Exciting prospects for 2014
Works slated to hit shelves in first half of the year
Even though following contemporary literature can feel like a game of perpetual catch-up, few at this time of year can resist the temptation to peek over the precipice to what the next year might hold. Herewith, then, is a selective cross-section of some of 2014’s more enticing prospects.
Bear in mind that listing books that are yet to be published is an inexact science. For that reason, I’ve resisted being too specific about when these titles will hit the shelves, though as of this writing nearly all of them are slotted for some time in the first half of the year.
It hardly feels like seven years since Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals won CBC’s Canada Reads and took up near-permanent residency on the bestseller lists, but it has been. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, if the few available details are any indication, looks like another quintessentially Montreal tale fit to succeed the gritty-lyrical Lullabies, with a Main-set plot centring on the twin daughters of a prominent Québécois folksinger/miscreant. It’s set for publication in early May.
Knopf Canada’s annual New Face of Fiction is an imprimatur with a trusty pedigree. This year’s pick, Kenneth Bonert, was a Governor General’s Award finalist for The Lion Seeker. In 2014, it’s the turn of Montrealer Sean Michaels with his debut novel, Us Conductors, a treatment of the improbably multifarious life of Russian Lev Termen — scientist, spy, political prisoner and pioneer of 20thcentury electronic music with his invention of the theremin. Loyal followers of Michaels’ addictive music blog, Said the Gramophone, will be primed for a book that looks like a dream matchup of writer and subject.
Another former New Face, Padma Viswanathan, debuted in 2008 with the epic-length South Indian family saga The Toss of a Lemon. The former Montreal resident, now living in the U.S., returns this spring with The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, a novel that follows the lingering impact of the 1985 Air India bombing through the story of a Canadian-trained Indian psychologist interviewing people who lost family and friends in the attack.
Irish Canadian Emma Donoghue has established herself as a can’tmiss writer. Her 2010 novel, Room, was an against-the-odds international success, selling far beyond what its unsparingly bleak premise might normally have deemed possible.
The 2012 collection, Astray, was almost implausibly wide-ranging in subject, theme and treatment. Spring 2014 brings the highly anticipated Frog Music, a novel based on a real-life story of former Parisian circus stars in the smallpox-ravaged San Francisco of 1876.
This year, Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary was shortlisted for the Man Booker and had a shot at being the shortest book ever to win the award. As it happened, it lost out in a battle of extremes to the longest, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.
The protean Irishman, who was also Booker-shortlisted in 2004 for The Master, is back this spring with the novel Nora Webster, and the hunch is that, added U.S. competition notwithstanding, 2014 might just be his overdue Booker year.
Three novels set at various points in 20th-century Montreal look to be among the highlights of the coming months. Claire Holden Rothman follows up the Giller-longlisted The Heart Specialist with My October, a family story revolving around the October Crisis of 1970.
Susan Doherty tells the story of a teen classical piano prodigy from a troubled home in the 1930s in A Secret Music. Mark Lavorato’s Serafim and Claire is a love story between a Portuguese immigrant photographer and a vaudeville dancer set amid the political tumult of the 1920s and ’30s.
If book industry chit-chat is to be believed, the mystery factors making up that elusive entity called buzz have converged on Carrie Snyder. The Ontario writer’s first two books, Hair Hat and The Juliet Stories, were linked collections that succeeded on their own terms even while leaving readers speculating as to what Snyder might do with the novel form. The hotly tipped Girl Runner, in which a 104-year-old woman looks back on a life that includes winning a gold medal at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, is our chance to find out.
There are brave writers, and then there’s Roberto Saviano. The Italian employed a blend of reportage and fiction to expose the workings of the Neapolitan mob in Gomorrah. The 2006 book sold upward of 10 million copies and was adapted into an acclaimed Matteo Garrone film. For his trouble, Saviano found himself with his life threatened.
If anything, he’s upping the ante with the forthcoming Zero Zero Zero, a study of the global cocaine trade that traces the trail of the drug from its South American origins through the Mexican cartels and into the hands of dealers and users worldwide, with a prominent bank or two helping smooth the way.
Philip Gourevitch wrote one of the classic non-fiction books of recent decades with the multipleaward-winning We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, a harrowing on-the-scene account of the Rwandan genocide.
Now The New Yorker staff writer goes back to the scene to examine the legacy 20 years later. You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know, with a title that speaks volumes by itself, looks sure to be essential reading.
Until recently, American Lydia Davis was a writer with a healthy-sized cult following, known as much for her translations of Proust as for her uniquely micro approach to the short story. That all changed this year when she won the lifetime-recognition Man Booker International Prize.
Longtime fans, as well as the many new readers who came on board with the sweeping, Booker-lauded The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, will be keen to see how she refines her art in the coming collection Can’t and Won’t.