Tim Adams looks forward to long-awaited novels by JM Coetzee and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and two books from a mother-daughter fiction double act
Long-awaited: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's
new novel, Americanah, comes six years after she won the Orange prize with Half
of a Yellow Sun. Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer
It is six years since JM Coetzee's last novel, a
long pause by the South African-born Nobel laureate's standards. The
Childhood of Jesus (Harvill Secker, Mar) is the semi-mythical tale
of a young refugee encountering new worlds and the obstacles of officialdom;
written with all of Coetzee's penetrating rigour, it will be an early contender
for an unprecedented third Booker prize for the author of Disgrace.
There are more migrants in
search of promised lands in Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie's Americanah
(Fourth Estate, April), which follows teenage lovers from the author's native
Nigeria as they try to make a new life together but are separated by the forces
of homeland security. Adichie won the 2007 Orange prize for her Half of a Yellow
Sun; this is her first novel since then.
Equally anticipated is any
new fiction from Claire Messud,
whose wonderful The
Emperor's Children was the most haunting of all post-9/11 books. She
returns with The
Woman Upstairs (Virago, May), a novel of Massachussetts, where she
now lives, about a teacher in mid-life who looks for transcendence in the art
she makes in secret.
Rachel Joyce made the 2012
Booker shortlist with her surprise bestselling debut, The
Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Her second novel,
Perfect (Doubleday, July), is another lyrical meditation on the
workings of fate, as two young boys marked by the same catastrophic event follow
very different paths through life.
Patrick McGrath grew up in Broadmoor hospital, where his father was director,
and he has mined a particular fiction of psycholgical extremes in books such as
Trauma and Asylum. His new novel, Constance
(Bloomsbury, May), watches a literary marriage unravel as the past returns to
haunt it.
There haven't been that
many mother and daughter fiction double acts, but this spring the Moggachs
threaten to extend the dynasty begun by Deborah's mother, Charlotte Hough.
First, Deborah Moggach follows the film success of The
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel with a version of that genteel
comedy transplanted to Wales. Heartbreak
Hotel (Chatto, Feb) is set in a B&B in the
valleys with a sideline in "courses for divorces". The debut novel by her own
daughter, Lottie, called Kiss Me First, was the subject of
intense bidding by rival publishers. Picador will publish the tale of online
deception and romance in July.
Other likely book group
favourites include Curtis "The
American Wife" Sittenfeld's Sisterland (Doubleday,
June), a story of estranged twins with a shared gift for clairvoyance, and
Nadeem Aslam's The
Blind Man's Garden (Faber, Feb), set in Pakistan and Afghanistan at
the outbreak of the war on terror, another story of intimate survival from the
author of Maps for
Lost Lovers.
James Hamilton-Paterson is
among the most singular and eclectic craftsmen in contemporary fiction; he
follows his recent nonfiction elegy to British aviation, The
Empire of the Clouds, with Under the Radar (Faber,
May), a fictional account of a practice raid by British pilots flying
nuclear-armed Vulcan bombers at the height of the cold war.
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