Alex Preston from The Observer bemoans the mediocre year just gone, but offers good cheer for the year to come. Here are some of his suggestions that particularly interest me:
- The long awaited and highly anticipated finale to Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March) – under strict embargo!
- Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) by Maggie O’Farrell – “an […] imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway.”
- Apeirogon (Bloomsbury, February), by Colum McCann “…ambitious formally and thematically, taking on the Israel-Palestine conflict in a work that is both spectacularly inventive and grounded in hard, often brutal fact. It is about grief and forgiveness, about family and politics… If you can read it without sobbing, you’re a monster.”
- Sebastian Barry’s A Thousand Moons (Faber, March). “Set in the wake of the American civil war, it tells the story of Winona, a brave, bruised orphan from the Lakota tribe whose new life on a Tennessee farmstead is threatened by the past.”
- “…the final part of Ali Smith’s era-defining seasonal quartet, Summer (Penguin, July)”
- Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves (Text, July) (“..which I’ve read and it’s every bit as good as The Secret River” says Preston – let us hope!)
A very nice start I would say. Preston’s preview in its entirety can be found here on The Guardian site.