NONFICTION

Publishers are an imitative bunch, and two events will hog the schedules in 2009 — Charles Darwin and the downturn. It’s hard to know which we’ll be more wearied by come the end of the year.

Certainly, with this being the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, we can expect an avalanche of books about the author of On the Origin of Species. Steve Jones’s Darwin’s Island: The Galapagos in the Garden of England (Little, Brown, this month) should prove one of the best about both man and influence, but watch out for a late intervention by Richard Dawkins, due on November 24, the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s most famous book.

Similar publishing overload can be expected about the economic downturn, and here, as well, two books look particularly interesting. Vince Cable was one of the star political turns of 2008, and his The Storm: The World Economic Crisis and What It Means (Atlantic, April) could set the seal on his reputation as an economic analyst. Equally compelling, though, may be Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown, March). Tett was one of the first to predict the current economic collapse, and her subtitle, How an Ingenious Tribe of Bankers Rewrote the Rules of Finance, Made a Fortune and Unleashed a Catastrophe, gives an idea of where she’s coming from.

Elsewhere, biography looks particularly well served in 2009, with first-time literary lives of both Muriel Spark (by Martin Stannard; Weidenfeld, August) and William Golding (by John Carey; Faber, October), and Ion Trewin’s highly anticipated life of the Tory renegade and uninhibited diarist Alan Clark (Weidenfeld, September). In memoir, William Fiennes, one of the finest stylists of his generation and a former Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, writes about an idyllic childhood overshadowed by his brother’s epilepsy in The Music Room (Picador, April), while in history, we are offered several mouth-watering prospects: Antony Beevor on D-Day (Viking, May), David Starkey on Henry VIII: Model of a Tyrant (HarperPress, April), Paul Kennedy on the Turn of the Tide: How the War Was Won, January 1943 to June 1944 (Allen Lane, May), and Norman Davies scouring European history for his study of Vanished Kingdoms (Bodley Head, October), which takes in everything from the post-Roman Kingdom of Strathclyde to the Soviet Union.

FICTION

If 2008 was mostly about new voices in fiction — Ross Raisin and Aravind Adiga among them — then 2009 looks like being a year for the big beasts, with a clutch of Booker winners and shortlisted authors publishing new works in the next 12 months.

Among them will be AS Byatt, whose The Children’s Book (Chatto, May), set in Edwardian England, marks a return to the atmosphere and ambience of her popular Booker winner Possession. She’ll be vying for the attention of the Man Booker judges with three other novelists looking to the past for their inspiration: Sarah Waters, who takes us back to the 1940s with a gothic ghost story, The Little Stranger (Virago, June); Hilary Mantel, who explores power politics in Henry VIII’s reign in Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, May); and Colm Toibin, who, after two Booker near-misses, may finally make the grade with the promising-sounding Brooklyn (Viking, May), the story of a young woman’s attempts to start a new life in 1950s New York.

Others looking to catch the judges’ eye come the autumn will be Margaret Atwood, with “an epic of biblical proportions” (The Year of the Flood; Bloomsbury, September), Monica Ali (In the Kitchen; Doubleday, May), William Trevor, who has a novel and a collection of short stories both out this year, Giles “The Last King of Scotland” Foden, who reimagines the D-day landings in his July novel, Turbulence (Faber), and Nick Hornby, whose Juliet, Naked (Viking, September), the story of a reclusive rock star, is set not in his usual stamping ground, north London, but in Lincolnshire and America.

The novelist making the biggest splash in 2009, though, will undoubtedly be Martin Amis. His September outing, The Pregnant Widow (Cape), is, he has announced, “blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme”. Expect fevered speculation all summer about his love life, his eccentric world-view and his equivocal relationship with his father.

America has its fair share of important authors producing new books this year, among them Philip Roth (The Humbling, Cape, September) and Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice, Penguin, August), but it will also be the place to look for the most promising new writers. Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Chatto, March), originally published in French and winner of two literary awards over the Channel, may hog the literary limelight in early spring, but much more rewarding could be CE Morgan’s debut novel, All the Living (Fourth Estate, March), a stunningly realised account of a claustrophobic relationship on a run-down tobacco farm.

Two other richly gifted newcomers to look out for are Sana Krasikov, author of a wonderfully wise collection of short stories about Russians in America, One More Year (Portobello, June), and David Vann, whose haunting collection of tales, Legend of a Suicide (Viking, August), revolves around a father’s death.

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