doubleday, April.
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Discerning readers had a soft spot for Mantel decades before she hit the book-club spot with her extraordinary novel of psychics and new-build estates, Beyond Black. In Wolf Hall she returns to a historical strand of writing that has already produced one of the great novels of the French revolution, A Place of Greater Safety. This time, the setting is tudor England, where a petulant Henry VIII is confronted by the ruthless Thomas Cromwell, a blacksmith's son with his eye on the highest office. Expect a compelling and humane investigation of the cost of ambition.
• Fourth Estate, May.
A Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Anyone who has followed Waters's career - from her trilogy of Victorian lesbian romps to her moving, back-to-front account of wartime London - will be desperate to know where she'll take them next. Her latest novel is set in 1940 in rural Warwickshire, where a doctor is called to minister to a patient in a crumbling stately pile with the clock permanently fixed at twenty to nine. Yes, it's a ghost story, and if her previous record is anything to go by, you're unlikely to find a chillier or more haunting one this year.
• Virago, May.
Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
Fans of Hornby's High Fidelity will doubtless be delighted to learn that his next novel takes him back into the music world, though nowhere near the north London of Fever Pitch. His protagonist is a reclusive 80s rock star who is forced out of isolation when the re-release of his most famous album brings him into contact with some of his most passionate fans. Set in America and Lincolnshire, the novel tell the story of two lonely people finding each other across decades and continents.
• Viking, Sept.
Where the Wild Things Are by Dave Eggers
A new book from Eggers is always an event, and here he attempts a novelisation of Maurice Sendak's children's classic Where the Wild Things Are, in a collaboration with the film-maker Spike Jonze. Max is now an eight-year-old with an absent father, an older sister who's leaving home and a mother who has trouble maintaining a work-life balance. Time for poor, troubled Max to take to his boat and head off for the island of the wild things. Being a bit of a wild thing himself - a little bit scary but basically benign - Eggers would seem the perfect custodian for Sendak's uproarious fable. So, let the wild rumpus begin . . .
• Hamish Hamilton, Oct.
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