Already available – but only if you read Japanese: Murakami’s latest
The festive season is big business for bookstores, but the latest bestsellers and award-winners are old news for publishers. With manuscripts bid for, bought and moulded months, even years ahead of publication, publishers’ lists read like forecasts into our reading future.
Here’s what to look out for in 2014.
Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
Haruki Murakami
Publishers tend to bet on short odds and there’s nothing more certain than a new Haruki Murakami book selling faster than sparklers on New Year’s. When the cult author’s latest book, Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, was released in his native Japan last year it was met with fanfare akin to lining up all night for rock concert tickets. Fans reportedly lined up overnight to get their hands on his latest. Authors don’t usually incite that kind of hype and they also don’t usually sell a million copies in the first six months. Murakami does. Expect the impending release of the English translation by Random House to ensure this is one of the most talked about books of the year.
Nora Webster
Colm Tóibín.
While the furor surrounding the opening of the Man Booker Prize up to all English language authors continues, Irish writer Colm Tóibín is already being tipped to keep the prize out of Yankee hands come 2015.
Having already been shortlisted in 1999, (The Blackwater Lightship), 2004 (The Master) and 2013 (The Testament of Mary), Tóibín’s story of Nora Webster, a woman overcoming the death of her husband with two young sons in 1960s Ireland, is being aimed straight for the judges’ eyes. At least this is what The Economist predicts, forecasting that its October 2014 publication, despite already being finished, will make it the top runner for the 2015 Booker.
Also, it’s a partial sequel to Brooklyn, and as Hilary Mantel has proven with Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies, judges like sequels just as much as movie studios.
Frog Music
Emma Donoghue
Another Irish writer with an interest in the Booker is Emma Donoghue. The author’s 2010 worldwide bestseller, Room was shortlisted for the prestigious award and like that book, which was based on the shocking Fritzl case, her 2014 offering fictionalises an actual event – the unsolved murder of a woman in 1876 San Francisco.
According to the publisher’s brief, ‘In thrilling, cinematic style, Frog Music digs up a long-forgotten, never-solved crime. Full of songs that migrated across the world, Emma Donoghue’s lyrical tale of love and bloodshed among lowlifes captures the pulse of a boomtown like no other.’
Based on the success of Room, Frog Music will at least be a boom for Donoghue’s publishers.
Lila
Marilynne Robinson
In 1980 Robinson’s Housekeeping won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer. It was 24 years until she released her next novel, Gilead (2004) and another four for her follow-up, Home (2008). Though she’s not exactly prolific, Robinson is revered for her novels, non-fiction titles, essay and as a teacher at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop, so there’s undoubtedly many awaiting the release of Lila, especially considering Gilead won the Pulitzer in 2005 and Home the Orange Prize (now sponsored by a booze company). Lila is set in the same world as her previous award-winners and follows the wife of Reverend John Ames, the focus of Gilead and like Home is a companion to her 2004 work.
Glow
Ned Beauman
Once a decade literary mag Granta names its Best of Young British Writers. At 28 Ned Beauman was the youngest. His debut, Boxer, Beetle won the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction and the Writers’ Guild Award for Best Fiction Book, while his second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was longlisted for the Booker in 2012.
Though some deride Beauman as an arrogant prat, his inclusion on the Granta list alongside the likes of Zadie Smith and his genre-morphing, whimsical yet restrained postmodernism makes his third title hotly anticipated.
Terms and Conditions
Robert Glancy
Next year’s Hannah Kent may be New Zealand author Robert Glancy. Like Burial Rites, the manuscript for Terms and Conditions sparked an international bidding war, with Bloomsbury eventually triumphing after surrendering six figures for a two-book deal.
Spotted with footnotes, this comedic story of a lawyer who loses his memory after a car crash and has to put his life back together (and doesn’t particularly like what he finds), will be interesting to see if it lives up to expectations.
Mrs Hemingway
Naomi Wood
One for the literary geeks who want to know (or imagine) more about the four women who gravitated towards the greatest writer of his generation, Naomi Wood’s novel follows Hadley, Pauline, Martha and Mary as they wrestle with Hemingway’s heart.
Meticulously researched, Mrs Hemingway features real love-letters and telegrams and traverses the Paris of The Lost Generation in the 1920s to Cold War America in the 1960s.
It’s an interesting sophomore premise for Woods, whose debut The Godless Boys was set in an alternate England strangled by the church, with God cast as the villain.
Foreign Soil
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2013, slam poetry champion Maxine Beneba Clarke’s book of short stories is set to be published by Hachette Australia in May 2014.
If you’ve ever seen Clarke perform slam poetry, count yourself lucky, but hearing her read an extract from Foreign Soil when it won the aforementioned award, the audience was presented with a poignant, contemporary story memorable for its deft innocence.
For those who can’t wait Clarke is also the author of two books of poetry, Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2009) and Nothing Here Needs Fixing (Picaro Press, 2013).
