Turning over a new page — or 2,000 — in 2013
A short preview of some of the most anticipated books of this spring
Already the nights are getting shorter, the days are getting longer, ground hogs are quivering in their holes, and publishers are promoting their new spring lineup. So to keep you on top of your game, here’s a brief scan of five of the most highly anticipated titles of early 2013. The Demonologist Andrew Pyper Publication date: March 5
Toronto thriller writer Andrew Pyper brings a gripping literary horror yarn about an English professor’s efforts to find his 11-year-old daughter after she apparently dies in a bizarre incident in Venice. With Milton’s Paradise Lost as a kind of ad hoc road map, Pyper’s academic anti-hero is drawn into a sinister netherworld in the U.S. mid-west and south, where he’s pursued by menacing characters, tormented by his past and driven almost mad by the conviction that his child is still alive and held hostage by some unearthly force. The Childhood of Jesus J.M. Coetzee Publication date: April 23
J.M. Coetzee’s contemporary allegory about a father and son who land in a strange country where other immigrants seem to have lost their memory and the boy becomes the object of fascination to a woman who resembles his missing mother and insists that his special qualities require nurturing in some distant, forbidden place, is garnering a lot of prerelease buzz for its daring content and perceptive reworking of Christianity’s fundamental narrative. It’s already tipped as one of the biggies of 2013, and is a hot lead item on the spring list. Country Girl: A Memoir Edna O’Brien Publication date: April 30
At age 78 and 45 years after copies of her second novel were ceremonially burnt in the church grounds of her home village, Irish writer Edna O’Brien set out to begin the memoir she swore she’d never write. It’s a rich and ribald tale that begins in the sexual and political maelstrom of the 1960s, when her new celebrity put her in the company of the likes of Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Paul McCartney, who sang her children to sleep, and Samuel Beckett, who accompanied her through her first LSD trip. The book is a chronicle of lifechanging events that seem so vivid and present it’s hard to imagine someone so physically delicate and emotionally unprepared could possibly have survived to become of the great writers of her time. Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate Safari Paul Theroux Publication date: May 7
Past retirement age and after 50 years of epic journeys, famed American novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux takes the last trip of the size and complexity that have made him a legend among travellers and memoirists: the second leg of the journey that he recounted in Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown, this time up the western side of the African continent, from Capetown to Congo. It prom- ises to rival his 1975 breakout, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia, as the perfect bookend to an amazing literary non-fiction odyssey. Big Brother Lionel Shriver Publication date, June
Big questions about health, perception, obesity, loyalty and popularity underscore U.K.-based American novelist Lionel Shriver’s account of the unsettling consequences of lead character Pandora’s favourite brother’s serious and sudden weight gain, as they both shift in the family hierarchy, even though her sympathetic ties with her brother are deepened and bonds between Pandora and her husband start to fray. Apparently not as unforgiving as earlier Shriver novels, Big Brother takes its cues from the death of her own brother from complications from diabetes.