Escaping into the future
Justine Jordan picks the highlights among forthcoming novels

Saturday December 29, 2007The Guardian

Autumn was a thin season for fiction, publishers fearing that novels would be drowned in the ever-swelling tide of zany stocking fillers and celebrity biographies; so it's a welcome relief to look beyond the Christmas turkeys to find the 2008 schedules full of good things.

The year begins with a notable follow-up: 12 years after the international smash The Reader, in Homecoming (Weidenfeld, January) Bernhard Schlink again wrestles with Germany's wartime demons. As a child, his narrator becomes obsessed with an incomplete manuscript about a German POW; as an adult, he goes in search of the missing ending - and his own father, also apparently killed in the war. It's a quest for identity, forgiveness and love.

It's been a long wait, too, for Adam Mars-Jones's epic Pilcrow (Faber, April),
investigating the rich internal life of a boy confined to bed, and for Manil
Suri's The Age of Shiva (Bloomsbury, March): after 2001's acclaimed The
Death of Vishnu, Suri now turns his gaze on India in the aftermath of
independence. Meanwhile, Siri Hustvedt follows the elegant What I Loved with The
Sorrows of An American (Sceptre, May), an absorbing study of family secrets
handed down the generations. Hustvedt threads elements from a memoir written
by her father about growing up in depression-era Minnesota with a tale of
loneliness and love in modern-day New York, as a divorced analyst confronts
traumatic memories from his immigrant roots. We'll have to wait until November
for more Manhattan family secrets from Notes on a Scandal author Zoe Heller in
The Believers (Fig Tree).

We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (Canongate,February) is James Meek's follow-up to his acclaimed historical novel, The People's Act of Love. This is a contemporary tale of love, hubris and misunderstanding as a war reporter takes his own baggage to Afghanistan,
hoping to turn the elusive, unpredictable Astrid into girlfriend material, and
the turmoil of political events into material for a bestselling thriller. The
world, needless to say, will not bend to his will, but the resulting novel is
as gripping and acute as its predecessor.

There's fabulous escapism to be had as Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence (Cape, April) transports the reader to the 16th-century Mughal court, where a visitor from
the Florentine world of Machiavelli wins the attention of the emperor himself.
Rushdie sets up symmetries between east and west in a bejewelled extravaganza
with shades of Borges.

Meanwhile, the dissident writer Ma Jian has written an epic novel about China's recent history in Beijing Coma (Chatto, May), in which a Tiananmen Square protester wakes from the 10-year coma caused by a soldier's bullet to find his country transformed.
In what looks set to be one of spring's most interesting novels, Gordon Burn is rushing the very recent past into print. From his award-winning debut novel Alma Cogan to his Fred
West biography Happy Like Murderers, Burn has long blended fact and fiction,
and in Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel (Faber, April) he finds his
natural subject: the news as entertainment. Twenty-four-hour rolling news, the
blogosphere and digital interactivity feed our culture of speculation and
spin. Burn takes a few highly charged weeks in 2007 - the summer of floods,
terror attacks, the Blair/Brown changeover and the disappearance of Madeleine
McCann - to investigate media manipulation and the boundaries between fact and
fiction.
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