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>> Suburban families, disaffected youth, drugs and murder all make up fall's literary tapestry

by JULIET WATERS

When it comes to book releases in Canada, it doesn't get much bigger than a new collection of short stories by Alice Munro. Her last collection won the biggest prize in the U.S., the National Critics Circle Award, though it lost the Governor General's Award. Bets are now being placed on whether Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship and Marriage will win the Nobel, and whether she'll win the Giller, or the G.G. or be the first writer to achieve a literary grand slam.

A few books that will probably be on the short list along with hers include: Losing It, by Alan Cumyn, described as a "blend of satire and the dark near-devastation of a suburban family, reminiscent of American Beauty"; River Thieves, the first novel by Newfoundland poet Michael Crummey, which tells the story of a family of 19th-century Newfoundland settlers and their war with the near extinct Beothuk Indians; and Life of Pi, by Montreal novelist Yann Martel, who follows up the mixed success of his first novel Self with this very intriguing novel set in India.

From Salman Rushdie there's a new novel, Fury, that sounds like the most autobiographical work he's ever written. Advance reviews are lukewarm, so wait before rushing out to buy it. I'm more optimistic about Booker Nominee Michael Collins' The Resurrectionists just from this description: "a searing new novel... set in the frozen wastes of North America, Collins brings his serrated-edge prose to a story of the unquiet dead. Blackly comic and alluringly chilly."

Also many, many great reviews have been written in the U.K. and in the U.S. about Helen Simpson's Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (released in the U.S. for some weird reason as Getting a Life), comparing her to the brilliant and hilarious American writer Lorrie Moore.

Art, adolescence and Americana

Canadian ex-pat Jean McNeil publishes her second novel, Private View, an edgy satire of the new young London art world. Maybe there's a character based on Matthew Collings, the extremely quirky but infectious BBC art critic who will be giving us his take on modern culture with Hello Culture!

In White Trash, John King does to London disaffected youth what Irvine Welsh did to Scottish disaffected youth in Trainspotting, although apparently with more of a thriller edge. Fans of vintage British squalor may also want to keep an eye out for Smoking in Bed, conversations with storyteller extraordinaire Bruce Robinson, director of Withnail and I and author of The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman.

From south of the border, Synthetic Bi-Products by Sparrow L. Patterson is the American disaffected youth narrative. Set in the mall culture of the early '90s, it brings back the grunge days with a bang and a memorable bisexual girl narrator. All this can be put in context with the Pursuit of Oblivion: A History of Narcotics by Richard Davenport Hines--it's billed as the first truly comprehensive and international history of narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens.

And for fans of ambitious American literary epics, Jonathan Franzen is being compared to Don Dellilo (and praised by Dellilo) for The Corrections, a novel that stretches from the mid-century mid-west to Eastern Europe and is described as being about the "swarming consciousness" of one American family.

Looks like a great season for mystery fans. Peter Robinson, who's been compared to P.D. James and has won just about every major crime writing award in English and French (Edgar, Arthur Ellis, Grand Prix de Littérature Policière) comes out with his 11th Inspector Banks novel, Aftermath. It opens with a chilling scene in which a teenage torture victim is discovered, a cop is killed with a machete and his partner, a female rookie, beats the murderer to death. A Spy's Life by Henry Porter, the British editor of Vanity Fair, splices some of the old-fashioned Cold War thriller with the more ruthless forces of modern espionage. And on the lighter side, Liz Evans, England's answer to Janet Evanovich, comes out with another Grace Smith mystery, Barking.