2015 will be a big year for literature, with new books from Neil Gaiman, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jonathan Franzen, Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.
Which books are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter
Here are some of the most anticipated international titles to look forward to:
Blurbs provided by publisher
Trigger Warning: Short Fictions and Disturbances by Neil Gaiman
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EAN: 9781472217691
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Multiple award winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman returns to dazzle, captivate, haunt, and entertain with this third collection of short fiction following Smoke and Mirrors and Fragile Things – which includes a never-before published American Gods story, “Black Dog,” written exclusively for this volume.
Amnesia by Peter Carey
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EAN: 9780385352772
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Amnesia, Peter Carey’s first Australian novel since True History of the Kelly Gang, moves between the critical dates of 2010, 1943 and 1975 to ask the most vital question of the past 70 years: Has America taken us over?
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EAN: 9780571315048
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An extraordinary new novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
“You’ve long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it’s time now to think on it anew. There’s a journey we must go on, and no more delay…”
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.
Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.
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EAN: 9781408859933
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Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author TC Boyle makes his Ecco debut with a powerful, gripping novel that explores the roots of violence and anti-authoritarianism inherent in the American character.
Set in contemporary Northern California, The Harder They Come explores the volatile connections between three damaged people—an aging ex-Marine and Vietnam veteran, his psychologically unstable son, and the son’s paranoid, much older lover—as they careen towards an explosive confrontation.
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EAN: 9781846557248
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The fourth part of a sensational literary cycle that has been hailed as ‘perhaps the most important literary enterprise of our times’ (Rachel Cusk, Guardian).
18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to a tiny fisherman’s village far north of the polar circle to work as a school teacher. He has no interest in the job itself – or in any other job for that matter. His intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine: He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls.
But then, as the darkness of the long polar nights start to cover the beautiful landscape, Karl Ove’s life also takes a darker turn.
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EAN: 9780241145999
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Visitants traces the extraordinary travels made by Pulitzer-nominated author Dave Eggers.
For almost 20 years, Dave Eggers has been travelling widely and chronicling his interactions with the countries and people he has encountered during his journey across continents. Visitants is his first collection of travel writing, one that spans his entire career and includes pieces on Sudan, China and a dozen other destinations.
The book begins at 140kph, with Eggers being driven across the deserts of Saudi Arabia by a hired driver who declares, ‘American, boom boom!’ This opening sets the stage for the collection’s vast cultural scope and ever-present sense of adventure, inquisitiveness and daring.
From Saudi Arabia, Eggers takes us further on caterwauling sojourns in the likes of Cuba and Thailand, followed by brief stopovers in Croatia and Syria, and thought-provoking, meditative expositions on South Sudan, expanding on issues explored in his previous books. Globetrotters and Eggers fans alike will find a faithful companion in his unique combination of humour, humanism and empathy.
God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
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EAN: 9780307594174
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Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child — the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment—weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
At the centre: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally Sweetness, Bride’s mother herself, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that ‘what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.’
A fierce and provocative novel that adds a new dimension to the matchless oeuvre of Toni Morrison.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
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EAN: 9780062190376
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When the moon blows up, the earth’s atmosphere is predicted to go through changes that will eventually lead to a Hard Rain, a meteorite storm that could last for thousands of years, rendering the earth’s surface uninhabitable. In preparation, the nations of the earth send an ark of humans to an International Space Station. But the Station isn’t immune to the galactic catastrophe and many of its people are lost, mostly men. When stability is reached, only seven humans remain, all of them women. Jump forward thirty thousand years. Two peoples exist: those who survived on Earth, living rustic, primitive lives; and those who derived from the Seven Eves of the space station, affluent, sophisticated, organized sects looking to colonize the surface of earth. Stephenson’s next novel is an epic potboiler, with political and military intrigue, and plenty to say about evolution, genetic engineering, and civilisation as we know it.
The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
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EAN: 9780374146740
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The latest masterpiece—perceptive, funny, insightful, affecting—from the Nobel Prize–winning author.
Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa’s newest novel, The Discreet Hero, follows two fascinating characters whose lives are destined to intersect: neat, endearing Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in Piura, Peru, who finds himself the victim of blackmail; and Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, who cooks up a plan to avenge himself against the two lazy sons who want him dead.
Felícito and Ismael are, each in his own way, quiet, discreet rebels: honorable men trying to seize control of their destinies in a social and political climate where all can seem set in stone, predetermined. They are hardly vigilantes, but each is determined to live according to his own personal ideals and desires—which means forcibly rising above the pettiness of their surroundings. The Discreet Hero is also a chance to revisit some of our favorite players from previous Vargas Llosa novels: Sergeant Lituma, Don Rigoberto, Doña Lucrecia, and Fonchito are all here in a prosperous Peru. Vargas Llosa sketches Piura and Lima vividly—and the cities become not merely physical spaces but realms of the imagination populated by his vivid characters.
A novel whose humor and pathos shine through in Edith Grossman’s masterly translation, The Discreet Hero is another remarkable achievement from the finest Latin American novelist at work today.
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EAN: 9780224089067
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A darkly glinting novel set on Ireland’s Atlantic coast, The Green Road is a story of fracture and family, selfishness and compassion – a book about the gaps in the human heart and how we learn to fill them.
The children of Rosaleen Madigan leave the west of Ireland for lives they never could have imagined in Dublin, New York and various third-world towns. In her early old age their difficult, wonderful mother announces that she’s decided to sell the house and divide the proceeds. Her adult children come back for a last Christmas, with the feeling that their childhoods are being erased, their personal history bought and sold.
Anne Enright is addicted to the truth of things. Sentence by sentence, there are few writers alive who can invest the language with such torque and gleam, such wit and longing – who can write dialogue that speaks itself aloud, who can show us the million splinters of her characters’ lives then pull them back up together again, into a perfect glass.
Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories by China Mieville
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EAN: 9780230770171
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China Mieville is best known for his compelling cross-genre novels such as The City & The City and Perdido Street Station. He’s also a renowned for his short stories which have appeared in The Guardian and Granta. In this new collection, China pulls together incredibly powerful stories about social issues with his usual dazzling imagination, intelligence and energy.
In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume
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EAN: 9781101875049
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The new adult novel from the beloved and best-selling author Judy Blume.
When a series of passenger airplanes crashed in Elizabeth, New Jersey within a three-month period in 1951–1952, Judy Blume was a teenager. “These events have lingered in my mind ever since,” says Blume. “It was a crazy time. We were witnessing things that were incomprehensible to us as teenagers. Was it sabotage? An alien invasion? No one knew, and people were understandably terrified.” Against this background, Blume uses her imagination to bring us the lives of three generations of families, friends, and strangers, who will be profoundly affected by these events, either directly or indirectly. But life goes on and Blume digs deep into her characters—we see them coping not only with grief but with first love, estranged parents, difficult friendships, familial obligations, divorce, career ambitions, a grandparent’s love, a widower’s hope, and everything in between … Most important, In the Unlikely Event is filled with the same warmth and authenticity that have won Blume the hearts and minds of readers of all generations.
Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi
EAN: 9780571319695
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Hate skews reality even more than love. In the story of a Pakistani woman who has begun a new life in Paris, an essay about the writing of Kureishi’s acclaimed film Le Week-End, and an account of Kafka’s relationship with his father, readers will find Kureishi also exploring the topics that he continues to make new, and make his own: growing up and growing old; betrayal and loyalty; imagination and repression; marriage and fatherhood. The collection ends with a bravura piece of very personal reportage about the conman who stole Kureishi’s life savings – a man who provoked both admiration and disgust, obsession and revulsion, love and hate.
Also to come later in 2015:
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah
Purity by Jonathan Franzen
The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood
Deep South by Paul Theroux
New translations of Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami
A Strangeness in my Mind by Orhan Pamuk
Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks
Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe