Booking ahead

Publishers make a push for paper with new
titles from McEwan, Amis, Martel & more

by JULIET WATERS

“Books? You mean those paper things.” It’s still a little early to imagine this kind of conversation. But with the deafening buzz about a rumoured March release for the Apple Tablet, it’s hard not to get a little cyberstruck. A year from now, when you’re lying in bed with your sexy hand-held multi-media machine trying to decide whether to watch a movie, read the Mirror or flip through the new Jonathan Franzen novel, remember that I first imagined you doing that here.

If this is the last season publishers push the paper things, at least it’s looking to be mostly a good one. Skip the early sacrificial duds, Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) and Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell (Julie & Julia). The first sounds like a disappointing attempt at the sociology of marriage, and the second sounds like an icky attempt at turning S&M into the new French cooking. If you’re craving memoir, my money is on Patti Smith’s Just Kids.

Strangely, it seems to be men who are writing the better books about marriage this month. I loved Joshua Ferris’s first novel Then We Came to the End, and early reviews of his second, The Unnamed, about a marriage tested by mental illness, are solid. With The Privileges, Jonathan Dee is getting a lot of favourable comparisons to Franzen. This should hold Franzen fans over until the fall, when he finally releases Freedom, his follow-up to The Corrections.

Martel, Pullman, Amis

We won’t have to wait that long for Yann Martel’s long-awaited Beatrice & Virgil. From what Martel says, this allegory for the Holocaust should be out by April. I’m reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy right now, so I’m excited about his long-awaited novel The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, an anti-Christian retelling of the Bible.

In February, Martin Amis releases The Pregnant Widow, a novel set in the ’70s, which, according to Amis in The Guardian, “is a very feminist book.” Continuing a trend in British male novelists concerned with feminism, Ian McEwan releases Solar, about a physicist who derails his career by suggesting that women are innately less intelligent than men. And just in case you think this is a British thing, Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club) releases his new book Tell All, based on the life of Lillian Hellmann. Honest, I’m not making this up.

A couple of interesting new releases by Canadian authors: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, best known for Down to This his memoir of living in Toronto’s Tent City, publishes his first novel, Ghosted, about a down-and-out writer who decides to make a career out of ghost-writing suicide notes. And Nigerian-Canadian ex-pat Carole Enahoro has written a promising dark comedy about disaster capitalism called Doing Dangerously Well.

Because we can never get enough about disaster capitalism, I also recommend Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market by Janine R. Wedel. Readers swept up in the latest craze for neuropsychology will appreciate the recently released Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention from French consciousness studies wunderkind Stanislas Dehaene. Or buy it for your science nerd partner. Not your usual Valentine’s day present, but still cheaper than an Apple Tablet, for now.