by JULIET WATERS

Winter is usually the season people curl up with the books they got (or bought themselves) for Christmas. It’s not usually the season they run out to buy new ones. Thus every year, promising books, especially fiction, get tragically lost in the early-winter slushpile. In an effort to reverse that trend, here’s a list of some to keep an eye out for.

Knopf’s New Face of Fiction, a program that traditionally gambles on fresh talent early in the year, can be a springboard or a graveyard for first books. This year, it celebrates its 10th year with claims of having launched the careers of writers like Yann Martel and Barbara Gowdy. Even so, it’s hard to overcome the perils of the January book launch. The Mirror’s doing its darned best with Neil Smith’s very promising first collection of short stories, Bang Crunch. Look for an update interview with him sometime in the next month.

Doctors appointment

Closer to spring, watch out for an intriguing literary thriller from McGill neurologist Liam Durcan. Garcia’s Heart tells the story of a doctor struggling with his conscience and pressures from a neuro-economics community as he participates in a war crimes trial in the Hague. Doctor/novelists did well last year, as Vincent Lam will be able to testify when he visits Montreal next week to talk about his Giller winner, Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures. Hopefully, Durcan will continue a trend.

No longer a new face but always a welcome one, Barbara Gowdy releases Helpless, another gorgeously creepy novel about obsessive love. Michael Ondaatje probably doesn’t need any more publicity, but it’s worth noting the release of a long-awaited fourth novel, Divisadero, which moves from ’70s northern California to the casinos of Nevada to modern day south-central France. Brad Smith tackles another part of the south in Big Man Coming Down the Road, which pokes fun at the Nashville music industry. Smith’s previous country-noir novel, All Hat, will be coming out as a Canadian feature this year.

From across the ocean, don’t be misled by the homey title of Colm Tóibín’s first book of short stories, Mothers and Sons. The plot summaries suggest some pretty complex versions of that elemental relationship: a son buries his mother and gets wasted at a rave, a mother tries to stay in denial about a son’s criminal activities, while another son goes searching for his mother who is presumed missing in a snow drift in the Pyrenees. Sounds like great post-Christmas reading. Michel Faber follows up his mesmerizing Dickensian tome, The Crimson Petal and the White, with a collection as well. The 17 stories in The Fahrenheit Twins seem to range from futuristic fantasy to meditations on Eminem.

Shark attack

Meanwhile, on the international scene, a couple of new novelists are making waves. Described as Moby Dick meets The Matrix, The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall sounds like a movie waiting to happen. A man wakes up with no memory and the suspicion he’s being pursued by a shark, albeit one that exists only in his psyche. And while the plot of Jane Fallon’s Getting Rid of Matthew sounds suspiciously like chick lit, the fact that she’s the partner of Ricky Gervais (The Office) makes it worth a gamble.

Vendela Vida follows up a great first novel (And Now You Can Go) with a promising second novel. Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name is about a woman who abandons New York for Lapland. A similar theme is explored in reverse for younger fans by Jackie French, whose fabulous slacker classic, Diary of a Wombat, is a household favourite. Rover is a historical novel about a girl and her dog forced to leave her small Greenland village in a boat piloted by the children of Eric the Red.