From a full programme of film and stage adaptations to a new James Bond novel, unpublished works by RS Thomas and WG Sebald and a new prize for women writers, 2013 is set to be a real page-turner
Margaret Atwood: the long-awaited final
novel in her apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy will be published in August.
Photograph: Mark Blinch/Reuters
January
10th The
Oscar nominations are announced unusually early this year. Keep an eye out for a
bumper crop of literary adaptations, including David Mitchell's Cloud
Atlas, Yann Martel's Life
of Pi, the David
Nicholls-scripted Great Expectations, as well as
Les Miserables, Anna
Karenina and The Hobbit.
18th A new
stage adaptation of Henry James's The Turn
of the Screw at the Almeida theatre in London. In the year of the
centenary of Benjamin Britten's
birth, his musical version will also feature around the country in both concert
and stage performances.
24th The
finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be
announced at the Jaipur festival. Philip Roth's victory last
time was preceded by a resignation from the judging panel and followed by much
recrimination. Will this year's jury chaired by Christopher Ricks and comprising
Elif Batuman, Aminatta
Forna, Yiyun Li and Tim
Parks be more collegiate?
28th The 200th anniversary of publication of
Pride and Prejudice in 1813. It is a truth universally
acknowledged that such an anniversary will be accompanied by re-issues,
mash-ups, adaptations and many, many tributes.29th The announcement of the winner of the overall Costa award will this year be accompanied by the crowning of the first winner of the new short story prize.
Fiction
Pow! by
Mo
Yan (Seagull Books). The first new novel in English from the
Chinese author awarded the 2012 Nobel literature prize for his "hallucinatory
realism" is a riotous carnival of food, sex and death in rural China.
Tenth
of December by George Saunders (Bloomsbury).
A welcome return for the master of the surreal short story. Disturbing drug
trials; a morale-boosting memo to a bizarre workforce; a very strange garden
decoration … In this new collection Saunders uses comic bureaucracy to hint at
atrocity, and spins poignant parables out of his characters' hesitation and
inarticulacy.
Wool
by Hugh Howey (Century). Will SF be the new
Fifty Shades? Howey's post-apocalyptic dystopia, in which the remnants
of humanity have built a claustrophobic civilisation in underground silos, took
off online after being self-published as a serial in 2011. Film rights have been
snapped up by Ridley Scott.
How
Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti (Harvill
Secker). A beguiling "novel from life" about creativity and authenticity that's
been taking the States by storm. Mixing real conversations and emails with
bedroom confessionals, self-help mantras and doses of pure fiction, this
portrait of Toronto playwright "Sheila" and her artist friends has been
characterised as "Girls in book form".
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