And 2014 slid past, faster than we could read through the calendar. But 2015 promises to have many good things up its capacious — and metaphorical — sleeve. Whether you like the feel and heft of a paper-printed book — with philistine obstinacy and many apologies to the trees that cringe from the axe — or prefer a more ‘eco-friendly’ and compact e-reader of whatever configuration, there are treasures to be opened, say publishing pundits.
Much expected is J.K. Rowling’s new work. She has been making noises about changing her mind and doing more in the Harry Potter series — offshoots of secondary characters rather than the continuance of the lightning-scarred hero’s own story — but this is not a fictional piece. Instead, April 14, 2015 — as announced by Little, Brown Book Group — will see the release of Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination , Rowling’s 2008 Harvard Commencement speech, with illustrations by Joel Holland. Will it have the same gripping narrative as Harry and Co?
Perhaps the big names that will really make a big splash are truly unexpected additions to a roster that deserves awing and oohing. J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and Seymour Glass could be back in the first of five new books due for publication between 2015 and 2020. This was reportedly the instruction given by the late author before he died. Another great writer resurfaces with The Buried Giant , Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel after a 10-year hiatus. Expected on March 3 from Faber & Faber, not much is known about this one except that it is a “sometimes savage, often intensely moving” story, “a truly sublime new chapter in one of the most significant bodies of work of anyone writing today”. Excited? So are many thousands of eager readers who have pre-ordered the book.
Where there is a book, there will be money. And one such partnership is apparently worth $2 million or thereabouts. Knopf author Garth Risk Hallberg refuses to comment but his debut work, City on Fire , set in New York city of the 1990s and spanning 900 pages (so far, since the author is apparently still fine-tuning it) has seven sections and has to do with a locked East Village townhouse and a shooting in Central Park, but is otherwise a production shrouded in mystery. Hallberg is a much-vaunted literary critic, but whether that will make his hugely-anticipated book a bestseller remains to be seen when it arrives in stores on September 9, 2015.
Nobel winner Toni Morrison makes her return after the 2012 Home , with her 11th book, God Help the Child , from Knopf, due April 21, 2015. It is reportedly a novel about “the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult”, and is the story of a woman who calls herself ‘Bride’. It begins, the publisher reveals, with a provocative line: “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me.” Another fine writer, Pulitzer Prize-winner Anne Tyler, is due to release A Spool of Blue Thread on February 10, 2015 from Chatto & Windus. It is a “sprawling family saga” about the Whitshanks, “people we instantly know and recognise”, intimate, dramatic and insightful.
There is even more excitement ahead. First Second releases The Sculptor , a new graphic novel by Scott McCloud, in February 2015. It is an urban fable about the price of art and the value of life, with a little magic to make it all more fun. And Jonathan Franzen will be back in September with Purity , a “multigenerational American epic”, from Farrar Strauss & Giroux/Fourth Estate. To round up, there is Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman, releasing on January 6, 2015 from Scribner, about women who did strange things and almost became famous.
All of which should make 2015 a very readable year indeed!
