Book PreviewsNew novels by Sebastian Barry, John Boyne and Hugo Hamilton, and a new take on misery memoirs - the terror memoir - are among the books on offer, selected by Arminta Wallace
NOVELS
New year, new novels from Irish authors at the top of their game. In The Secret Scripture (Faber, May), Sebastian Barry moves from the war scenario of A Long Long Wayto the contemporary battlefield of the health services, where 100-year-old Roseanne McNulty is talking to her psychiatrist in Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital.
John Boyne revisits his Boy in the Striped Pyjamas strategy of having a young, innocent narrator in The King's Shilling(Doubleday, May), set aboard the good ship Bounty; and in Hugo Hamilton's Disguise(Fourth Estate, June), a Berlin family that has lost a son in the bombing of 1945 takes in a child from a refugee train while David Park's The Truth Commissioner(Bloomsbury, Feb) is set in post-ceasefire Belfast.
Three interesting debuts are Ronan O'Brien's Confessions of a Fallen Angel(Sceptre, Feb), about a man who develops psychic powers; Rowan Somerville's The End of Sleep(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March), in which an Irishman goes in search of a tall tale in the back streets of Cairo; and The Semantics of Murderby Aifric Campbell (Serpent's Tail, April), a psychological drama of sibling rivalry and a psychoanalyst whose own psyche leaves a lot to be desired.
Netherland(Fourth Estate, May), a post-9/11 New York tale, comes from Irish-born, longtime American resident Joseph O'Neill, the author of the memoir Blood Dark Track. South of the Borderby James Ryan (The Lilliput Press, March) is set in rural Ireland during the second World War and Nick Laird's Glover's Mistake (Fourth Estate, June) features two dissatisfied bachelors, an older woman - and a destructive relationship .
On the international front Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence(Jonathan Cape, April) is a tangled yarn spun around the court of the Mughal emperor, while Andrei Makine plunges into Angolan history for Making Human Love(Sceptre, June). Peter Carey's His Illegal Self(Faber, Feb) has a rebellious young New Yorker arriving in a commune in Queensland; Breath (Picador, May), from Cloudstreetauthor Tim Winton, is set in an Australian sawmilling town; and Carpentaria(Constable, March) is by the Aboriginal writer Alexis Wright, winner of this year's Miles Franklin award - also won, in former years, by Carey and Winton. Manil Suri provides another latest slice of life in contemporary India in The Age of Shiva(Bloomsbury, March), and Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies(John Murray, June) features a diverse cast of characters on a slave ship.
English names to watch in 2008 include David Leavitt, author of The Lost Language of Cranes, whose The Indian Clerk(Bloomsbury, Feb) is based on the friendship between a British mathematician and the famous, and eponymous, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Philip Hensher's The Northern Clemency(Fourth Estate, April) applies an epic perspective to two decades of a changing England - focusing on the 1984 miners strike and how it impacts on the two families at the novel's heart, while Attachment(Chatto and Windus, June) the debut novel from Isabel Fonseca - aka Mrs Martin Amis - is a study of marriage. Rebecca Miller - aka Mrs Daniel Day-Lewis - tracks the unravelling of a fiftysomething life in The Private Lives of Pippa Lee(Canongate, April).
MEMOIR
Are terror memoirs the new misery memoirs? It certainly seems so, to judge by the number of them on offer. In Leaving al-Qaeda: Inside the Life and Mind of a British Jihadist (Constable, Feb), Hassan Butt tells his story with the help of Shiv Malik; and Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo(Palgrave Macmillan, March), finds Murat Kurnaz do much the same. The Christian pacifist Norman Kember tells of his dramatic rescue by British Special Forces in Hostage in Iraq(Darton Longman Todd, Feb), while poet and playwright Jonathan Garfinkel takes to the road in Ambivalence(Saqi, February), a provocative and playful journey from a Zionist childhood in Toronto to an Israel where nothing is as simple as it seems.
JG Ballard opens his memoir Miracles of Life(Fourth Estate, Feb) in his native Shanghai, where he was interned during the second World War, while in his first book in 17 years, Czech playwright-turned president Václav Havel, applies his trademark humour to his battle with cancer - and with both his wives - in To the Castle And Back(Portobello, Jan). Samson Kambalu's The Jive Talker(Cape, July) pays tribute to his father, who died of Aids in 1995. In The Life and Times of Mark E Smith(Viking, April), the leader of the iconic British band The Fall adds a spell in prison to the usual tale of sex, drugs and rock'n'roll excess.
A considerably more serious note is struck by My Father's Watch(Fourth Estate, April), the story of Patrick Maguire, the youngest of the Maguire Seven, a group falsely convicted for acts of terrorism on behalf of the Provisional IRA in the 1970s. Co-written by Carlo Gébler, it promises to pack quite a punch. The former chief psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, Ivor Browne, is another man who rarely pulls his punches - he tells his story in Music and Madness (Cork University Press), with a foreword by Colm Tóibín. In his first work of prose in English, poet Cathal Ó Searcaigh charts a childhood in Donegal in Light On Distant Hills(Simon & Schuster, March). The colourful life of Seamus Martin, former Irish Timesjournalist and brother to the Archbishop of Dublin, is portrayed in Good Times and Bad: From the Coombe to the Kremlin(Mercier Press, Jan); and Tim Ecott, who grew up in the North before moving to Africa, tells all in Stealing Water: A Secret Life in an African City (Sceptre, March)
Finally, three memoirs shed light on wildly different aspects of life in Ireland. Sara-Jane Cromwell started life as Thomas, and her book Becoming Myself(Gill & Macmillan, Feb) is published to coincide with the first national gender dysphoria conference to be held here. Anne Nolan reveals the secrets behind the success of the I'm in the Mood for Dancingsisters in Anne's Song(Century, April) and in Lights, Camera, Dynamite: The Adventures of a Special Effects Director(Liberties Press, May) Gerry Johnston, whose film credits include Saving Private Ryan and Excalibur, celebrates both the 50th anniversary of Ardmore Studios and his own life in the movies.
PHILOSOPHY/ETHICS
Thank God? We probably have the phenomenal sales of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusionto thank for a plethora of books telling us what to think - and how to think it. George Monbiot's Bring on the Apocalypse(Atlantic, March) deals with the big themes of money, war, power and nature, and suggests that the existence of humanity is under threat if we don't shape up. David Boyd Haycock takes quite a different tack in Mortal Coil: A Short History of Living Longer(Yale University Press, May), a witty exploration of our tireless search for longevity, from Adam and Eve to designer babies. The arguments for and against assisted suicide are rehearsed by Mary Warnock and Elisabeth MacDonald in Easeful Death(Oxford University Press, March), while Simon Critchley takes a life-enhancing look at what the world's great minds have made of death in The Book of Dead Philosophers(Granta, June).
ENVIRONMENT
Climate change is also generating more and more hot air - and gobbling more and more paper - every year. Al An Inconvenient TruthGore is back on the global-warming track with The Path To Survival(Bloomsbury, April), a guide to taking action on both a personal and a political level. If we keep on as we are, the planet will be unfit to live in by the end of this century - so says James Gustave Speth in The Bridge at the End of the World(Yale, May) while in Sick Plant: Corporate Food and Medicine(Pluto Press, April), Stan Cox examines the links between big business and environmental destruction. What would happen if we just disappeared? Alan Weisman pursues this intriguing line of inquiry in The World Without Us(Virgin, April), which has been a huge bestseller in the US, Canada and Germany.
Believe it or not, ecological disaster also has its lighter side. Fred Pearce blithely travels the world in Confessions of an Eco Sinner(Eden Project Books, Feb), while Anna Shepard's Snails in My Handbag: An Eco-Worrier's Yearbook(Eden Project Books, June) concentrates on fun and quick fixes. Minks in the Dodder and newts in Dundrum: you name it, Éanna Ní Lamhna tracks it down in Wild Dublin: Exploring Nature in the City(O'Brien Press May). With photographs by Anthony Woods, this full-colour volume shows a city we thought we knew in a totally new light.
BIOGRAPHY
In a year when all eyes will be on the American presidency, Nigel Hamilton offers a second volume in his candid study of a recent White House resident in Clinton- Bill, not Hillary (Century, July). How about this for a bit of historical re-evaluation? Not mindless savagery but military brilliance, says Christopher Kelly in his book Attila the Hun(Bodley Head, April). The perennially fascinating story of the murder of the Russian imperial family is revisited in Helen Rappaport's Ekaterinaburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs(Hutchinson, June).
Bet you thought everything that could possibly be written about Oscar Wilde had already appeared? Not so. Thomas Wright's Oscar's Books(Chatto, April) approaches Wilde by way of his library, which was sold off to help pay his legal costs at the time of his trial. Peter Ackroyd's Poe(Chatto, Feb) investigates the short life and mysterious death of the poet Edgar Allan Poe; Paul Fisher makes a study of the brilliant James family - novelist Henry, philosopher William and their sister Alice, also a writer, in House of Wits(Little, Brown, May); in The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth(Faber, March) Frances Wilson asks whether the poet William's sister was a self-effacing virgin or a sacrificial saint and Anna Beer has written Milton. Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot(Bloomsbury, Jan).
French intellectual and novelist Marguerite Duras - best known for Hiroshima, Mon Amour- left behind a cache of papers now coming out in English as Wartime Notebooks & Other Texts(Quercus, Jan).
Kitty O'Shea was no saint, but she changed the course of Irish history as decidedly as any man, declares Elisabeth Kehoe in her biographical study (Atlantic , May). And according to Ronan Kelly's Bard of Erin(Penguin Ireland, April) the poet Thomas Moore did far more than we realise to shape our modern psyche,
The most influential lives, of course, are often those of people whose names don't spring immediately to mind. In The Mission(Maverick, April) Jean Harrington pays tribute to the lives of two Columban priests killed on the war-torn island of Mindanao in the Philippines, while the Jewish intellectual and former lord mayor of Cork, Gerald Goldberg, is remembered in a series of essays edited by Dermot Keogh and Diarmuid Whelan (Mercier, March). John Banville, Julia Neuberger and Paul Durcan are among those who acknowledge his contribution to 20th-century Ireland and the Irish-Jewish experience. A less inspiring link with Nazi Germany is explored by the author of Hitler's Irish Voices, David O'Donoghue - The Tainted Patriot (Liberties, March) is the first biography of IRA bombmaker and would-be Nazi collaborator James O'Donovan.
HISTORY
Our love-hate relationship with British royalty, from Queen Victoria to the present, is the subject of Mary Kenny's The Shamrock and the Crown(New Island, May); and the 17th-century economic and scientific rivalry between England and Holland is the starting-point for Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch(Harper Press, March). Israeli historian Ilan Pappe marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel with The Bureaucracy of Evil: the History of the Israeli Occupation(Oneworld, May), which will undoubtedly raise lots of hackles in his home state. Other books sure to be controversial are Giles Milton's Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922(Sceptre, May), an account of the destruction of Turkey's most cosmopolitan city in 1922; and Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Invention of Scotland(Yale, May), in which he claims that Scottish identity is largely an English invention - bound to cause a bit of a stir.
The question of identity was a hot topic in 18th-century Philadelphia, according to Maurice Bric, whose Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-invention of America, 1760-1800(Four Courts Press, Feb) asks whether Irish immigrants could be truly "American" at a time when many aspects of US political and social culture were themselves being reinvented. In The Forsaken(Little, Brown, June), Tim Tzouliadis tells the tale of the Americans who emigrated to Russia to play baseball at Gorky Park only to end up dead, or in Stalin's labour camps. Another historical horror story is that of the turn-of-the-20th-century British adventurer Lord Leverhulme, whose system of forced labour accounted for more deaths than the Holocaust, according to Jules Marchal's Lord Leverhulme's Ghosts: Colonial Exploitation in the Congo(Verso, June). Mary Valente's The Vikings in Ireland: Settlement, Trade and Urbanisation (Four Courts, April) looks at the history of our Scandinavian towns, while Geraldine and Matthew Stout provide an up-to-date synopsis of the latest international research, for their study Newgrange (Cork UP).
CRIME/THRILLER
The name's Faulks . . . Sebastian Faulks. We all know that the author of Charlotte Grayand Human Traceshas been signed up to produce the new Bond book for the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth - what we want to know is, will Devil May Care(Penguin, May) be better than its tacky, soft-porn cover? Late spring will see the blossoming of a healthy crop of literary thrillers, including John Burnside's Glister(Cape, May), about a town where a boy disappears every year, Charles Cumming's Typhoon(Michael Joseph, June), a spy chiller set in Hong Kong, and John Connolly's new Charlie Parker novel, The Reapers(Hodder & Stoughton, May). If you can't wait that long, there's always Philip Kerr's A Quiet Flame(Quercus, Feb), in which Berlin PI and tough-guy Bernie Gunther follows a war-time trail to Argentina.
Shenanigans in the world of racing is the challenge facing Ed Loy in Declan Hughes's new book A Dying Breed(John Murray, April), and Ken Bruen is one of the authors featured in Politics Noir(Verso, April), a selection of American crime stories with a political theme - a good antidote to the squeaky-clean mood of election year. The Nordic crime factory just keeps on producing new names and titles, and here are two cool-looking chillers for January: Yrsa Sigurdardottir's Last Rituals(Hodder), a tale of eyes gouged out in Iceland, and Mari Jungstedt's Unspoken(Doubleday), set on the Norwegian island of Gotland.
SHORT STORIES
Her Man Booker Prize triumph has catapulted Anne Enright into the top literary league, so there'll be great interest in her new collection Taking Pictures(Cape, May), which features stories on the theme of women's bodies in crisis, in denial and in love, set in Dublin, Venice, the US and France. The poet and novelist Mary O'Donnell's new collection, Storm Over Belfast(New Island, March), is her first since Strong Pagansin 1991, and fans of Pádraic Ó Conaire will be delighted to hear that Diarmuid de Faoite's new selection of his stories, Rogha Phadraic Uí Chonaire, (Cló Iar-Chonnachta, March) is on the way.
Conflicts in Africa are seen through the eyes of children in Say You're One of Them(Abacus, June), the debut collection from young Nigerian Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan, and two collections from China chronicle the rise of the Tiger economy; Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars(Viking, Feb) focuses on a series of hapless young Chinese men, while Su Tong's Mad Woman on the Bridge(Black Swan, June) takes a fresh look at the cultural revolution. Sad people, funny stories; that's the premise both of Donald Ray Pollock's Knockemstiff(Harvill Secker, June), set in a grotty Appalachian town, and Benjamin Percy's merciless take on central Oregon, Refresh, Refresh( Cape, June). Finally, those with fond memories of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?should check out Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories (Faber, May), a bumper edition of three volumes of pieces from this quirky writer, with three new stories thrown in for good measure.
POLITICS/CURRENT AFFAIRS
The war in Iraq continues to occupy centre stage in world affairs, as is reflected in the books world. Patrick Cockburn's Muqtada al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq(Faber, April) is a biography of the cleric who's been orchestrating the deaths of British soldiers, while in Human Being to Human Bomb: The Conveyor Belt of Terror(Icon, Feb) Muslim psychologist Russell Razzaque examines the motivations behind suicide bombing and proposes a "cure". And Lawrence Freedman's A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts The Middle East(Weidenfeld, June) examines how the US has managed to get itself locked into three wars, none of which seems to have any hope of an early solution.
Dreadful things happen elsewhere in the world, of course, and the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, Asne Seierstad, goes to Chechnya to investigate one such scandal in The Children of Grozny(Virago, March). Shocking revelations on the Bush administration's conduct in Africa are promised by Jeremy Keenan's The Dark Sahara(Pluto, June). An expert on Balkan culture and politics, Misha Glenny, turns his attention to international gangsters of the organised crime variety in McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers(Bodley Head, April). Glenny has spent three years researching this shadowy economy which, he says, forms 20 per cent of the world's entire GDP. The young Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo is sure to stir up a storm of protest with Dead Aid: Destroying the Biggest Global Myth of Our Times(Allen Lane, Feb), which insists that handing out aid to "third-world" economies just makes the poor even poorer.
Making predictions about the future of the entire planet isn't for the faint-hearted - but former Bill Clinton adviser Robert Shapiro gives it his best shot in Forecast 2020(Profile, Feb). Where do people go to find out what's really going on in the US? Increasingly, some say, to the website run by Tom Engelhardt, the first volume of which is coming out in book form in The World According to Tomdispatch(Verso, May), with contributions from writers such as John Brown, Rebecca Solnit, Adam Hochschild, Mike Davis and Noam Chomsky. Political systems are examined in Paul Ginsborg's Democracy(Profile, April) and in Antonio Negri's Goodbye, Mr Socialism(Serpent's Tail, March).
On the Irish scene there's bound to be debate over Susan McKay's Bear in Mind These Dead(Faber, May), in which the award-winning journalist gives a voice to those in the North who feel their grief and rage have been overlooked. The peace may be made - but what of those who loved the missing and the dead from those horrific decades when neighbour murdered neighbour and tit for tat violence was a way of life?
Meanwhile, Ireland's number one shrine comes under the microscope in Anne Marie Hourihane's Seasons of Devotion: Knockand the Making of Modern Ireland(Penguin Ireland, Sept). In Beyond the Call of Duty(Maverick Books, May), a celebration of those who've received the Irish State's highest honour, the Military Medal for Gallantry, Declan Power takes us behind the scenes of the Defence Forces.
TRAVEL
It may sound like a movie starring Humphrey Bogart, but Richard Grant's Bandit Roads: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre (Little, Brown, June) is a real-life adventure complete with cowboys and cave-dwelling Indians. Basra is a place we often think of as hell on earth; Mohammad Khudayyir aims to change our minds in Basrayatha(Verso, April), an evocative portrait of the Venice of the East. Daniel Kalder reports from the dark side of Russia in Strange Telescopes (Faber, May), Michael Moran keeps a deathbed promise to an eccentric uncle by visiting Poland in A Country in the Moon(Granta, April) and Martin Buckley takes an intriguing angle on India in An Indian Odyssey(Hutchinson, May), by setting out to recreate one of the great quest stories of world literature, the Ramayana.
In a world of airport security insanity, slow travel is an evermore appealing option - and Downstream: Across England in a Punt(Century, March) finds Tom Fort messing about on the River Trent in a 15-foot boat. Gregor Dallas combines catacombs and cafes in the French capital in Metrostop Paris: History from the City's Heart(John Murray, May), while in The Bridge(Harvill Secker, March), best-selling Dutch author Geert Mak takes Istanbul's Galata bridge - a mini-metropolis teeming with merchants, tourists, pickpockets and fishermen - as the starting-point for an exploration of East-West relationships. Duncan Fallowell's Going As Far As I Can(Profile , Feb) does pretty much what it says on the tin, by taking a wild and wacky look at New Zealand; and Robert Mighall put his best shades on to examine our obsession with good weather in Sunshine: One Man's Search for Happiness (John Murray, May).
ESSAYS
The essay form can encompass a huge variety of writing, and three volumes due next year illustrate the point. Novelist Martin Amis opens his heart in a series of 14 short piece - reviews, short stories and essays - on the subject of September 11th, The Second Plane(Cape, January), while in The Atlantic Ocean(Faber, June) the Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan examines the ongoing relationship between the UK and the US. The veteran journalist Robert Fisk always has something interesting to say, and his new collection, The Age of the Warrior(Fourth Estate, April), promises another slice of enjoyably opinionated analysis. The accelerated change of recent years is the theme of Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten 20th Century (Heinemnan, April), in which the historian Tony Judt asks whether we are losing touch with the past before we've begun to make sense of it.
CHICKLIT
The latest instalment from Marian Keyes, This Charming Man(Michael Joseph, May), is about the remarriage of a charming but ever-so-slightly-scandalous politician. Hmm. Anyone we know? Nope: it's a chap by the name of Paddy de Courcy. The over-heated emotions associated with weddings are the subject of two other tales of 2008: a mammy is determined to marry off her three beautiful daughters in Marita Conlon-McKenna's The Matchmaker(Bantam, Feb), something of a modern-day Pride and Prejudice, and there's a veritable wedding disaster at the heart of Patricia Scanlan's Forgive and Forget (Bantam, June).
Cecelia Ahern, following on the movie of PS, I Love You, will be back in April with her fifth novel, Thanks for the Memories(HarperCollins). A passion for shoes, meanwhile, unites - or should that be "unties"? - the four central characters in Beth Harbison's Shoe Addicts Anonymous(Arrow, March) The death of an Irish aid worker in Africa is the subject of the new book from Karen Gillece, The Absent Wife(Hodder Headline, April). Poolbeg will publish a debut book from Ellen McCarthy, who won the Seoige and O'Shea short-story competition, Guarding Maggie(May). And just in time for the summer hols, we'll be treated to another slice of madcap domestic misadventure in Niamh Greene's Confessions of a Demented Housewife(Penguin Ireland, June).
POETRY
Thomas Kinsella's 80th birthday will be marked by two books in the spring of 2008, one in February from Irish Academic Press, and one from UCD Press in May. The latter - The Sea of Disappointment, by Andrew Fitzsimons - is a comprehensive study of Kinsella's complete oeuvre, written with the poet's assistance. Two decades of work forms the basis of a Selected Poemsfrom Whitbread winner Bernard O'Donoghue (Faber, April), while Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin's Selected Poemswill be co-published by Faber and Gallery Press in June. Other new Irish collections to look forward to include Ciaran Carson's For All We Know(Gallery Press), Paula Meehan's Music for Dogs: Scripts for Radio(Dedalus Press, late spring) while a New and Selected Poemsfrom Paddy Bushe (Dedalus Press, March) features work in both English and Irish, with the author's own translations. Another big poetic birthday in 2008 is that of the Northumberland publisher Bloodaxe Books, which celebrates its 30th year in operation with what is, even by its own consistently exacting standards, a first-class list. Tell Me This Is Normal: New and Selected Poems, comes from Julie O'Callaghan (Jan), while a collection of contemporary Indian poetry edited by Jeet Thayil (May) promises a fascinating glimpse into an area of literature far less familiar to us than fiction. And In Person (Bloodaxe, April) is a DVD with recorded readings by some of the best-known international poets, from Fleur Adcock to Benjamin Zephaniah via James Berry, Brendan Kenneally and Mícheál Ó Siadhail.
LIFESTYLE/HEALTH
When we're stuck in traffic in the rain we all long to downsize - but is it really better in a country cottage with a leaking roof and a couple of pigs called Charlotte and Wilbur? Yes it is, says Irish Timescontributor Michael Kelly and his wife, who tell all in Trading Paces: From Rat Race to Hen Run(O'Brien, April). Someone else whose life changed dramatically was Masha Gessen who, in 2004, was told she had a genetic predisposition to cancer. Not a woman to sit around and brood, she went out and interviewed people with rare genetic diseases, and she combines personal memoir with a guide to the new genetics in Blood Matters: A Journey Along the Genetic Frontier(Granta, June).
Thinking of turning to alternative medicine for a kinder, gentler approach to health matters? You may have to think again as the alternative health business is subjected to ever-closer scrutiny. In Trick or Treatment?(Bantam, June) pop-science writer Simon Singh and the world's first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst, claim to lay out a decade of research findings in a cool, calm manner: as her book title suggests, however, Rose Shapiro isn't being very complimentary at all in Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All(Harvill Secker, April).
FOOD
Is obesity the shape of things to come? Maybe. Meanwhile, the number of books on the subject of food gets heavier by the year. Some, such as Felicity Lawrence's exposé of the truth behind food production and marketing, Eat Your Heart out: Who Really Decides What Ends up on Your Plate (Penguin, March), are busy warning us what not to eat; others, such as The Vegeterranean(Simon & Schuster, March), a gloriously illustrated collection of recipes from a country house in Umbria run by chefs Malu Simoes and Alberto Musacchio, make it all look more edible than ever. The American food writer Michael Pollan has some crisp advice in In Defence of Food: the Myth of Nutrition and the Pleasures of Eating(Allen Lane, Jan): "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." Those who still dare to put a bit of butter on the humble spud might be interested in John Reader's The Potato in World History(Heinemann, Feb) while Josh Ozersky traces the history of the US's favourite snack in The Hamburger: A History(Yale, May). Panikos Panayi traces how successive waves of immigrants inspired a shift in taste from pork pies to poppadoms in Spicing Up Britain(Reaktion, March), and the man who wrote the best-selling book about the end of oil, Paul Roberts, predicts a new era of food geopolitics in The End Of Food (Bloomsbury, March).
SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY
2009 is the 150th anniversary of The Origin of Speciesso congratulations to Michael Boulter for getting in first with Darwin's Garden(Constable, June), a study of how Darwin's observation in his own back garden helped him study larger ecosystems and, eventually, evolution. Did we evolve to read, or does reading help us evolve? Maryanne Wolf dissects the science of the reading brain in Proust and the Squid(Icon, April), while Gary Marcus reckons our brains are kluges, an engineering term for a sort of grab-bag of haphazard stuff Sellotaped together - in Kluge: The Haphazard Construction Of The Human Mind(Faber , June). Christopher Potter gives the cosmos a new spin in The Portable Universe(Hutchinson, May), billed as "literary science". And here's my vote for title of the year: A Babylonian Made My Blackberry(Quercus, March), in which Ian Stewart, author of Flatterlandand Does God Play Dice?,proves that maths created the modern world. QED. On the tech front, there's a huge fascination with the kind of mass participation that is now evident in our online behaviour. Clay Shirky examines the wiki revolution in Here Comes Everybody(Allen Lane, Feb), Charles Leadbeater asks what the rise of digital media might mean for the ordinary punter in We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity(Profile, March), and in Everyone Knows Everything: Wikipedia and the Globalisation of Knowledge(Random House, March), Marshall T Poe looks at MySpace, YouTube and others and asks how it all really works - and where it will all end.
SPORT
The ancient sport of boxing has been subject to a few low blows now and again. Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History(Reaktion, March) traces its cultural markers from Greek odes through to hip hop lyrics. Boxers and gangsters have often been hand in glove, says Kevin Mitchell in Jacobs Beach: The Mob, The Fights, The Fifties(Yellow Jersey, April). Wrestler Chris Jericho reveals all about his professional colleagues The Rock, Triple H and company in A Lion's Tale: Around the World in Spandex(Orion, Feb), while the British tennis player Andy Murray does a bit of wrestling of his own - with his many and vociferous critics - in Hitting Back(Century, June). Now that we're all mad about cricket - aren't we? - we'll need to consult Lawrence Booth's selection of anecdotes and eccentricities in The Thing About Cricket(Yellow Jersey, June). Those who prefer to get out and do their own thing should check out the suggestions in 30 Irish Adventures(Mercier, April), Padraic Woods's fully illustrated guide to kayaking, mountain boarding, surfing, or whatever you're having yourself. Or you might just prefer to curl up in an armchair with Joe Humphreys's Foul Play: What's Wrong With Sport (Icon, April). Sport, according to Humphreys, isn't a healthy influence on humans so much as a last refuge for sexism, racism, homophobia and animal cruelty.
LITERARY CRITICISM
One of our most acclaimed living writers, Colm Tóibín, is given the analytical treatment in Reading Colm Tóibín(Liffey Press, March), a collection of essays by some of the most prominent figures in Irish Studies, including Roy Foster, Anne Fogarty and Liam Harte, edited by Paul Delaney. The Harvard critic James Wood turns a critical eye on everything from Beatrix Potter to John le Carré in his alternative history of the novel, How Fiction Works(Cape, Feb), while Jay Parim asks Why Poetry Matters(Yale , May) and answers his own question by arguing that in dark times such as ours, it matters more than ever. In My Unwritten Books(Weidenfeld, Jan) George Steiner discusses seven books he has never written - and why, while in Anonymity - A Secret History of English Literature(Faber, Jan ) John Mullan looks at why many great English authors chose to publish anonymously.
VISUAL ARTS/MUSIC
Chinese art is, apparently, the Next Big Thing - and to coincide with a major exhibition at the new Saatchi Gallery in London next year, there's New Art in China(Cape, Feb) for those who want to get on the inside track. Closer to home, the long-awaited Jack B Yeats: Old and New Departures, edited by Yvonne Scott, will offer some new perspectives on an old favourite (Trinity Irish Art Research Centre, Feb).
Styliane Philippou's book Oscar Niemeyer(Yale, April) is the first big study of one of the most fiercely original architects at work today; and the bad-boy celebs of the late Victorian era, the pre-Raphaelites, are the stuff of a spring TV series and a luscious tie-in: Franny Moyle's Desperate Romantics: The Private Lives of the Pre-Raphaelites(John Murray, May).
For many people the soundscape of 20th-century music is still a foreign country; in The Rest Is Noise(Fourth Estate, March) the New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross takes a tour of its wilder shores. And in The Triumph of Music(Weidenfeld, July), Tim Blanning looks at the incredible rise of music from Mozart to the Arctic Monkeys.
ECONOMICS
Is statistical analysis the new sex? Maybe not, but brace yourself for a flood of statistical books in the style of last year's mega-selling Freakonomicsby Levitt and Dubner, including Tim Harford's The Logic of Life: Uncovering the New Economics of Everything(Little, Brown, Feb), which argues that despite its apparent madness, life does make a certain kind of sense.
Green issues are going to affect the field of economics like nobody's business over the next decade, and in Economics for a Crowded Planet(Allen Lane, March) Jeffrey D Sachs asks what a truly sustainable form of development might look like, and whether we can really achieve it. Dietmar Rothermund examines the diverse roots of the Indian sub-continent's economic miracle in India: the Rise of an Asian Giant(Yale, March), while Craig Sams and Jo Fairley tell the delicious tale of the £100-million- a-year chocolate brand that is consistently praised both for its quality and its ethical credentials in The Story of Green & Blacks(Random House, March).
CULTURAL HISTORY
What does it mean to be British? Wannabe London lord mayor Boris Johnson will doubtless provide some pretty idiosyncratic answers to his own question in The British(Harper Press, March). Being a Muslim has, over the past five years, acquired many negative connotations - so Natana Delong-Bas's Notable Muslims(Hodder & Stoughton, Feb), a list of 100 positive Islamic contributions to culture and civilisation, is especially timely.
Since its foundation in 1859, this newspaper has played its own modest part in the development of Irish identity, and former Irish Timescompany secretary Dermot James traces that influence in Changed Times: a History of The Irish Times(Woodfield, Feb).
Killer birds, alien abductions, asteroids in Tesco - Hugh Aldersey-Williams and Simon Briscoe take a light-hearted look at things we really don't need to worry about for the 21st century in Panicology!(Viking, Feb). Finally, if language really is what marks us out as human, we should study Bryson's Dictionary(Doubleday, March), Bill Bryson's foray into some of the obscure corners of English usage, and Mark Abley's Future Language(Heinemann, June), which tries to predict what will happen to languages over the coming decades as we all text madly in fluent gloop while juggling the vertiginous vernaculars of daily multicultural life.