NOT AT THE BOOKSTORES YET

Bestselling memoirist FRANK McCOURT returns with the concluding instalment of his bestselling memoir in the trilogy that started with the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angela’s Ashes (1996) and continued in ’Tis (1999) on November 15, 2005. Teacher Man (Fourth Estate, 2005) focuses on McCourt’s 30-year teaching career in New York City’s public-school system.

PHILIP ROTH will be coming out with a novel entitled Everyman (2006), a story of regret, loss and death, to be published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006.

VIKRAM CHANDRA—whose novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), and short-story collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997), were excellent reads—has written a new novel, a story of organised crime set in modern-day Bombay, India. The new as-yet-untitled novel will be published by HarperCollins in the fall of 2006.

CLARE MORRALL—whose first-published novel, Astonishing Splashes of Colour (2003), was shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize for Fiction—has a new novel as well. It is entitled Natural Flights of the Human Mind, but will only be released on January 16, 2006 under the Sceptre imprint. Her new novel is about a man who lives in a lighthouse, a study in social and emotional isolation.

On February 7, 2006, Scribner will be publishing MAILE MELOY’s second novel. It will called A Family Daughter. If you’ve enjoyed her novel, Liars and Saints (2003) (which was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction), and her story collection, Half in Love (2002), make sure you keep a lookout for her new novel.

Bloomsbury will be publishing ROMESH GUNESEKERA’s new novel, The Match, on March 6, 2006. You will most probably have enjoyed the Colombo-born novelist’s last two novels, Heaven’s Edge (2002) and The Sandglass (1998); a novella, Reef (1994), winner of the 1994 Yorkshire Post Award for Best First Work and shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize for Fiction and the 1994 Guardian Fiction Prize; as well as a collection of stories, Monkfish Moon (1992), which was shortlisted for the 1993 Commonwealth Writers Prize. Read what the acclaimed novelist has to say about why he writes: “The world being what it is, I write to redress the balance, at least in my own mind. I want to keep an inner life alive and, with luck, somebody else’s too. Imaginative writing, to me, is a way of discovering who we are, and what we have to contend with; discovering what is out there, and also what is not there. It enables me to think and explore and make something new with language, while trying to make sense of our lives.”

PETER RUSHFORTH, the author of such novels as Pinkerton’s Sister (2004) and Kindergarten (1979), died on September 25, 2005. His new novel, A Dead Language, will be published by Scribner on April 3, 2006. Kindergarten, his first novel, was the winner of the 1979 Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature.