Literary Highlights of 2008

A VERITABLE SMORGASBORD of literary delights to usher in the new year. Literary heavyweights Martin Amis, Sebastian Barry, Peter Carey, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, James Meek, Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushdie and Tim Winton are all back with new novels. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Jhumpa Lahiri has a new collection of stories called Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). Lahiri, of course, is the author of Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and The Namesake (2003). Annie Proulx has one, too: Fine Just the Way It Is (Simon & Schuster, 2008). The most recent Man Booker Prize-winner Anne Enright has a new collection stories out: Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008). I am really looking forward to reading Manil Suri’s The Age of Shiva (W.W. Norton, 2008) after enjoying his first novel, The Death of Vishnu (W.W. Norton, 2001). There are two Malaysian writers making their débuts: Preeta Samarasan’s Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2008) and Chiew-Siah Tei’s Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008). John Banville is back in his other incarnation as crime novelist Benjamin Black. Louise Dean, the author of Becoming Strangers and This Human Reason, is also back with The Idea of Love (Fig Tree, 2008) sometime in the middle of 2008. It is interesting to imagine that we have found our 2008 Booker Prize for Fiction winner among these new books?

From Martin Amis and Paul Auster to Gerard Woodward and Adam Zagajewski, from novels and short-story collections to poetry and nonfiction, these are just some of the good stuff coming our way in 2008.

Novels
1. The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / Peter Ackroyd
2. Pregnant Widow (Random House, 2008) / Martin Amis
3. Man in the Dark (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Paul Auster
4. The Pages (Text, 2008) / Murray Bail
5. The Secret Scripture (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Sebastian Barry
6. A Partisan’s Daughter (Harvill Secker, 2008) / Louis de Bernières
7. The Retreat (McClelland & Stewart, 2008) / David Bergen
8. The Silver Swan (Henry Holt, 2008) / Benjamin Black
9. Skeletons at the Feast (Shaye Areheart, 2008) / Chris Bohjalian
10. People of the Book (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Geraldine Brooks
11. Morality Tale (Counterpoint/Picador, 2008) / Sylvia Brownrigg
12. His Illegal Self (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Peter Carey
13. Amenable Women (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Mavis Cheek
14. A Person of Interest (Viking, 2008) / Susan Choi
15. The Idea of Love (Penguin/Fig Tree, 2008) / Louise Dean
16. Being Emily (Canongate, 2008) / Anne Donovan
17. The Room of Lost Things (Virago, 2008) / Stella Duffy
18. Counting the Stars (Fig Tree, 2008) / Helen Dunmore
19. So Brave, Young, and Handsome (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008) / Leif Enger
20. The Plague of Doves (Harper, 2008) / Louise Erdrich
21. Cathedral of the Sea (trans. from the Spanish, La Catedral del Mar, by Nick Caistor) (Doubleday, 2008) / Ildefonso Falcones
22. Imposters (Atlantic, 2008) / Damon Galgut
23. Sea of Poppies (John Murray, 2008) / Amitav Ghosh
24. Everything I Knew (Penguin, 2008) / Peter Goldsworthy
25. The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago/Little, Brown, 2008) / Linda Grant
26. The Story of a Marriage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Andrew Sean Greer
27. The Believers (Henry Holt, 2008) / Zoë Heller
28. The Northern Clemency (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Philip Hensher
29. The Third Angel (Shaye Areheart, 2008) / Alice Hoffman
30. The Sorrows of an American (Henry Holt/Sceptre, 2008) / Siri Hustvedt
31. Wolf Totem (trans. from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt) (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) / Jiang Rong
32. Wakening (Portobello, 2008) / Derek Johns
33. Kieron Smith, Boy (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) / James Kelman
34. Something to Tell You (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Hanif Kureishi
35. Alfred and Emily (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Doris Lessing
36. I Play the Drums in a Band Called Okay (Hamish Hamilton, 2008) / Toby Litt
37. The House on Fortune Street (HarperCollins, 2008) / Margot Livesey
38. Deaf Sentence (Harvill Secker, 2008) / David Lodge
39. Beijing Coma (trans. from the Chinese by Flora Drew) (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / Ma Jian
40 . A Quiet Adjustment (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Benjamin Markovits
41. Trauma (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Patrick McGrath
42. We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (Canongate, 2008) / James Meek
43. Her Three Wise Men (Hutchinson, 2008) / Stanley Middleton
44. The Senator’s Wife (Random House, 2008) / Sue Miller
45. The Language of Others (Sceptre, 2008) / Clare Morrall
46. Out of Breath (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Julie Myerson
47. Serious Things (Sceptre, 2008) / Gregory Norminton
48. The Truth Commissioner (Bloomsbury, 2008) / David Park
49. Daphne (Bloomsbury, 2008) / Justine Picardie
50. Lush Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Richard Price
51. Goldengrove (Harper/HarperCollins, 2008) / Francine Prose
52. The Enchantress of Florence (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Salman Rushdie
53. Homecoming (trans. from the German by Michael Henry Heim) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008) / Bernhard Schlink
54. The Butt (Bloomsbury, 2008) / Will Self
55. If Wishes Were Horses (Little, Brown, 2008) / Gillian Slovo
56. Willing (Ecco, 2008) / Scott Spencer
57. More Than It Hurts You (Dutton, 2008) / Darin Strauss
58. The Age of Shiva (W.W. Norton, 2008) / Manil Suri
59. A Mercy (2008) / Toni Morrison
60. Breath (Picador, 2008) / Tim Winton
61. The Ten-Year Nap (Riverhead, 2008) / Meg Wolitzer

First Novels
1. The White Tiger (Atlantic, 2008) / Aravind Adiga
2. Attachment (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / Isabel Fonseca
3. A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Mohammed Hanif
4. Crusaders (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Richard T. Kelly
5. God’s Own Country (Viking, 2008) / Ross Raisin
6. Evening Is the Whole Day (Fourth Estate/HarperCollins, 2008) / Preeta Samarasan
7. Little Hut of Leaping Fishes (Picador, 2008) / Chiew-Siah Tei
8. Road from Damascus (Penguin/Hamish Hamilton, 2008) / Robin Yassin-Kassab

Stories
1. The Japanese Wife (HarperCollins India, 2008) / Kunal Basu
2. Taking Pictures (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Anne Enright
3. My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, from Chekhov to Munro (Harper, 2008) / Jeffrey Eugenides (ed.)
4. Unaccustomed Earth (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Jhumpa Lahiri
5. Dangerous Laughter: 13 Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Steven Millhauser
6. The Collected Stories (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Lorrie Moore
7. Fine Just the Way It Is (Simon & Schuster, 2008) / Annie Proulx
8. Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Tobias Wolff
9. Caravan Thieves (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / Gerard Woodward

Poetry
1. Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Frank Bidart
2. New Collected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2008) / Eavan Boland
3. Singing in the Dark (Carcanet, 2008) / Alison Brackenbury
4. Two Cures for Love: Selected Poems 1979-2006 (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Wendy Cope
5. Everything Else in the World (W.W. Norton, 2008) / Stephen Dunn
6. Song & Dance (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / John Fuller
7. Sea Change (Ecco, 2008) / Jorie Graham
8. Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems New and Selected (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / August Kleinzahler
9. Fidelity (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Grace Paley
10. That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008) / Charles Simic
11. Eternal Enemies (trans. from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh) (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008) / Adam Zagajewski

Nonfiction
1. Poe: A Life Cut Short (Chatto & Windus, 2008) / Peter Ackroyd
2. The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Martin Amis
3. The Sum of Our Days (Harper, 2008) / Isabel Allende
4. Somewhere Towards the End (Granta, 2008) / Diana Athill
5. Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography (Fourth Estate, 2008) / J.G. Ballard
6. Nothing to be Frightened of (Jonathan Cape, 2008) / Julian Barnes
7. A Wolf at the Table (St. Martin’s Press, 2008) / Augusten Burroughs
8. Clearing a Space: India, Literature, and Culture (Peter Lang, 2008) / Amit Chaudhuri
9. The Collected Prose of Robert Frost (ed. Mark Richardson) (Harvard University Press, 2008) / Robert Frost
10. While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family (Random House, 2008) / Kathryn Harrison
11. The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008) / Pico Iyer
12. The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza (Vermilion, 2008) / Oliver James
13. The Library at Night (Yale University Press, 2008) / Alberto Manguel
14. Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature (Faber & Faber, 2008) / John Mullan
15. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (trans. from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel) (Harvill Secker, 2008) / Haruki Murakami
16. The Atlantic Ocean (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Andrew O’Hagan
17. The Secret Life of Poems (Faber & Faber, 2008) / Tom Paulin
18. Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir (Simon & Schuster, 2008) / David Reiff
19. What Rhymes with Bastard? (Fourth Estate, 2008) / Linda Robertson
20. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: 28,000 Miles in Search of the Railway Bazaar (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) / Paul Theroux