Autumn is always the busiest time in the publishing calendar – this year more than ever, with new books from many of the best-known authors
Clockwise from top left: Sarah Waters, James Ellroy, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Hilary Mantel and Howard Jacobson. Photographs: Murdo MacLeod/Richard Saker/Sarah Lee/Marco Garcia
AUGUST
The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
Throughout his career, Amis has had a fascination with the Holocaust and the problem of how to engage imaginatively with a historical horror beyond imagination. He set his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow, in a world where chronology runs backward, so that the Nazi death camps become places of healing and rebirth. His new novel is just as unsettling, following the progress of a love affair in Auschwitz and taking us into the minds of Germans doing their best to normalise their part in the Nazi regime. The camp, says one character, is a mirror on the soul: "You can't turn away." But how to come to terms with such darkness? Time's Arrow was Man Booker-shortlisted, but this new novel hasn't made the cut.
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's last collection of short stories was 2006's Moral Disorder, in which the history of a family is explored from the shifting point of view of one of its members. Since then, Atwood has completed the dystopian trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake with the publication of The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. Now comes a gathering of nine stories, including her 2012 piece "I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth", in which she returns to the characters from The Robber Bride. Elsewhere, we encounter an elderly lady who finds a way to accommodate the little people she has begun to see everywhere, another woman is mistaken for a vampire and – perhaps most intriguingly – a 1.9 billion-year-old Arctic stromatolite helps to revenge an old crime. With plaudits from Alice Munro, Germaine Greer and Michael Ondaatje, this looks set to be one of the story collections of the autumn.
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The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis
(Jonathan Cape)
Throughout his career, Amis has had a fascination with the Holocaust and the problem of how to engage imaginatively with a historical horror beyond imagination. He set his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow, in a world where chronology runs backward, so that the Nazi death camps become places of healing and rebirth. His new novel is just as unsettling, following the progress of a love affair in Auschwitz and taking us into the minds of Germans doing their best to normalise their part in the Nazi regime. The camp, says one character, is a mirror on the soul: "You can't turn away." But how to come to terms with such darkness? Time's Arrow was Man Booker-shortlisted, but this new novel hasn't made the cut.
Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood
(Bloomsbury)
Atwood's last collection of short stories was 2006's Moral Disorder, in which the history of a family is explored from the shifting point of view of one of its members. Since then, Atwood has completed the dystopian trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake with the publication of The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. Now comes a gathering of nine stories, including her 2012 piece "I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth", in which she returns to the characters from The Robber Bride. Elsewhere, we encounter an elderly lady who finds a way to accommodate the little people she has begun to see everywhere, another woman is mistaken for a vampire and – perhaps most intriguingly – a 1.9 billion-year-old Arctic stromatolite helps to revenge an old crime. With plaudits from Alice Munro, Germaine Greer and Michael Ondaatje, this looks set to be one of the story collections of the autumn.More
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