Glance even for just a moment at the nonfiction lists for the first half of 2018, and the trends all but leap from the shelf. One can, for instance, see immediately that the three S’s – spies, suffragettes and Mary Shelley – are going to be a thing next year; ditto essays, a form, newly invigorated, that perhaps connects more than most with our frenzied and confused times. But while publishers continue to indulge the trend for books about reading, they seem to be tiring both of nature writing and traditional biographies (though the juggernaut that is memoir rolls noisily on).
To take the three S’s first. Next year marks the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave women (though only those who were householders and older than 30) the vote. Two excellent books explore the movement that fought so fearlessly to achieve this: Hearts and Minds by Jane Robinson (Doubleday, January) and Rise Up Women! by Diane Atkinson (Bloomsbury, February). It’s also the 200th anniversary of the publication of Frankenstein, and by way of celebration the poet Fiona Sampson has written an inspired new life of its author, In Search of Mary Shelley (Profile, January) – though readers already familiar with her story may prefer Kathryn Harkup’s quirkier Making the Monster: The Science Behind Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Bloomsbury, February), which explores the historical context in which the novel was written.
Finally, in 2018 two writers will reinvestigate the Cambridge spies with the help of recently released papers. First up is Richard Davenport-Hines with Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain (William Collins, January). He will be closely followed by Roland Philipps, whose new life of Donald Maclean has the intriguing title A Spy Named Orphan (The Bodley Head, April).
Some big names have essay collections out next year, among them Lorrie Moore (See What Can Be Done, Faber, May), Zadie Smith (Feel Free, Hamish Hamilton, February) and Graham Swift (Making an Elephant, Scribner, January). All of these books, though, will contain work that, however dazzling, has already appeared elsewhere. For words that will come to most of us as entirely new, then, let us turn instead to Dear Zealots: Letters from a Divided Land (Chatto, April) by the great Israeli writer, Amos Oz – a book that, as his friend David Grossman puts it, depicts (among other things) one man’s struggle to maintain his remarkable sense of perspective in the face of chaos. Though the American writer Leslie Jamison is best known for her essays, her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and its Aftermath (Granta, May), combines memoir, biography and criticism to build a narrative that aims to take us inside the experience of addiction. It comes with advance praise from Andrew Solomon and Stephen King.
There are two biographies that I’m looking forward to. The first is In Byron’s Wake (Simon & Schuster, March), Miranda Seymour’s account of the lives of the poet’s wife, Annabella Milbanke, and daughter, Ada Lovelace. We know quite a lot about Lovelace, of course (she wrote what many consider to be the first computer algorithm); but in this book, Seymour will draw on new material to reveal the extent to which Byron, dead at 36, shaped the lives of both women. The second is The Monk of Mokha (Hamish Hamilton, January) by Dave Eggers, which tells the story of a Yemeni American, Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee brewing, only to find himself trapped in Sana’a as civil war breaks out. Eggers’s narrative is guaranteed to be every bit as compelling as that of any novel.
I’m excited, too, by the prospect of Michelle Dean’s Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion (Fleet, May); among her 10 subjects are Hannah Arendt, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy and Janet Malcolm.
Science publishing continues to go from strength to strength, its titles ever more relevant and alluring: I like the sound of The Genius Within: Smart Pills, Brain Hacks and Adventures in Intelligence (Picador, February) by David Adam, which is, as its subtitle suggests, about cognitive enhancement; and of Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures (Bloomsbury, February) by Roma Agrawal, an award-winning young engineer who once worked on the Shard.
Being unable to resist what people sometimes call psychogeography, I’m also eager to read The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England (Picador, February) by the ever brilliant Graham Robb; and Yorkshire: A Lyrical History of England’s Greatest County (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, January) by Richard Morris, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of Huddersfield – though I hope his account of (I’m biased) the best place on Earth will turn out to be weird as well as poetic. Finally, our old friend nature writing. As an owl lover of 40 years standing, my pick is Miriam Darlington’s Owl Sense (Guardian Faber, February), in which the author of Otter Country aims to tell us exactly what we would see were it possible for us to follow these birds as they slice noiselessly through the night sky. Even thinking about it sends shivers up my spine. Twit twoo – and happy reading.
