Now read this: what’s on offer for reading in 2016

Welcome to our annual look ahead at some of the books due to be published over the next 12 months.

Fiona McFarlane is one of the shortlisted writers. The Stella Prize, worth $50,000 an now in its second year, is for Australian women writers. Pictured around her home in Newtown.

Welcome to our annual look ahead at some of the books due to be published over the next 12 months. Before we start, let me extend good wishes of the season to all readers. As usual, it’s difficult to know where to start when considering the next crop of books. I’m writing this just before Christmas and already my desk is piled with proof copies stretching into April. And then there’s the publishers’ advance catalogues, which go deeper into the year and which I’ve perused. I’m tempted to start with the book I’ve spotted that I’m most looking forward to, because it’s not what you might expect, but I’m going to save it for later. Instead, I’m going to start in a back to the future sort of fashion.

One of the authors I devoured as a young man was Kenneth Cook, who remains best known for his 1961 novel Wake in Fright. I think that tale of lust, madness and malignant mateship in the outback is a great Australian novel, and that the 1971 screen version, directed by a Canadian, Ted Kotcheff, is one of the best Australian films. It’s the only one of Cook’s numerous books that I’ve re-read, to refresh my memory when the film was re-released a few years ago, and it stands up well. But I can still recall the thrill I felt reading his other books decades ago, especially the nihilistic The Man Undergound (1977) and the brutal Bloodhouse (1963). Bloodhouse, with its urban fringe pub setting, reminds me of another of my favourite Australian writers, David Ireland. As it happens Ireland and Cook were both born in the Sydney suburb of Lakemba, in 1927 and 1929 respectively. There must have been something in the water. While Ireland is still with us, Cook died of a heart attack in 1987. Imagine my interest, then, when I learned Text Publishing (which has championed Ireland) will publish a new Kenneth Cook novel, Fear is the Rider, in February. The novel, also set in the outback and centred on a woman being pursued by an “inexplicable, terrifying creature”, has been produced from an unpublished manuscript from the 1980s recently found in Cook’s papers.

Last year was such an impressive one for Australian fiction that you might expect a bit of a lull, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Two of our most promising young writers, Fiona McFarlane and Hannah Kent, have new books due. McFarlane, an awards shortlist regular for her debut novel of tigers in the attic, The Night Guest, follows up with a story collection The High Places (Hamish Hamilton, late January), while Kent, author of the bestselling Burial Rites, is expected to publish her second novel with Pan Macmillan later in the year. Macmillan also promises new novels by blockbuster authors Di Morrisey and Matthew Reilly. Also much anticipated is Tara June Winch’s story collection A Year of Impossible Margins (UQP, August), her first book since the award-winning Swallow The Air in 2006.

Toni Jordan, one of our cleverest, funniest writers, has a new novel of relationships sour and sweet, Our Tiny, Useless Hearts (Text, May). Emily Maguire’s new novel An Isolated Incident (Picador, March) is billed as a “psychological thriller about everyday violence”, while in One (Transit Lounge, April, Patrick Holland, a writer of striking range and originality, fictionalises the lines of the Kenniff brothers, who have claims to being Australia’s last bushrangers. That other well-known bushranger receives the graphic novel treatment in Ned Kelly: The Man Behind the Mask (New South, February), by former RAAF intelligence officer turned author Hugh Dolan. Transit Lounge, which punches well above its weight, also has AS Patric’s new one, Atlantic Black, scheduled for November and another novel from William Lane, The Salmanders, due in July. Queensland writer Inga Simpson, author of the acclaimed Nest (2014), follows up with a novel of trees and childhood, Where the Trees Are (Hachette, April).

Kirsten Tranter’s third novel, Hold (March), is described by publisher HarperCollins as “a journey through grief and desire, betrayal and loss’’. Georgia Blain’s intriguingly titled Between and Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, April) is “a novel about dissatisfactions and anxieties in the face of relative privilege’’. David Brooks, another writer of great originality, has a story collection, Napoleon’s Roads, with UQP next month. Philip Salom, best known as a poet, will publish a novel of cross-dressing and academia, Waiting (Puncher & Wattman, March), for which a queue of would-be reviewers has already formed. Sydney writer Suzanne Leal will have a new novel, a yet-to-be-titled public school drama, with Allen and Unwin in June. I know this because I bumped into her Christmas shopping at Rebel Sport and she told me.

By the way, when I was in the sports store I heard another customer ask a sales assistant what was popular with 10-year-old boys this Christmas. The young man answered in a way that made it seem he’d beem asked whether rain was wet: “Messi jerseys.” I’d already bought mine. No surprise then that my 10-year-old has an order in for Luca Caioli’s Messi vs Ronaldo (A&U, February), about the rivalry between the world’s two greatest football players. Personally, I’m keener on the autobiography of race horse trainer Gai Waterhouse that A&U has scheduled for later in the year.

Australian debut novels to catch the eye include Josephine Rowe’s A Loving, Faithful Animal (UQP, March), Robyn Mundy’s Wildlight (Picador, March), Kelly Doust’s Precious Things (HarperCollins, April), Anna Westbrook’s Dark Fires Shall Burn (Scribe, May) and JD Barrett’s The Secret Recipe for Second Chances (Hachette, April). Olga Lorenzo, author of the much-praised 1996 novel Rooms at My Mother’s House (1996), is back with The Light on the Water (A&U, February). In literary studies, Black Inc has a Philip Pacquet biography of sinologist and author Pierre Ryckmans, aka Simon Leys, slated for June. I’ve yet to see a copy but I’d love to read Living on Paper (Chatto & Windus), a just-published collection of Iris Murdoch’s letters.

Crime fiction is set for a strong year, with one of the more unusual offerings being The Soldier’s Curse (Vintage, March), the first instalment of a historical crime series by living legend Tom Keneally and his daughter Margaret. Peter Corris sends the durable Cliff Hardy around the block again in That Empty Feeling (A&U, out now); Adrian McKinty’s cracking Carrickfergus copper Sean Duffy has his fifth outing in Rain Dogs (A&U, now) and Philip Kerr’s sardonic German sleuth Bernie Gunther returns in The Other Side of Silence (Hachette, April). I know A&U has high hopes for the just-published American Blood, by Auckland writer Ben Sanders. Melina Marchetta shows her dark side in Shaming the Devil (Penguin, September).

We can also expect new books from most of the big guns of international crime fiction, including Jeffrey Deaver, Linwood Barclay, John Connolly, Harlan Coben, Lee Child, Peter May, Kathy Reichs, Jo Nesbo and Camilla Lackberg. Sophie Hannah, who took time off to write an authorised Hercule Poirot novel, returns to her bread and butter with a psychological thriller, The Narrow Bed (Hachette, February), about a killer who targets best friends. In true crime, Clive Small and Tom Gilling examine the Calabrian mafia down under in Evil Life (A&U, February), Martin McKenzie-Murray considers the 2004 killing of Perth woman Rebecca Kyle in A Murder Without Motive (Scribe, February) and British author Kate Summerscale of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher fame recounts a sensational Victorian murder trial and its aftermath in The Wicked Boy (Bloomsbury, May).

When it comes to international fiction, we need to start with the book that probably won’t be published this year: The Mirror and the Light, the concluding instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. It was tentatively expected, but a spokeswoman for HarperCollins said no publication date had been announced. “We must just wait,’’ she added. Indeed we must, however impatiently. Until then we will have to make do with, oh, Don DeLillo, who in May will publish Zero K. Publisher Macmillan describes the novel, which centres on a billionaire who is investing in mortality-defying technologies, as “a meditation on death, and an embrace of life’’.

Another veteran American novelist, E. Annie Proulx, will publish her first novel in a decade, Barkskins (HarperCollins, June). It’s billed as “an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about taming the wilderness and destroying the forest, set over three centuries’’. Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time (Jonathan Cape, February) is his first novel since winning the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. It’s a very different book, at least outwardly, as it’s set in Leningrad in 1937. Another fine English stylist, Graham Swift (1996 Booker for Last Orders) returns with Mothering Sunday (Simon & Schuster, March), a story of secret lovers. While on Booker winners, Yann Martel (Life of Pi, 2002) has a new novel called The High Mountains of Portugal (Text, February) which looks like a lot of fabulist fun; Howard Jacobson (The Finkler Question, 2010) is next in the Hogarth Shakespeare series with Shylock Is My Name (February), a reimagining of The Merchant of Venice; and Avarind Adiga (The White Tiger, 2008) returns to India with Selection Day (Macmillan, May).

American novelist Jonathan Safran Foer’s provocatively titled new novel is The Destruction of Israel (Hamish Hamilton, October). Edmund White’s Our Young Man (Bloomsbury, June) is the story of a modern day Dorian Gray (as narcissists go, a shade more interesting than that other Mr Grey). Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With a Pearl Earring, turns to 19th century America and family saga in At the Edge of the Orchard (HarperCollins, March). Jeffrey Archer steers his massive Clinton Chronicles to the end (there will be one more book) in Cometh the Hour (Macmillan, March). Popular philosopher Alain De Botton makes his second foray into fiction with The Course of Love (Hamish Hamilton, May), “a philosophical novel about modern relationships). The Penguin Random House empire tells us to expect a new novel from Ali Smith later in the year, an autobiography from Australia-loving comedian and writer Ben Elton and also Paula Hawkins’s follow-up to her bestselling thriller The Girl on the Train. Zadie Smith will publish a collection of essays, Feel Free (Hamish Hamilton, July).

Michael Heyward, head honcho at Text, has a keen eye for foreign novels and his latest obsession (I believe that is how his office described it to me) is Fever at Dawn (February), by Hungarian writer Peter Gardos. That’s enough to put it on my reading pile. Other international titles of note include The Last Painting of Sara de Vos, by Sydney-born Dominic Smith (A&U, May), Janice YK Lee’s The Expatriates (Hachette, now), Jesse Ball’s How to Set a Fire and Why (Text, March), Eben Venter’s Trencherman (Scribe, May), Han Kang’s Human Acts (A&U, February), Muriel Barber’s The Life of Elves (Text, February) and Meg Rosoff’s Jonathan Unleashed (Bloomsbury, February). And the following novels are by writers I’ve not heard of, but which look interesting: Virginia Reeves’s Work Like Any Other (Simon & Schuster, March); Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier (Faber, March), Nick Seele’s Cambodia Noir (Simon & Schuster, April) and Ian McGuire’s The North Water (Simon & Schuster, February).

Anyone who has been revelling in Helen Garner’s essays of late — so whip-smart and unflinching, whether on the insults of age, a terrible murder trial, memories of her mother or the pleasures of re-reading Jane Austen — will look forward to Everywhere I Look (Text, April), a collection of her shorter nonfiction spanning the past 15 years. The wonderful photo of the author we have run here will be on the cover. Text will also publish English translations of Second-Hand Time (June), a portrait of post-Soviet societ by the incumbent Nobel laureate in literature, Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, and Men (May), an award-winning exploration of female desire by French novelist Marie Darrieussecq. Actor and author Gillian Anderson (I would say of X-Files fame, but I like her best in The Fall) and journalist Jennifer Nadel have collaborated on a “manifesto for modern women” titled We (HarperCollins, March), while New South plans an updated 40th anniversary edition of Anne Summers’s Damned Whores and God’s Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia (March) and A&U has just put out a new edition of Chris Kraus’s classsic feminist novel I Love Dick. Australian academic and author Shakira Hussein considers another aspect of the war on terror in From Victims to Suspects: Muslim Women since 9/11 (New South, February).

Julia Leigh is the author of two fine novels, The Hunter and Disquiet. Her new book is nonfiction and sounds fascinating. Avalanche: A Love Story (Penguin, April) is about the author’s experiences with IVF after having a “late-blooming desire for a baby’’. I’ve admired Stan Grant ever since we used to play touch football on the lawns of the old Parliament House in Canberra, many years ago now. I was faster but he was tougher. His new book, Talking To My Country (HarperCollins, March), had its genesis in a powerful piece the indigenous journalist and author wrote in response to the Adam Goodes booing controversy. A&U is promising a Wendy Harmer memoir in the second half of the year. Robert Forster is a brilliant writer about music so his memoir of the Go-Betweens days, Grant & I (Penguin, September) should be worth reading. And I’m looking forward to Whole Wild World (New South, May), a childhood memoir by my former colleague Tom Dusevic, because he’s a good writer and because a nicer bloke it would be hard to meet.

However, this year’s nonfiction awards are a foregone conclusion, surely, as Ashleigh Wilson, The Australian’s esteemed arts editor, will in July publish Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing (Text). I’m only half-joking; I know how much Ashleigh has put into this book, and the access he has had, and I expect it to be a work worthy of its extraordinary subject.

When it comes to capital H history, we start with Geoffrey Blainey, who will publish volume two of The Story of Australia’s People (Penguin, October). David Hunt will follow up his entertaining history of Australian settlement, Girt, with True Girt (Black Inc, November). Henry Reynolds continues his study of war and its truths and myths in Unnecessary Wars (New South, April) and Random House howitzers Peter FitzSimons and Paul Ham each have books on World War I due towards the end of the year: Villers-Bretonneux from the man with the bandana and Passchendaele from Ham. Mikhail Gorbachev analyses the Putin era in The New Russia (Polity, June), while Simon Sebag Montefiore goes back a bit further with The Romanovs: 1613-1918 (Hachette, February). The newish pontiff release his first book next month, Pope Francis: A Conversation with Andrea Tornielli (Macmillan).

Australian counter-terrorism expert David Kilcullen will publish an updated, book-length version of his Quarterly Essay on ISIS, Blood Year (Black Inc, March). The family of ABC journalist Peter Greste has a memoir due with Penguin in September. When you change prime ministers as often as we do, it’s to be expected the political books will keep on coming. Journalist Aaron Patrick is fast out of the blocks with Credlin & Co: How the Abbott Government Destroyed Itself (Black Inc, February), while the popular Annabel Crabb runs the rule over the incumbent (at the time of writing) in Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull (Black Inc, March). The ABC’s Sarah Ferguson will publish a book based on her successful TV series about the Kevin Rudd-Julia Gillard dramas, The Killing Season Uncut (MUP, April), and her colleague over at SBS, Karen Middleton, considers a Labor leadership contender in Albanese (Random House, April). And from left field, so to speak, former Labor minister Lindsay Tanner has penned a crime novel, Comfort Zone (Scribe, February).

All these new books suggest we don’t need one on how to get published, but even so I’ll read John Birmingham’s How To Be A Writer: Who Smashes Deadlines, Crushes Editors and Lives in a a Solid Gold Hovercraft (New South, May), because he’s a very funny guy. I suspect The Art of Reading (April, MUP), by Melbourne philosopher-author will be gentler, but persuasive. But before I read either I will peruse, for perspective, Jim Bernhard’s Final Chapters: How Famous Authors Died (New South, now).

Finally, the book I mentioned at the start, the one I’m most looking forward to. It’s Lenny and Lucy (A&U, February), a picture book by American husband and wife team Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead. Their previous one, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, is utterly beautiful and has been reread many times in my household.

Well, there you have it; I honestly feel I have only scratched the surface here but I hope I’ve mentioned a few books that you will enjoy in the months ahead.