Chapter and verve

Want to know what not to miss in 2017? takes a look at the best of the new releases hitting bookshop shelves in the next few months.

mystery, though all elements are naturally to be found in ostensibly straight literary novels too.

In January Canongate publishes The Automobile Club of Egypt by Alaa Al Aswany, author of the worldwide bestseller The Yacoubian Building, and in March the same firm will bring out two novels by Ron Rash. There will be crimes there too, but also beauty. There’s no living American novelist I would rather read.

Helen Dunmore is one of the best and most versatile of English novelists today. Birdcage Walk (Hutchinson, March) is a historical novel set in London and Bristol in the 1790s, a time of radical enthusiasm and State repression.

Another historical novel that sounds interesting is The Kingdom by Eugene Carrere (Penguin, March). A couple of years ago Carrere wrote a fascinating biography/ memoir of Limonov, the Russian criminal, punk-poet and would-be revolutionary. This new novel is set in Corinth in the first century AD and the subject is the growth of Christianity from its early beginnings as an underground cult in the Roman Empire.

There is no novel I am looking forward more eagerly to reading than To Die in Spring by a German novelist, Ralf Rothmann, which Picador will publish in May. It’s the story of two young farm boys conscripted into the SS in the last terrible months of the Nazi regime. One German reviewer has called it “a sublime novel of damaged lives and of fathers and sons” – fathers and sons being, of course, the most problematic of relationships in post-war Germany. Another critic claims that “there is nothing comparable in contemporary German literature”.

Bloomsbury is enthusiastic about Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, a novel which begins with the night-time visit of Abraham Lincoln to the grave of