Raking in the lit

>> From the Big Apple to the Amazon, books to curl up with as the air gets crisp

by JULIET WATERS

Here are some titles that will probably find themselves in the Mirror books section in the next few months:

With his first novel, Lost Girls, Andrew Pyper burst onto the international literary scene like the secret love child of Alice Munro and Stephen King. In his follow-up novel he moves his meticulously composed psychological suspense from Northern Ontario to the Amazon jungle. The Trade Mission, a story about a pair of Web designers who are kidnapped while on an eco-tour up the Rio Negro, sounds like a Heart of Darkness for the dot-com generation.

Wayne Johnston took New York by surprise a few years ago when his fictional biography of Newfie premier Joey Smallwood landed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Now he returns with The Navigator of New York, which fictionalizes the race between Peary and Cook to reach the North Pole at the beginning of the 20th century.

With The Cure for Death by Lightning and A Recipe for Bees, Gail Anderson Dargatz made a nice home for herself on the Canadian bestseller list. Now she’s back with another book that showcases her impressive talent for imagery. A Rhinestone Button is the story of a man with synesthesia, the phenomenon of seeing sound as colour.

Alan Furst has quietly established himself as an American version of Graham Greene. His noir-ish, sophisticated spy stories are set in the Europe of the ’30s and ’40s and always involve a deep moral dilemma and a compelling plot. The Blood of Victory is set in Paris with a suitably nicotine-addicted set of characters.

Now that his cult classic Fight Club has been made into a video store classic, Chuck Palahniuk has a hard act to follow. But his latest apocalyptic thriller, Lullaby, the story of an involuntary baby killer, looks interesting.

The jury is hung on whether or not Gwyneth Paltrow has done A.S Byatt any favours in the recent film version of Possession. In the meantime the Booker Prize winner returns with the final installment of her “Frederica quartet,” which depicts the forces in British life between the ’50s and ’70s. In A Whistling Woman, Frederica falls by accident into a career in television while “tumultuous events” at home threaten to change a lot of lives.

Val McDermid is finally getting the respect she deserves with a new British TV series and a recent surge of readership in North America. The Last Temptation is the third installment of the mystery series featuring Tony Strong, a sexually dysfunctional profiler of serial killers.

Activists and autumnal achings
You’d think Jonathan Franzen might have gotten enough alone time last year after he dissed Oprah. Apparently not, according to his first book of essays How to Be Alone. Subjects range from “super-max” prisons and Alzheimer’s disease to his own experience as an Oprah anointed.

Salman Rushdie also sounds a little testy with the title of his newest collection of non-fiction. Step Across This Line includes his thoughts on The Wizard of Oz, U2, boundary issues, and 50 years of Indian writing.

Naomi Klein, Canadian poster girl for international activism, collects her most recent columns and articles in Fences and Windows. Hometown troublemakers Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith will be touring the world with The Vice Guide to Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, which will include favourite classics: “Interview With a Foreskin,” “Lost in Uranus,” “Confessions of a Serial Killer” and “The Vice Guide to Nonprescription Drugs.” And for the back-to-school crowd, childhood expert Barbara Coloroso will be in town to talk about The Bully, Bullied and the Bystander.

If the fall leaves start bringing out the romantic in you, I Can’t Fight This Feeling: Timeless poems for lovers from the pop hits of the ’70s and ’80s, with a foreword by Fred Schneider, should cure that pretty fast. But if you’re not trying to fight that feeling, check out the launch of Montreal poet Jon Paul Fiorentino’s latest, Resume Drowning at the Jupiter Room (3872 St-Laurent), this Sunday, Sept. 15, at 8 p.m. :

>> Cool comics to look for this autumn