by JULIET WATERS

I can’t say if Jincy Willett’s first novel, Winner of the National Book Award, will actually live up to the expectations of its ballsy title. We’ll have to wait until all those fall book prizes are awarded. But I can guess, after reading an advance copy, that it will be one of fall’s sharpest, funniest novels. Twin sisters living in Rhode Island are both seduced by the same loathsome local writer. Their revenge, and how they got to that point, is both a satire of writers and a classic tale of murder, sex and womanhood in small-town America. Rave reviews from satirists David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs are no surprise

Advance reviews for the latest Martin Amis, Yellow Dog, have not all been raves, and there’s already speculation about his not making the Booker short list. Fellow Brit Tibor Fisher described it as being like “your favourite uncle being caught in the school playground, masturbating.” Other reviews of Amis’s satire of the pornography industry have been glowing, however, with one critic from the Observer theorizing that Fisher, whose own novel is being released the same day, might be pulling a literary prank, acting like a typical, envy-driven Amis character.

Either way, satires of writers are the big trend this month. Garrison Keillor puts aside his usual homespun, small-town Lake Wobegon schtick for Love Me, which draws on his own experiences writing for The New Yorker and as the advice columnist Mr. Blue for Salon.com. Patricia Pearson, granddaughter of Lester B., made big waves this year by quitting her column at the National Post to protest its rabidly pro-American coverage of the war in Iraq. Her first novel, Playing House, has a heroine who works in New York as an editor for The Pithy Review, loosely modelled on The Paris Review. After the first few chapters, however, it morphs into an excellent satire of Toronto. Her character is forced to return to her relatively provincial hometown after getting knocked up by a charming Cape Breton-born jazz musician.

OFF HER KNEES

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s latest book-club epic, The Way the Crow Flies, has nothing to do with writing, or, surprisingly, Cape Breton, the setting of her mega-seller Fall on Your Knees. Set during the Cold War, it’s the story of a young girl growing up on an airforce base in Southern Ontario. Another page-turner that hinges on terrible family secrets, its critique of the U.S. government may spark some controversy with her many Oprah fans. Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts, a novel about a woman whose father turns out to have a secret past as a kamikaze pilot, is also promising, and part of a minor trend in novels about daughters of pilots.

For readers who prefer writers of satire to satires of writers, there’s Career Suicide! Contemporary Literary Humour edited by Jon Paul Fiorentino. Local writers are well represented in this collection, which includes Andy Brown, Robert Allen and Sheri-D Wilson among many.

In non-fiction, look for some promising additions to the annals of Canadian true crime. Missing Sarah is a riveting book by Maggie de Vries about a sister whose DNA was discovered on Robert Pickton’s farm. I Was a Killer for the Hells Angels is the English translation of Quebec journalist Pierre Martineau’s classic. While the American left heats up the attack with Noam Chomsky’s first new book in a decade, Hegemony of Survival and Michael Moore’s follow-up to mega-selling Stupid White Men. Look for him to be touring Canada with Call Me American.

On the lighter side, Save Karyn by Karyn Bosnak is a disarming addition to the confessions-of-a-shopaholic genre. Bosnak was the ditzy genius behind Savekaryn.com, the panhandling Web site she created to get herself out of credit-card debt. In Behind Bars: The Straight-Up Tales of a Big-City Bartender, Ty Wenzel writes about quitting her job as fashion editor at Cosmopolitan to serve Cosmopolitans. After a decade of slinging girl drinks at one of New York’s swankest Bowery bars, she has a theory of how the Cosmopolitan is ruining civilization. This is looking like a positive trend in feminist downward mobility. As autobiographies go, however, it’s going to be pretty hard to beat The Pythons: Autobiography by The Pythons. As in the Flying Circus.