This year was, by virtually all accounts, a big one for fiction: new novels by Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Colm Tóibín, Howard Jacobson and Ali Smith, with the final two appearing on the Man Booker shortlist; at the end, the prize was won by Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan in the year that finally allowed American writers into the competition. There were short-story collections by Hilary Mantel and Rose Tremain, and enormously successful novels in the shape of Jessie Burton’s bestselling debut The Miniaturist and Neel Mukherjee’s second novel The Lives of Others that also found favour with the Booker judges.
So what does 2015 have in store? Among the most eagerly awaited novels of the year are Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, his first for 10 years, to be published in March, Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border, out in April, and, the following month, Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, described as a companion piece to the much-loved Life After Life, and Anne Enright’s The Green Road.
January kicks proceedings off with some pretty compelling narratives. Already published in the States and making its way on to booksellers’ shelves over here is Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (Granta), the second novel from the author of the much-praised, strikingly meditative Leaving the Atocha Station. 10:04 – its title alludes to the moment at which the clock stops in the film Back to the Future, allowing a return to the past – is a similarly interior narrative, focusing on the struggles of the protagonist, a thirtysomething writer based in Brooklyn, to confront the passing of time and the advent of adulthood.
Also out this month are Emily Woof’s The Lightning Tree (Faber), a somewhat different coming-of-age novel with its beginnings in 1980s Newcastle, Adam Thirlwell’s disquietingly riotous take on a crime caper, Lurid & Cute (Jonathan Cape), and The Offering (Sceptre), the third novel from the extraordinarily talented Grace McCleen. And fans of all things theatrical will not want to miss Anthony Quinn’s Curtain Call (Jonathan Cape), which plunges us into the stagedoor shenanigans of 1930s Soho.
Top of many readers’ wishlist will be Andrew O’Hagan’s The Illuminations (Faber), set to land in bookshops in February, which tells the story of a captain in the Royal Western Fusiliers who returns to Scotland from service in Afghanistan; his experiences are set against those of his grandmother, once at the forefront of British documentary photography. Also out in the same month are the second volume of Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years trilogy, which began with last autumn’s Some Luck and will continue the story of the Langdons, an Iowan farming family, in Early Warning (Mantle); and, in the same vein of terrific American female writers, Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto), which also tells a multigenerational family story, this time rooted in Tyler’s native Baltimore. Maybe it’s the year for it: Anne Enright’s The Green Road (Jonathan Cape) is another story of family unfoldings, departures, complications, which begins in County Clare but spreads its wings to encompass New York , Africa and urban Ireland.
March brings with it that Kazuo Ishiguro novel, the first since Never Let Me Go (Nocturnes, five pieces of short fiction with a musical theme, appeared in between). His taste for dystopia appears to have taken hold; The Buried Giant (Faber) is a quest based in a war-ravaged, post-Roman landscape. Another vision of an ancient, pre-industrial Britain appears in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border (Faber), in which a young woman returns to her Lake District home in order to supervise the reintroduction of wolves, which last inhabited the land hundreds of years previously. Other promising novels to look out for include David Vann’s Aquarium (Heinemann), Irvine Welsh’s A Decent Ride (Jonathan Cape), which reprises the adventures of one of his best-loved characters, anarchic taxi-driver Juice Terry, and Amitav Ghosh’s Flood of Fire (John Murray), which completes his acclaimed Ibis trilogy.
Those keen to be in on the ground floor of a new writing career will be delighted with the number of enthusiastically trumpeted debuts on their way, including Emma Hooper’s Etta and Otto and Russell and James (Fig Tree), The Girl in the Red Coat (Faber) by Kate Hamer and Claire Fuller’s Our Endless Numbered Days (Fig Tree). Noticeable, too, are the debut novelists who have previously published well-regarded short stories, among them Lucy Wood, whose first novel is Weathering (Bloomsbury), and Louise Stern, who brings us Ismael and His Sisters (Granta). Perhaps the best known is cult artist, film-maker and writer Miranda July, whose novel The First Bad Man (Canongate) has been described as a mixture of AM Homes and Zoë Heller “suffused in Vonnegut”. What that means precisely remains to be seen, but it certainly sounds intriguing. Happy reading!
