Run for cover

>> Spooks, Vietnam vets, Jews with swords and a superstore apocalypse coming at you this fall

“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” So opens The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold’s follow-up to her macabre bestseller, The Lovely Bones. Sebold’s surefire blockbuster represents a definite dark trend for the upcoming fiction season. Here are some other books you’ll be hearing about and seeing reviewed in the next few months.

No danger of anyone killing Nathan Zuckerman so easily. Advance buzz on Exit Ghost, Philip Roth’s latest installment in the life of the lusty, cantankerous anti-hero is good as usual. Failed penis surgery has done little to dampen septuagenarian Zuckerman’s sexual obsessions, just as advanced age has done nothing to slow down Roth’s career.

If Roth is the Barry Bonds of the contemporary novel (as he was recently called in New York Magazine), then Denis Johnson is batting second. Johnson is best known for his white trash tragedy, Jesus’ Son. His long awaited new novel Tree of Smoke, about a Vietnam vet, has been described as a hallucinogenic Heart of Darkness and looks to be a solid bunt into the canon of classic American fiction.

Fans of more restrained suburban satire will be looking out for Tom Perrotta’s follow-up to Little Children. His latest, The Abstinence Teacher, is about a high school teacher forced to teach abstinence as part of his sex ed class. Perrotta looks to be mining some of the old territory he covered in first hit, Election. Needless to say, film rights have been sold.

Unfortunately, there’s no news yet on the film rights to Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road. Serialized last year in The New York Times Magazine, the story is set in 950 A.D and apparently started its life with the working title “Jews With Swords.”

Braindead essayist

For dark absurdist humour, it’s hard to beat George Saunders, who releases a new collection of essays, The Braindead Megaphone. For the more sombre minded, Brother, I’m Dying is a memoir by prodigious and prolific novelist Edwidge Dandicat about growing up in Haiti while her parents lived in Brooklyn.

So far, the most buzzed about new writer comes from the other side of that same Caribbean island. Dominican-born Junot Diaz’s work was recently described in The New York Times as “Mario Vargas Llosa meets ‘Star Trek’ meets David Foster Wallace meets Kanye West.” In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Diaz is said to navigate a story that ranges from Trujillo-era Santo Domingo to contemporary New Jersey.

Way on the other side of the pond, Irish writer William Trevor continues his career as one of the world’s most respected short story writers with a new collection, Cheating at Canasta. Out of Scotland, there’s a new collection of stories from Irvine Welsh, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work, and from London, a new novel by Esther Freud. Best known for Hideous Kinky (and as the daughter of randy Zuckerman-esque British painter Lucian Freud, and great-granddaughter of the founder of psychoanalysis) her sixth novel, Love Falls, is another eccentric coming-of-age-tale, this one set in Siena.

Thieving Corporations

What Canadian book season would be complete without a new release by Douglas Coupland? The Gum Thief is described by its publisher as “the first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore.” Meanwhile, fans of looming apocalypses will no doubt join the growing chorus of praise for William Gibson’s just released thriller, Spook Country.

Mystery fans will be impressed that Toronto native Peter Robinson’s Friend of the Devil just hit number one on the London Times bestseller list last week. For something a little less talked about, look for a new collection by Elyse Friedman, Long Story Short. Her first novel was the impressive and funny Then Again. Her latest includes a coming-of-age novella about a young man and his relationship to a washed up ’80s sitcom star.

As for Canadian non-fiction, perennial political activists Naomi Klein and Maude Barlow dominate the season. Klein was in Montreal last week promoting The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Barlow’s latest, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Fight for the Right to Water is said to be The Inconvenient Truth of water.