YEAR AHEAD LIST (JANUARY 2015)

 What's coming out in 2015? Having read two really good books on vacation (Scroll down to see reviews) and several not so good, I'm anxiously searching for some year-ahead lists. 

Should I start HONEYDEW by Edith Pearlman? The Times and Boston Globe wrote glowing reviews...or start reading some neglected downloads on my Kindle, overlooked in favor of Words With Friends, the Daily Mail Gossip Page and a quirky Sue Grafton mystery? But that's another story... 

Those who can’t face living in the present, the end of all the retrospective 2014 lists doesn’t have to spell doom. It’s time to see what the future brings....

Here's what John Williams of the Times had to say.....

“GOD HELP THE CHILD” due in April, is a short new novel by the Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison about childhood trauma and its reverberations in adulthood. From the slender to the sizable, April also sees the publication in English of the fourth volume of "MY STRUGGLE" Karl Ove Knausgaard’s series of six autobiographical novels. This one finds him as a teenager, attempting to kick-start a writing career while teaching at a school in a tiny village in the Arctic. Contemplation, no doubt, ensues.

"OUR SOULS AT NIGHT" the last novel by Kent Haruf, who died at 71 in November, is slated for May. It’s set in the fictional town of Holt, Colo., which will be familiar to readers of Haruf’s previous novels. The same month, Nell Zink, whose short novel “The Wallcreeper” drew praise just this past October, wastes no time publishing her second book, " MISLAID" also in May. 

September will bring at least one guaranteed best seller: Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, "PURITY" which revolves around a young woman named Purity, or Pip, who investigates the identity of her father. Also scheduled for September is “THE TSAR OF LOVE AND TECHNO"  a collection of stories by Anthony Marra, whose first novel, “A Constellation of Vital Phenomena,” was published in 2013 to widespread acclaim. 

Other writers with new books scheduled for 2015 include Miranda July, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jane Smiley, Nick Hornby and, in English translation, Mario Vargas Llosa.