THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS

On the back of the success of his debut novel, The Sympathiser, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among a host of other prizes, Viet Thanh Nguyen will publish a collection of short stories in February. Born in Vietnam in 1971, Nguyen came to the US with his family when they fled their homeland after the North Vietnamese took Saigon in 1975. Drawing on that experience, the stories in The

Refugees move back and forth from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City, telling the stories of people displaced by the war and making their lives anew. Several big-name American novelists have new books out in the early months of the year, including Paul Auster, who turns 70 this year. A once iconoclastic writer turned grand old man of literature, Auster hasn’t published a novel in seven years. But 4321, due at the end of January, is already being described as a “tour de force”. George Saunders, a writer’s writer known for his brilliant short stories, has finally written a novel. Coming in February, Lincoln in the Bardo is an unconventional historical novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln’s 11-year-old son. A number of writers have turned to Greek tragedy as inspirations for new novels, including Kamila Shamsie, whose Home Fire, out in August, retells Antigone as a story of two British Muslim families in contemporary London. Hitting the shelves later this month, award-winning journalist Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark unveil “the extraordinary inside story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the years after 9/11” in The

Exile—which draws on first-person testimony from bin Laden’s family and closest aides to unpack mysteries from Abbottabad to the rise of the Islamic State. A number of books mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, but one of the most intriguing is October by China Miéville—a writer much admired for his science fiction. Miéville’s book is out in May. And though the new year has only just started, appetites are already being whetted for Hit Refresh, the autobiography Satya Nadella, the Indian-born CEO of Microsoft, out in November.