With wider windows on the Arab world, a new translation from a Nobel prize winner and some fresh names to get excited about, four of our experts pick their top book releases of the coming year.
Leah Caldwell’s picks:
The gap between the publication of an Arabic novel and its English translation can be immense – sometimes uncomfortably so. Luckily, the coming year will alleviate some of this anticipation, as 2016 brings the publication of several authors’ English-language debuts and a few long-awaited titles from more prolific novelists.
Hilal Chouman's novel Limbo Beirut, forthcoming in August, "explores how young adults in Lebanon experienced the violent clashes between Hizbollah militants and Sunni fighters in 2008", according to the University of Texas Press. It will be interesting to see how Chouman's characters make sense of the chaos and confusion of that time, which is sometimes only vaguely referred to in the Arab press as the "events of May 2008". Limbo Beirut is the third novel of Beirut-born Chouman and his first to be translated into English.
Also no stranger to recent Lebanese history is Rabee Jaber, whose 2013 novel The Mehlis Report tapped Beirut's mood during the time of Rafik Hariri's assassination. In March, New Directions will publish Jaber's Confessions, "a powerful thriller about trauma and forgiveness" set during the civil war and narrated by a boy who is adopted by the man who murders his entire family. Although Confessions is described as a thriller, Jaber's works are more psychological portrait than page-turner.
Renowned Palestinian scholar Salman Abu Sitta's first English-language memoir, Mapping My Return, also comes out in March. Abu Sitta, born in Beersheba in 1938, is a one-man archive of Palestinian history, having collected a wealth of maps and other historic documents over the years, not to mention the fact that he has witnessed first-hand nearly every major regional event of the past half-century, from the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars to the 1991 Gulf War. Abu Sitta's memoir will be a personal recounting of a painful history from a man who has seen it all.
And if you're still up for more history, Laila Parsons' biography of Commander Fawzi Al Qawuqji – who has alternately been labelled an "opportunist" and a hero of Arab independence – will debut in August. Al Qawuqji is one of those fascinating figures who manage to play prominent roles in several disparate eras of history, first fighting in the Ottoman Army in World War I and then leading the Arab Liberation Army against Israel in 1948. Parsons' The Commander: Fawzi Al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914-1948 will be as much drama as history, as she explores the reality of Al Qawuqji's "dubious motives" in these various wars.
Leah Caldwell writes for Alef Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Texas Observer
Malcolm Forbes’s picks:
The forthcoming year brings the release of much-anticipated books from both established acts and rising stars – but with the added treat of intriguing new offerings from one or two returning big names. January sees the publication of The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes' first novel since his 2011-Booker Prize winner The Sense of an Ending. Life of Pi-author Yann Martel takes the reader on another magical, fable-filled adventure in The High Mountains of Portugal, while Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday promises to be a more grounded but equally scintillating journey through the 20th century.
After Jeanette Winterson's modern rewrite of The Winter's Tale, two other authors continue the Shakespeare Retold series: next month, Howard Jacobson takes on The Merchant of Venice with Shylock is My Name, and in June, Vinegar Girl is Anne Tyler's cover version of The Taming of the Shrew. In another series, Karl Ove Knausgaard delivers the fifth instalment of his My Struggle cycle – his struggle this time being with booze, introversion and learning to write. Also in March, anglophone readers can familiarise themselves further with Patrick Modiano, the recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, as NYRB Classics publish two of his works, Young Once and In the Café of Lost Youth. In May comes the first English translation of Secondhand Time: An Oral History of the Fall of the Soviet Union, the latest book by last year's Nobel winner, Svetlana Alexievich. Javier Marias and Ismail Kadare – two novelists who, if there is any justice, will one day also become Nobel laureates – publish new fiction with Thus Bad Begins and A Girl in Exile in February and March, respectively. In May, Helen Oyeyemi and Mark Haddon release collections of short stories, What is Not Yours is Not Yours and The Pier Falls; and in June, Zadie Smith serves up a second round of essays with Feel Free. Expectations are high for several novels: Bright, Precious Things, Jay McInerney's first in 10 years; and Here I Am, Jonathan Safran Foer's first in 11. As ever, the second half of the year remains largely under wraps. One known September title is Sophie Hannah's Closed Casket. Agatha Christie fans must wait anxiously until then to see whether Hannah's second case for Hercule Poirot is a more fitting tribute to the Queen of the Crime than her first.
Malcolm Forbes is a freelance writer based in Edinburgh.
Saul Austerlitz’s picks:
In 2016, familiar literary faces will return with notably unfamiliar passions. Jhumpa Lahiri, best known for her heart-wrenching miniature sagas of the Indian-American expatriate class, has expatriated herself to Italy with the goal of teaching herself Italian. In Other Words, out in February, is her report on the process of self-consciously aping the likes of Conrad and Nabokov, complete with a new short story composed in Italian. Literary jack-of-all-trades Tom Bissell in March goes on a religious-literary pilgrimage in Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve. National Book Award-winning novelist James McBride turns his attention to biography in April, taking on the Godfather of Soul with Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for the Real James Brown. Noah Hawley, rapidly becoming a household name in the United States with his cops-and-crooks television series Fargo, turns his attention to the page this month with the aftermath-of-a-disaster thriller Before the Fall. Ben Lerner, the acclaimed young author of 10:04, has gone from writing novels about poets to theorising about the work itself with The Hatred of Poetry, out in June. And Geoff Dyer, who has made surprising transitions his forte, returns in June to familiar ground with the travelogue White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World, which tours Beijing's Forbidden City and Los Angeles' Watts Towers. Gregg Zoroya's The Chosen Few: One U.S. Army Company's Heroic Struggle to Survive in the Mountains of Afghanistan, out in May, also looks engaging.
For others, the essay is a forum to tackle material already framed in earlier doorstopper volumes. French economist Thomas Piketty follows Capital in the Twenty-First Century with his pointedly titled collection Why Save the Bankers? which is out in April. And Andrew Solomon, having completed the epochal Far From the Tree now comes back in August with the even broader-ranging Far and Away: Essays from the Brink of Change, Seven Continents, Twenty-Five Years.
A number of new books tackle the turmoil and promise of the Middle East, including Robert F Worth's In the Caliph's Shadow: The Dreams and Disorders of the New Middle East, out in April; Peter Bergen's United States of Jihad, out in February; Shadi Hamid's Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam is Reshaping the Middle East, out in May; and Janine di Giovanni in February with The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches from Syria.
Saul Austerlitaz is a critic and commentator based in New York and a frequent contributor to The Review.
Tod Wodicka’s picks:
If 2015 is any indication, most of the books I’ll be most excited about reading in 2016 will have probably been written in 1916 or 1868 or, who knows, 2008. I feel like I’m always playing catch up. The best books, usually divorced of market hype, often have a way of slipping by us all. Simply put, I’m sure there will be a few 2016 books in my pile of most anticipated 2024 reads.
That said, there are a few sure things. Surest of them being the great Don DeLillo's 16th novel in May, Zero K. One of the greatest living American authors, DeLillo novels once had a terrifying prophetic power. His novels contain the traumatic seeds of what's grown into the 21st century: terrorism and fanaticism, Wall Street run amok, the military industrial complex and the way TV has replaced reality. Nobody made more sense of the unseen workings of so-called American century than DeLillo. His new novel, Zero K, takes us to the end and possibly beyond. It is about a remote compound where scientists are working on ways to control or cheat death, and preserve the bodies of people suffering from terminal illnesses.
For a year or so now, I've been hearing absolutely incredible things about debut British novelist Megan Bradbury's Everyone is Watching to be published in June. I like boldness in a writer, and you don't get much bolder than writing a meditative, intertwining narrative of four New Yorkers living in years as disparate as my 2016 reading list will probably be: poet Walt Whitman in 1891; artist Robert Mapplethorpe in 1967; city planner and "master builder" Robert Moses in 1922; and writer Edmund White in 2013.
But back to 2016. Sometimes a book demands to be read now: and that book may be Ben Rawlence's City Of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World's Largest Refugee Camp, out in February. Half-a-million people currently live in the Dadaab Refugee Camp in the inhospitable desert in northern Kenya. Although "camp" is a rather quaint word to describe such a horrific, dystopian ad-hoc city on the burning edge of the 21st century. Rawlence spent four years there, gathering the stories of the people who are trapped with little hope in sight.
Finally, Italian author, Elena Ferrante, whose fourth and final Neapolitan novel, The Story of the Lost Child was published in September (and, if I'm honest, is actually the book I'm most looking forward to reading in 2016!) will publish Fragments in April. What should prove to be an interesting coda to one of the greatest literary achievements of this century: Fragments is a collection of writings by the mysterious novelist on why she has remained reclusive, her literary inspirations and how culture and politics have shaped her.
Tod Wodicka’s second novel The Household Spirit was published last year by Jonathan Cape. He lives in Berlin.
