The books that flower in spring...

AS ever, reading the publishers catalogues one must wade through superlatives and definitive claims - can every new book really be the best book ever written? Still, where there is life there is hope. And there certainly are a lot of books heading our way:

This has been a quiet year for American fiction. Two of the most eagerly awaited titles, John Updike's In The Beauty of the Lilies and E. Annie Proulx's Accordion Crimes, failed to fulfil expectations. Only with the publication of Tobias Wolff's fine collection The Night In Question in early November did US fiction reassert its preeminence. This year should be different: Saul Bellow's The Actual (Viking, June) is his first major work of fiction for ten years. It is the story of Harry. In many ways a success, he is still in love with the woman he met while at high school, he even helps her to re-bury her ex-husband. William Maxwell, who has had a long career as a New Yorker editor, begins the year: his So Long, See You Tomorrow (Harvill) is yet another of those quiet American masterpieces. (Harvill, incidentally, remain the major publisher of outstanding European fiction in translation.)

Lorrie Moore's The Faber Book of Contemporary Stories about Childhood (Faber, January) is another good start to the year. A wide selection of international writers tackle the subject of childhood either through the eyes of child narrators or through the adult who was that child. An attractive and unsentimental collection. Scribbling Women, edited by Elaine Showalter (Dent, February), is an important volume of short stories by 19th-century American women writers including Willa Cather, Kate Chopin and Edith Wharton. Also in February from Dent is She Wields a Pen, an anthology of poetry by 19th-century American women poets. The book is a remarkable testament to the range of work written by these pioneering writers in a new society.

Mona Simpson's A Regular Guy (Faber, March) explores Simpson's preferred territory, the strange, muddled world of the modern family. Marly Swick's Paper Wings (Phoenix, March) is another variation of the Sixties American family, except Mom is not your typical Donna Reed. Barbara Kingsolver's Homeland and Other Stories (Faber, January) is a solid collection from a warm, humorous writer. Brad Watson's The Last Days of the Dog-Men (Weidenfeld, March) is a volume of funny, black and at times brutal stories all centring on the theme of men and their complex relationships with dogs - as companions, as accomplices and as compensation. In Martha McPhee's Bright Angel Time (Faber, May), two lovers set off across the American West with their combined families, all aboard a large camper.

You want confusion? How about Richard Russo's Straight Man (Chatto, June). Hank is 50, half in love with three women and still frightened of his father. Joan Didion returns to fiction with The Last Thing He Wanted (Flamingo, January), in which a journalist's visit to her father leads her to a dangerous story. Donald Antrim's wacky second novel, The Hundred Brothers (Seeker, May) is about the 100 brothers who gather each year in a large library to commemorate their father's death. One can only imagine what kind of character dear old dad was. James Lee Burke is one of the best - hell, he is the best American crime writer. In Cimarron Rose (Orion, April) he moves the action West, away from his usual Southern setting, where Texan lawyer Billy Bob Holland is preparing to defend a teenager accused of rape.

The best of the Canadians are led by Mavis Gallant, the Paris-based writer who can even give Alice Munro a run for her money. Her Selected Stories comes from Bloomsbury in March. Vikram Chandra's Love and Longing in Bombay (Faber, March) contains six interconnected stories from the author of Red Earth and Pouring Rain. Indian fiction with its massive domestic sagas has a unique energy, sophistication, heart and compassion, and is far from dependent on Rushdie's magic realism. Russian humour in the face of horror is brilliantly represented by Venedikt Yerofeev's Moscow Stations (Faber, January). One wise man, and a very drunk wise man at that, wanders around Moscow and misses nothing

Irish publishing is increasing its fiction lists, but many Irish writers continue to be published in Britain. Among the coming year's literary exports are John Banville. His The Untouchable (Picador, May) is a book of masks which takes as its theme various levels of betrayal. This poised, elegant narrative, loosely based on the Cambridge spies, is Victor Maskell's story - the memoir he decides to write when his double life has been publicly exposed.

Tough, street-wise Tracey tracks down the father she never knew in Dermot Bolger's sixth novel, Father's Music (Flamingo, April). James Ryan's Dismantling Mr Doyle (Phoenix House, May) is an ironic, at times comic, but never farcical study of the conflict between the sexes. Y. is an Irish girl doing a postgraduate inter-disciplinary MA in the behavioural sciences in the United States. On her visits home, fortified by her newly shaped consciousness, she attempts to apply her world view to the one prevailing in the Ireland of the 1980s. Now read on. Colum McCann's We Fell Like Snow (Phoenix House, April) is set in the dark world of the New York subways. The biographer of Constance Markievicz, Anne Haverty publishes her first novel. One Day as a Tiger (Chatto, March) is an inventive tragicomedy involving a couple and a clever sheep. Katy Hayes's Curtains (Phoenix House, March) promises to be an hilarious odyssey into Dublin theatre life. Eamonn Sweeney's debut Waiting for the Healer (Picador, May) follows Paul Kelly, manager of a Brixton pub and already shattered by the death of his wife back to Ireland with his small daughter, drawn home by the murder of his brother.

The ultimate Irish literary export, James Joyce, is represented by Ulysses - A Reader's Edition, edited by Dan is Rose (Picador, June)

Funny how life moves on. Once the rebellious boy wonder of British fiction, Martin Amis is now a middle-aged pillar of literary society - Straight Fiction and Other Stories (Flamingo, May) is a collection of five previously published stories, and three new offerings. Much fuss is being made of Susan Wicks's first novel The Key (Faber, January). The narrow world of Anita Brookner's fiction is populated by materially privileged, emotionally bereft lost souls. Bleak yet brilliant, her novels are consistently intelligent explorations of death in life; her Visitors comes from Cape in June.

A.L. Kennedy, a Scot, and one of the best of the younger generation of British writers, is an original whose examinations of life, love and loneliness are invariably touching and real - the stories in Original Bliss (Cape, January) are unlikely to disappoint.

Spare a thought for Frances Spalding - her biography Duncan Grant (Chatto, May) must compete with Hermione Lee's outstanding recent biography of Virginia Woolf and which also evokes the entire Bloomsbury world. Lawrence Durrell, poet, novelist, travel writer, whose work includes The Alexandria Quartet, is an interesting character and is the subject of Ian MacNiven's Lawrence Durrell (Faber, April). Still in the same family but far more personalised is Himself and Other Animals - A Portrait of Gerald Durrell (Hutchinson, January), in which novelist David Hughes manages to give a balanced account of the campaigning wildlife writer and their 40-year friendship which ended with Durrell's death in 1995.

Several biographies of Chekhov have been written, now we have Donald Rayfield's Anton Chekhov - A Life (HarperCollins, June), which on length alone - 800 pages - may prove to be as definitive as the publishers claim. Jeremy Lewis's authorised biography of Cyril Connolly (Chatto, May) draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries and endeavours to understand the confusions which drove this literary boy wonder who peaked brilliantly but too early. Biographies of Jack London are always described as "full-blooded", and so is Alex Kershaw's Jack London: A Life (HarperCollins).

John Drummond's Speaking of Diaghilev (Faber, February) is not only a portrait of this great impresario but should also be a history of some of the most exciting years of European artistic Modernism. J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood (Seeker, August) is the first of an autobiographical trilogy from this complex South African artist who has written several of the finest novels of recent years including 1983 Booker winner, The Life and Times of Michael K and Irish Times International Fiction Prize winner; The Master of Petersburg. Patches of Fire is a Vietnam memoir by Albert French, author of Billy (1994) (Seeker, April). The new book is the story of his year "in country" and his life on return - but will it equal Tobias Wolff's In Pharoah's Army (1994)? Edmund White's autobiographical works A Boy's Own Story and The Beautiful Room is Empty were quickly acknowledge as classic chronicles of the experience. The Farewell Symphony (Chatto, May) is a third volume and also an elegiac examination of a way of life witnessed through his highly literary intelligence.

Some clues to the singular imagination which has produced the cinematic art of director David Lynch may turn up in; Lynch on Lynch, edited by Chris Rodley (Faber, June).

Among the more attractive re-issues are T.S. Eliot's classic first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood (Faber, April). First published in London in 1920, two years before the publication of The Waste Land, it contains some of his most influential early essays and reviews. Reissued to tie in with the forthcoming movie is Nabokov's maligned classic Lolita (Weidenfeld, January).

Was she as clever as many claimed? Read her and decide for yourself, in The Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell edited by Richard Greene (Virago, February). In April Virago are also reissuing three of Willa Cather's classics, My Antonia, One of Ours, and The Professor's House, as well as Hermione Lee's biography Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up.

Among the most interesting history books is Geoffrey Hosking's Russia: People and Empire (HarperCollins, March), spanning 400 years of Russian imperial history which began with the creation of one of the most extensive and awe-inspiring empires the world has ever seen and ended with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Stephen Budiansky's The Nature of Horses - Their Evolution, Intelligence and Behaviour (Weidenfeld, June) sounds intriguing, as does Jeffrey Masson's Another World of Feeling - Dogs Never Lie about Love (Cape, April). Author of When Elephants Weep, Masson is not a crank but a serious behavioural scientist.

Relatively little exciting reportage or travel is on offer this spring, but novelist and documentary film maker Gita Mehta's Snakes and Ladders (Seeker, April), shaped by personal reminiscence and reportage, is being billed as the definitive guide to contemporary India. Aimed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Indian independence this should prove an exciting study. Finally, in despair about the language spoken and written by you, yours and the people you associate with? There is always the late Kingsley Amis's reference book, The King's English (HarperCollins, March), a guide to modern usage - although, come to think of it, I never much liked the way he used English.