LITERARY HEAVYWEIGHTS

THE award for Most Eagerly Anticipated Novel Of The Year surely goes to Klara And The Sun (Faber, March 2021), Kazuo Ishiguro’s first outing since his 2017 Nobel Prize. Centring on Klara, an ‘artificial friend’, it’s a stunning exploration of AI and the human heart.

The acclaimed author of the Patrick Melrose novels, Edward St Aubyn, returns in March with the compelling Double Blind, which follows the progress of three friends over the course of a year. And fanfares will also greet the return of Colm Toibin with his spellbinding new novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Viking, September).

Other likely front-runners include the three- times Booker- longlisted Jon McGregor, whose Lean Fall Stand (4th Estate, April) charts the fall-out from a disastrous

Antarctic research expedition. Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year Of The Runaways propelled him on to the 2015 Booker shortlist. His latest, China Room (Harvill Secker, May), a multi-generational masterpiece based in part on Sahota’s family history, could well see him nominated again.

Costa winner Francis Spufford’s ingenious Light Perpetual (Faber, February) takes us back to 1944 and the moment when a German rocket kills five young people.

Vienna in 1933 is the setting for Sebastian Faulks’s ‘intensely personal’ Snow Country (Hutchinson, September), but Booker Prize winner Richard Flanagan brings us bang up to date with the The Living Sea Of Waking Dreams (Chatto, January), a strange tale of family love, grief and climate change.