A look ahead to what's new in 2010

From cosmology to children's picture-books, our reviewers give a guide to the best of the publishers' lists for the first six months of the new year
The Guardian, Saturday 2 January 2010

Is there anyobody there? Photograph: Science Photo Library/Frank Zullo

JANUARY

Fiction

The first big novel of the year is Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence (Faber), both a tale of obsessional love and a stunning panorama of Istanbul society rich and poor, traditional and westernised, over the past three decades. It comes with a real museum attached: Pamuk plans a house of ephemera in which to display the memorabilia of his hero's affair and of Istanbul life, from ferry tickets to quince grinders.

EL Doctorow creates another museum of the moment in Homer and Langley (Little, Brown), based on the lives of the Collyer brothers, eccentric hoarders who rarely left their New York townhouse and were eventually killed by their own clutter. Doctorow finds in their decaying mansion a weird and wonderful platform from which to view a century of American life.

The trend for posthumous publication continues with John Wyndham's Plan for Chaos (Penguin). In this companion piece to Day of the Triffids, the suspicious deaths of a series of identical women reveal a plot to clone a master race. Meanwhile, Blacklands (Bantam) heralds a fresh new voice in crime: Belinda Bauer inhabits the mind of her 12-year-old hero, struggling to tease the whereabouts of his uncle's body from an imprisoned child-killer, with uncanny conviction.

Justine Jordan

Science history

Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, edited by Bill Bryson (HarperPress). On a dismal night in London 350 years ago, a group of intellectuals sat down and created a society for the accumulation of knowledge. Since then, the Royal Society has been at the heart of scientific endeavour. Bryson's anniversary collection of articles by Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Richard Holmes and others tells the story of human advancement, from the pioneering expeditions of Captain Cook and dubious experimental medical procedures to Newton's theory of light, splitting the atom and the discovery of the DNA double helix.

Ian Sample

Memoir

Must You Go, by Antonia Fraser (Weidenfeld & Nicolson). This memoir of one of the great literary marriages of our time is based on diaries Fraser kept during her time with Harold Pinter. It promises to shed new light on the germination of his plays as well as on their lives together. "In essence," Fraser writes, "it is a love story and as with many love stories, the beginning and the end, the first light and the twilight, are dealt with more fully than the high noon in between."

Claire Armitstead

Poetry

Love Poems, by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador). The inaugural collection of Carol Ann Duffy's laureateship explores a theme that has long lain at the core of her poetry; the publication of her 2005 narrative of a relationship, Rapture, saw her anointed as our generation's premier anatomist of love. This collection unites some of her greatest love poems with more recent efforts. "All poems are love poems," she said at last year's Hay festival. "Poetry can offer consolation, it can be angry and potent, but all these poems, these moments in language, come from love."

Sarah Crown

A Hospital Odyssey, by Gwyneth Lewis (Bloodaxe). In her first collection since stepping down as the first national poet of Wales, Gwyneth Lewis follows the odyssey of Maris, whose husband Hardy has been diagnosed with cancer (Lewis's own husband faced the same news some years earlier). Somewhere in the hospital she loses him, and her search metamorphoses into a descent through wards and corridors populated by a fantastical cast of fickle physicians, anthropomorphised diseases, party-going microbes – and the shade of Aneurin Bevan – posing fundamental questions about the nature of health and healthcare. SC

Music

The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece, by Eric Siblin (Harvill Secker). Eric Siblin spent years as a rock critic before suddenly falling under the spell of Bach's Cello Suites. It wasn't just the way the music sounded, but its backstory that so intrigued him. The Cello Suites had lain forgotten until Pablo Casals famously popularised them in the 20th century. In crisp, business-like prose Siblin explores the source of both his and Casals's fascination with some of Bach's most challenging music.
The full selection at The Guardian.