Forecasting the big books of the coming year is a bit like forecasting the weather: You know there'll be rain and wind, but you don't know when or how much. There will be hot books and good books, and maybe even a few that are both, but there are bound to be surprises, too.
In fiction, one surefire superseller is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, due out July 16. In nonfiction, the only certain hit looks to be historian David McCullough's 1776, due in stores May 24.
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Dan Brown, author of the megaseller The Da Vinci Code, is working on a sequel to that book. That would give Harry Potter a run for the lead, but while Brown's Web site says it's tentatively scheduled to appear next summer, there has been no official announcement.
A few usual suspects -- John Grisham with The Broker and Danielle Steel with Impossible -- will surely sell tons of books, but teasing out the best to look forward to is a trickier business. Still, there are clear highlights in the first half of the year.
Andover's Mary McGarry Morris publishes her sixth novel, The Lost Mother, the story of a rural family in Depression-era Vermont, this month. Morris's first novel, Vanished, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her best-selling Songs in Ordinary Time was an Oprah's Book Club pick. Writer Liz Benedict's new novel, The Practice of Deceit, is due in June. Ian McEwan's newest, Saturday, set amid a massive London peace demonstration, comes out in March. It's his first since his best-selling Atonement in 2003.
Kazuo Ishiguro's biggest book is still The Remains of the Day, made into a film with Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. In his April novel, Never Let Me Go, three friends remember happy days at an English boarding school, but the dark truth about the school is gradually revealed. Novelist and war correspondent-emeritus Philip Caputo, of Connecticut, returns in May with a timely novel of the strife in Sudan, titled Acts of Faith.
This year also brings new collections of stories by John Edgar Wideman (God's Gym, February), Worcester-born John Dufresne (Jonny Too Bad, February), James Salter (Last Night, April), and Newton's Jonathan Wilson (An Ambulance Is on the Way, February). Wilson is chairman of the English Department at Tufts University. Wideman teaches at Brown University.
Also this month, Mary Gordon offers Pearl, the tale of a single New Yorker who learns that her daughter is protesting violence in Ireland and elsewhere by chaining herself to the US embassy in Dublin. Boston's Sue Miller has an April novel, Lost in the Forest, about the struggles of a woman bereft after her husband's death in a traffic accident. And Hull's Jennifer Haigh, whose Mrs. Kimble was a surprise hit in 2003, returns this month with her second novel, Baker Towers.
Stewart O'Nan's most famous recent book in these parts is probably Faithful, the chronicle of the 2004 Red Sox season, co-written with Stephen King. But fiction fans know him for Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, and 2003's The Night Country.Now comes The Good Wife in April, the tale of a woman who must raise her child alone while her husband spends decades in prison.
In nonfiction, the Founding Fathers continue to inspire new books, the biggest of which will undoubtedly be 1776, McCullough's first book since the blockbuster John Adams. Beginning with the winter siege of Boston and ending with the battle of Trenton on Christmas Day, the book focuses on the characters and events of the most fateful year of the struggle for independence.
Financial journalist and historian James Grant in February offers another portrait of the second president in John Adams: Party of One, which gives special attention to Adams's effort to gain financial support for the revolutionary cause in the Netherlands. A related work, due in April, is Stacy Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. Schiff won the Pulitzer Prize for Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), and here she tackles Gentle Ben's amazing success as delegate to the French court, where he craftily wangled huge loans to finance the War of Independence.
A decidedly less uplifting story, coming out in February, is John Mack Faragher's A Great and Noble Scheme: The Expulsion of the French Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755. It tells the story of the first wholesale deportation in North American history: 18,000 people were loaded on ships and dumped in ports in Europe and America, and their lands given to English settlers. A few ended up in Louisiana and became the ancestors of the Cajuns.
Medicine is a perennial subject, and this year brings some unusual entries. The Framingham Heart Study, which began in 1948 and revolutionized the treatment of heart disease, is the subject of Daniel Levy and Susan Brink's A Change of Heart: How the Framingham Heart Study Helped Unravel the Mysteries of Cardiovascular Disease, due in February. Brink is a journalist, and Levy, who lives in Newton, is director of the ongoing study.
The stirring tale of a medical maverick is Jeffrey Kluger's Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, out this month. Ira M. Rutkow's Bleeding Blue and Gray: The Untold Story of Civil War Medicine, in April, recalls the heroic efforts of pioneers in medicine and nursing, but also reminds us that those killed outright in Civil War battles were often the lucky ones.
Elsewhere in science, MIT faculty appear in this year's booklists, including inventor and visionary Ray Kurzweil, with The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, in March, and physicist/novelist Alan Lightman with A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and the Human Spirit, this month. Lightman's essays focus on such figures as Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman as well as the connections among art, science, and the imagination.
Apart from our bodies, there's the fate of the earth, dealt with by geographer Jared Diamond, author of the best-selling Guns, Germs, and Steel, in his new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, this month. Also, there's Alan Burdick's Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion, due in May.
Diamond writes of societies that destroyed themselves by trashing their environmental support systems. Burdick's book is a chronicle of the rampant worldwide spread of animal and plant species, displacing native local forms and threatening both man and nature.
This year's crop of memoirs includes Vermont novelist Howard Norman's In Fond Remembrance of Me, in February; Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood, in February, by Boston-born Koren Zailckas; and Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow, in April.
Norman writes of his 1977 project in Churchill, Manitoba, translating Inuit folktales into English, where he met a dying Anglo/Japanese linguist who was translating the same stories into Japanese. A brief, bittersweet relationship developed between them. Zailckas relates her history of out-of-control party drinking in her teens, what it cost her, and how she pulled herself together. Timm's book, translated from the German, recalls his family's reverent memories of his older brother, who died on the Eastern Front in World War II, serving with the dreaded Totenkopf (Death's Head) division of the Nazi SS, as well as Timm's own efforts in adulthood to learn the truth.
Finally, two uncategorized books: Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages, in March, by Yale religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan, and Legends of Winter Hill: Cops, Con Men, and Joe McCain, the Last Real Detective, also in March, by Salem-based novelist Jay Atkinson.
In the aftermath of all the tussling over religion and morals in the 2004 election campaign, Pelikan explores the known origins of the Bible and how it evolved through various versions and translations to be the book it is today. Atkinson, author of novels Caveman Politics and Ice Time, spent a year as a fledgling private detective in Boston, working with Joe McCain Jr, son of legendary Boston police detective Joe McCain Sr. Besides describing his own year as a PI, Atkinson chronicles the late senior McCain's battles with such Boston mob figures as Howard Winter and James "Whitey" Bulger. Atkinson didn't make a permanent career change -- he teaches English at Salem State College.
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