For the weightiest novel of the autumn – or pretty much any season – Alan Moore has the grandest ambition. “The intention was to somehow combine four or five different books or impulses for books into one coherent whole,” the author – best known for his graphic novels, including Watchmen, The League of Gentlemen and V for Vendetta – says of Jerusalem, a 1,266-page words-only union of science and fantasy that references a wide range of historical figures, from Albert Einstein to Oliver Cromwell.
Moore spent a decade on his all-encompassing tale, which is set in his native Northampton, England.
“This is the book in which I have written most directly about the things that are most central to my life, these being my family and the place that I emerged from,” he says. “By making the narrative so personal and specific, I hoped to conjure a kind of universality, an evocation of the families and places that we all come from at some point in our ancestry, irrespective of who or where we are.
"But the fact remains that the materials of Jerusalem come from a source very close to me."
Autumn is the time for “big books”, irrespective of page count, and some of the top fiction authors from around the world have new works coming soon, including Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Margaret Atwood, T C Boyle, Rabih Alameddine, Emma Donoghue, Jonathan Safran Foer and Michael Chabon.
As owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, Ann Patchett is looking forward to Jacqueline Woodson's autobiographical novel Another Brooklyn, and Colson Whitehead's celebrated, Oprah Winfrey-endorsed, historical novel about slavery, The Underground Railroad.
An author in her own right, Patchett will also be promoting her novel Commonwealth, although she will be keeping it low-key at Parnassus Books.
“I’ll sign them, put them in a linen bag, send them off with a picture of my dog Sparky – Sparky is the ‘value added’ element,” she says.
Another bookshop-owning author, Jeff Kinney, has completed Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Double Down, the 11th instalment in his multimillion-selling series. He will tour worldwide to promote the book, but at his own shop, An Unlikely Story, in Plainville, Massachusetts, the message is "try not to overdo it on the Wimpy Kid front".
“We have two small roller units with my books, and that’s about it,” says Kinney. “I don’t think someone coming off the street would know I own the bookstore if they hadn’t heard beforehand.”
Whitehead’s novel is one of several notable new accounts of black life, past and present.
Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery's book, They Can't Kill Us All, focuses on the Black Lives Matter movement.
The Fire This Time, edited by Jesmyn Ward, is a collection of essays and poems on race by Isabel Wilkerson, Kevin Young and 16 others.
Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures, which has been adapted into a feature film, documents the historic contributions made by black women mathematicians to the US space programme.
Douglas R Egerton's Thunder at the Gates tells of the black Civil War soldiers portrayed in the 1989 movie Glory, which he describes as a "powerful, beautifully acted" production that "manages to get absolutely everything wrong". He says fiction and nonfiction about slavery and the Civil War have become more prominent in recent years.
“When I was younger, novels that wrestled with slavery were few and often published by obscure presses,” he says. “That appears to be no longer true.
“Perhaps also the sesquicentennial of the war and the dawn of Reconstruction has led ... to a rebirth of scholarship about black history. One of the depressing things about going to conferences now is to wander through the book exhibit and realise how many new books there are that I need to read.”
Two books that could contain tough words for American presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are scheduled for November 15.
Coming out a week after election day in America is Bernie Sanders's Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In, which is expected to include his thoughts on his surprisingly competitive primary battle with Clinton, while Megyn Kelly's Settle for More will probably recount her feud with Trump and her thoughts on deposed Fox News chairman Roger Ailes.
In music books, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run is likely to be the hottest rock memoir since Keith Richards's Life in 2010.
The Band's Robbie Robertson gives us his Testimony this autumn, while My Life with Earth, Wind & Fire is a posthumous release from the group's founder, Maurice White, with an introduction by Steve Harvey and foreword by producer David Foster.
Brian Wilson and fellow Beach Boys founder (also his first cousin) Mike Love continue their long-running and occasionally litigious family competition as Wilson releases I Am Brian Wilson, while Love has Good Vibrations. Often cast as the business-minded Beach Boy, at odds with the visionary Wilson, Love will provide detailed accounts of how he wrote the lyrics to many of the band's best-known songs.
“The problem is you have hundreds of thousands of words about us, not always by people who were actually there,” Love says. “I wanted to show how I was actually working on the songs with my cousin, writing the lyrics while he was creating those incredible chord processions and harmonies.”
Other musical memoirs are coming from veteran Welsh singer Tom Jones, songwriter Carole Bayer Sager and the Sex Pistols' Steve Jones. Beatles fans with some extra cash might consider A Hard Day's Night: A Private Archive, a volume of photographs, documents and memorabilia, costing US$125 (Dh460), about the 1964 film that stunned critics and delighted fans. Annotation is provided by one of the world's foremost Beatles experts, Mark Lewisohn.
“It isn’t only the end-product that’s extraordinary, it’s the background story, too,” he says.
"It always comes down to the people, to the four guys themselves. Why was A Hard Day's Night their first film when it could have been their third or fourth? They'd had movie offers for six months before this one and turned them all down, because The Beatles were always innately clear on what not to do as well as what to do.
“They were prepared to risk never appearing in a film at all rather than say yes to something ‘soft,’ which in their vocabulary meant ‘stupid’.”
artslife@thenational.ae
