What does the future hold? Well, when the literary prize season rolls around in the autumn, there’s nothing the pundits like better than a Battle of the Beasts. Plenty of that to look forward to in 2005, especially on the fiction front. There will be new novels from Ian McEwan (Saturday, from Jonathan Cape, in February) and Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown, also Cape, September), Zadie Smith (On Beauty, Hamish Hamilton, September), Sebastian Faulks (The Footprints on Mount Low, Hutchinson, September) and Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go, Faber, March). And certain to hurtle into the bestseller lists in the autumn will be the new Hannibal Lecter novel from Thomas Harris, Behind the Mask (Heinemann).

Some fine names will be bringing out collections of stories, too. Matthew Kneale, whose wonderful novel English Passengers won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 2001, publishes Small Crimes in an Age of Abundance (Picador); stories described as “thematically linked”. That seems to be the way to sell stories, these days. Tim Winton, twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has a collection coming (also Picador) in April; The Turning contains 17 linked stories. Chatto publish Alice Munro’s new collection, Runaway, in February, which links three of its tales around a central character.

Michel Faber’s last book, the vast novel The Crimson Petal and the White, was one of the hits of 2002. He returns to the story form with The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories (Canongate, September).

New names to watch: Bloomsbury’s Helen Oyeyemi, whose first novel, The Icarus Girl, traverses Nigerian and English cultures (January); Tash Aw, whose novel The Harmony Silk Factory (Fourth Estate, March) is being compared to The English Patient — it is set in Malaysia in the 1930s and 40s, and rights have already been sold around the world. Viking will publish Nicole Krauss’s debut, The History of Love, in May. When the opening of this novel was published in The New Yorker earlier this year, I thought it was the best fiction I’d read in that (always wonderful) magazine for a long time, and I’d never heard of her. Now I have; and it’s worth noting that she’s part of what can only be called an American literary power-couple, as she’s the wife of Jonathan Safran Foer. His debut, Everything Is Illuminated, was one of the best novels of 2002 — and his next book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, appears from Hamish Hamilton in June. With great courage, JSF took on the Holocaust in his first book; his new one is narrated by a boy who lost his father on 9/11.

On the non-fiction shelves, Dava Sobel returns with The Planets, “the human story of the nine planets of the solar system” (Fourth Estate, September). A grand theme for a writer; as is Karen Armstrong’s next offering, The Great Transformation (Atlantic, September). Armstrong’s memoir, The Spiral Staircase, was one of the great pleasures of 2004, charting her shift away from the certainty of religious faith; her new book is described as a “spiritual prehistory of the world”.

We have never been more interested in the lives of “ordinary” people; at least that’s what they call them. My Father’s Rifle is Hiner Saleem’s story of growing up in war-torn Iraqi Kurdistan (Atlantic, February). Alexander Masters’s Stuart: A Life Backwards (Fourth Estate, April) is the story of Stuart Shorter, a homeless man whose life the author has reconstructed, starting with its end. Bernard Hare’s Urban Grimshaw and the Shed Crew (Sceptre, June) is another look at the underbelly of British life — Hare hooks up with a gang of delinquent children on a rough estate in Leeds.

But if you want glamour instead of grit, Headline will publish By Myself and Then Some, Lauren Bacall’s memoir, in April. Hugo Vickers will give us his certainly authoritative biography of the Queen Mother (Hutchinson, September). It will be a good year — as it almost always is, it has to be said — for Shakespeare, too. Peter Ackroyd’s long-awaited biography of the Bard (a book to equal his biography of London, his publishers tell us) will come out from Chatto in October; from Faber comes 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare by James Shapiro (October). Once more unto the literary breach. . .

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