The bad news is that financial constraints, consolidations and rationalisations will continue. The good news? Despite the bean-counting, publishers have shown commendable imagination in their commissioning and the reading year ahead looks unusually solid, especially for AUSTRALIAN FICTION, where a stable of heavy hitters and promising contenders is gloving up. Aficionados will seek ringside seating for The White Earth (Allen & Unwin, May), Andrew McGahan's tale "about the power of the land and the passions of people trying to make it their own", and the much-awarded Robert Drewe's September novel for Penguin. He's being superstitiously coy about its title but it's set in northwest Western Australia and might concern a scientist, his troubled daughter and their conflict over an Afghan refugee. Or it might not.
There's no confusion about A Private Man (Vintage, Jan) - Malcolm Knox's portrait of a family in crisis, with seductive sidestreams on cricket, pornography and domestic secrets, has a huge pre-pub buzz about it. As does March (Flamingo, Sept), Geraldine Brooks's US Civil War love story inspired by Louisa May Alcott's father, an idealistic abolitionist and intimate of Emerson and Thoreau.
History too is at the heart of The Resurrectionist (Hodder, May), James Bradley's evocation of opium, murder, salvation and grave robbers. Discovery and death in 19th century Australia also informs The Bright Planet (Picador, April) by Peter Mews, while Christos Tsiolkas enters new territory via the appalling bloodshed of European history to clarify the distortions of mythology in Dead Europe (Vintage, August).
Recent history resonates in Arnold Zable's Scraps of Heaven (Text Publishing, Oct), with migrant families settling in Melbourne's 1950s Carlton, while Steven Carroll has a 1960s coming-of-ager about a cricket-obsessed 16-year-old, his crabby granny and a mysterious sportscar-driving mogul in The Gift of Speed (Flamingo, Aug). More contemporary are Nick Earls' change-of-pacer, The Thompson Gunner (Penguin, August), in which a successful stand-up comedian is a woman caught between two worlds, and Amanda Lohrey's The Philosopher's Doll (Penguin, March), which delves into what happens when one partner wants a child and the other doesn't.
Cults of the religious kind have attracted Thomas Shapcott in Spirit Wrestlers (Wakefield Press, July) and Georgia Blain in Ninety-Nine Words for Nothingness (Picador, August): the former investigates a sect's effect on its surrounding communi-ties, the latter its influence on maternity, relationships and love. Religion and secrecy also figure in I Have Kissed Your Lips (UQP, Oct), Gerard Windsor's return to fiction after a series of autobiographical works: sexual abuse, church cover-ups and erotic beauty. Sin and sensuality marked Tobsha Learner's first collection of erotic short stories, Quiver, and she revisits that arena with Tremble: Sensual Tales of the Mystical and Sinister (HarperCollins, Oct).
Speculation propels Jack Dann's The Rebel (Flamingo, May), a "what say" assumption that surly sex-symbol James Dean survived his car crash: Marilyn, Elvis and Bobby Kennedy have guest roles. John Birmingham, poised for international super-stardom following a 50-books-in-five-minutes deal, has the first of three quick-hit blockbuster thrillers in July - Weapons of Choice (Pan Macmillan) probes a "what if we had the chance to change the course of World War II?" line. And imagination propels the underrated Carmel Bird's Cape Grimm (Flamingo, Feb), a fabulist take on Tasmania, precarious passions and the force of faith.
In popular fiction, Bryce Courtenay's November novel for Penguin also has a Tasmanian edge as an intrepid Bass Strait fisherman finds himself in deep waters, literally and figuratively; Di Morrissey maroons an eclectic cast on an island off the North Queensland coast and throws in a murder in The Reef (Pan Macmillan, Nov); and Judy Nunn's Pacific (Random House, March) sweeps through time from Dunkirk evacuation to big-budget filmmaking in Vanuatu.
Next year will see a slew of SECOND NOVELS, often considered a more difficult act to pull off than a successful debut: Rosalie Ham, whose The Dressmaker earned kudos for subversive charm, has A Year at Mount Pleasant (Duffy & Snellgrove, Oct), described as "Jane Austen set in the wheat belt''. Succeeding his vibrant Saigon Tea, Graham Reilly has Sweet Time (Hodder, January), with Scottish migrants to Melbourne's western suburbs attempting to set up a local soccer club, and Charlotte Wood follows the enigmatic Pieces of a Girl with The Submerged Cathedral (Vintage, March), a saga of sisterly devotion and rivalry. Andrew Humphreys moves from his oddball-centred The Weight of the Sun to an odd couple tale of a movie star monkey and his drunken trainer amid avaricious agents and striving starlets during Hollywood's Golden Age in Wonderful (Allen & Unwin, Feb), and Jay Verney (A Mortality Tale) returns with Percussion (UQP, May), an immorality tale sweeping "from Queensland's Pineapple Bay to the American way of denying death". Belinda Alexandra (White Gardenia) has a heroine forced to become a serving maid in Marseilles before seeking music hall redemption in Wild Lavender (HarperCollins, Nov) and Jillian Watkinson (The Architect) surveys five generations of secrets in an ethnically mixed farming family in The Hanging Tree (UQP, Sept).
ON the INTERNATIONAL FICTION front, V.S. Naipaul will release the must-read Magic Seeds (Picador, Oct), the irrepressible Fay Weldon satirises easy perception with a man waking up one morning as a woman in Mantrapped (HarperCollins, Sept), and Anchee Min has a sexy politics 'n' power page-turner with Empress Orchid (Bloomsbury, March). Adelaide Festival visitor Isabel Allende follows her escapist City of the Beasts with Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (Flamingo, March), with intrepid grandmother Kate Gold Indiana Jones-ing in the Himalayan Alps. Also Adelaide Festival-bound is the idiosyncratic Jeanette Winterson, whose Lighthousekeeping (4th Estate, March) promises a story of "mutability, talking birds and stolen books … and of the Jekyll and Hyde in all of us''. The inventive Elizabeth Knox is delivering Daylight (Flamingo, Feb), which melds caving, a strange death, a Resistance heroine and a miracle assessor in a mysterious melange.
Water is central to The Hungry Tide (Flamingo, May), as Amitav Ghosh tracks an expedition tracing a utopian society founded by an eccentric Scotsman in the Sundarbans - that mystifying mangrove forest where Himalayan waters merge with the sea. David Adams Richards' River of the Broken-hearted (Jonathan Cape, Feb) is more metaphorical, featuring a doughty pioneering cinema operator in New Brunswick, while the multicultural (Australia-born, US-raised, Germany-based) Jane Alison is more metaphysical in The Marriage of the Sea (Text, March), her characters tidally drifting between Venice and New Orleans.
In Jin-Shei (HarperCollins, March) by the equally multicultural Alma Alexander (New Zealand-born, Australia-raised, US-based), sisters are doing it for themselves - think Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood meet Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon say her publishers. The very talented Xiaolu Guo has the haunting yet humorous Village of Stone (Chatto & Windus, June), Olivia Goldsmith has a trans-Atlantic romantic comedy about a "love klutz" finding Prince Charming in Casting Off (Harper-Collins, April) while Thieves (Flamingo, April) is Canadian Janice Kulyk Keefer's study in deception inspired by the historic theft of Katherine Mansfield's letters, and a father and son infatuated with her. Arturo Perez-Reverte (The Flanders Panel) returns with Queen of the South (Picador, July) and big picture man Edward Rutherford (of London fame) embraces Dublin (Century, March) in all its mystical gory.
IN FIRST FICTION, former publisher Sophie Cunningham crosses to the dark side with Geography (Text, April), part traveller's tale, part love story, part diary of obses-sive desire … and wholly interesting to all associated with the industry. Also crossing genre borders are established authors Susan Kurosawa, Liz Byrski, Anna Maria Dell'oso and Diane Armstrong: The Australian's Travel Editor, Kurosawa has Coronation Talkies (Penguin, August), a "Paul Scott meets Bollywood" tale of 1930s India; in Gang of Four (Pan Macmillan, April), non-fictionist Byrski targets the Mary Moody market with a tale of four women in their 50s escaping home to chase personal goals; journalist/violinist Dell'oso, critically applauded for her short story collections, has a vagabondish heroine in Beating Time (Flamingo, Feb) through whom she investigates "violins, cults, musicians, alchemy and the nature of redemption''; and Armstrong, whose Mosaic and The Voyage of Their Life were non-fiction bestsellers, has a Polish-born, Sydney-based forensic dentist in Winter Journey (Flamingo, Nov) confronting personal mystery and historic public evil.
The present and past are equally central to Dancing with the Hurricane (Flamingo, July), Leon Silver's rollercoasting post-Holocaust tale of loss and exile, while the where is as important as the to whom in Corrie Hosking's The Black Dream (Wakefield Press, March), which explores the inexplicable love between friends and between adults and children. Perplexing love informs Furies (UQP, Aug), John Charalambous's intriguing take on mother/daughter relationships, and 3 (UQP, Oct), Grant King's black comedy about a guy, three girls, one jealous dog and just how far loyalties stretch. Comedy and adventure mark Martin Carter Takes a Chance (Penguin, August), where Geoff McGeachin's eponymous hero - fat, 50, and a failing rural bank manager - finds romance on the run. Memorable characters are said to distinguish The Secret World of Annette Robinson (HarperCollins, April), the late-starting Paulette Gittens's kid's-eye view of 1950s Kings Cross - it carries Ruth Park associations.
In The Chronicle of Isaac Quirk (Text, Aug), Melburnian Michael Read's 17th century England rollicks and rolls in a family saga of "spies and surgeons, murder and skulduggery''; former UN engineer Frank Coates enters Wilbur Smith territory with Tears of the Maasai (HarperCollins, April), his African saga of tribal ritual and modern mores; Jane Goodall has a serial killer with a Jack the Ripper complex stalking 1960s Swinging London in The Walker (Hodder, March); and Miranda Darling provides an insider's insight on wannabe supermodels for whom life is no cakewalk in B Model (Wakefield Press, May).
Overseas, rare interest surrounds PS, I Love You (HarperCollins, March), a love story that transcends death - but then author Cecelia Ahern is the daughter of Ireland's Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern. American reviewers rushed to praise The Laws of Evening (Scribner, May), portraits by Mary Yukari Waters of post-war Japanese women trapped between ancient culture and the new world in "banquet for the senses" and "female Raymond Carver" terms.
There's big marketing excitement over English grandmother Sheila Quigley - eight leading publishing houses bid for the rights to her Run For Home (Century, April), a moody tale of kidnap, murder and nightmarish family secrets. Jonathan Frantzen volunteered a "one of the funniest Hollywood novels I've read" endorsement for Elizabeth Robinson's The True & Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters (Simon & Schuster, March), and critics are salivating about the Long Island-set Amagansett (Flamingo, June) by screenwriter (The Reckoning) Mark Mills - it's pre-packaged as Snow Falling on Cedars meets The Shipping News and is widely tipped to top the pops.
THE usual suspects are seemingly absent from the coming year's CRIME wave, with publishers choosing to take the fifth re spilling the beans on the local scene - despite the fillip Channel Seven's upcoming telemovie series on Shane Maloney's Murray Whelan, with David Wenham as the ALP apparatchik, will give the genre. Maloney is actually on Text's 2004 delivery roster with an as-yet unnamed, undated novel, as is his multi-Ned Kelly Award-winning stablemate Peter Temple. The industrious Tara Moss will revisit the Stiletto Murderer in Covet (HarperCollins, Sept), while Kirsty Brooks is sending the saucy Cassidy Blair into more emotional mires in Happiness Punch (Hodder, August).
Overseas, the crime cupboard is bursting with prime suspects. Most expectation surrounds The Narrows (Orion, May), Michael Connelly's long-awaited and long-denied Harry Bosch sequel to The Poet. Anticipation too for Val McDermid's The Torment of Others (HarperCollins, April), with clinical psychologist Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan tackling an outbreak of perverse murders, and for Carl Hiaasen's Florida-based Skinny Dip (Bantam, April), another "fantastic grotesques" yarns in which a husband who pushes his wife overboard forgets she's an Olympic-class swimmer.
Boris Starling of Messiah and Storm fame has a multifaceted Moscow thriller in Vodka (HarperCollins, March), with undistilled violence, passion, betrayal and cor-ruption, while the brooding Inspector Banks makes his 15th return in Peter Robinson's as-yet-unnamed newie for Pan Macmillan in November. Robert Crais has the further adventures of the anti-heroic Elvis Cole in The Forgotten Man (Doubleday, July); Reginald Hill's latest Dalziel and Pascoe, Good Morning, Midnight (Harper-Collins, Feb), is a riddle of stepmothers, heredity and powerful cartels; Duffy & Snellgrove has two titles from Ireland's tough-talking Ken Bruen; and Lisa Scottoline unleashes her Killer Smile (Pan Macmillan, July). Colin Harrison's The Havana Room (Bloomsbury, April) is one to note - a taut thriller with tension plus.
A TRIO of titles heads the must-read TRUE CRIME catalogue: Helen Garner explores questions about duty of care in Joe Cinque's Consolation (Picador, August), arising from the trial of a woman who gave her boyfriend an overdose; Peter Rees has a sure-fire seller in Killing Juanita (Allen & Unwin, Feb), his examination of the 25-year mystery over missing Kings Cross anti-development campaigner Juanita Nielsen and the associated milieu of "colourful Sydney identities"; and Stephanie Bennett probes The Gatton Murders (Pan Macmillan, May), the brutal 1898 rape and homicide of two sisters and their brother that remains hauntingly unsolved.
BIOGRAPHY and MEMOIR remain bottom-line pleasures for publishers and a top-drawer delight for Australian readers - according to bestseller demographics, certain non-fiction success awaits the unexpurgated journal of a gardening cook who fished and played cricket. In literature, the 50th anniversary of Miles Franklin's death has inspired dual scrutinies of her brilliant career: Diaries of Miles Franklin (Allen & Unwin, March), edited by Paul Brunton, replicates many of the author's revealing diary entries while in Stella Miles Franklin (Flamingo, Sept), Jill Roe documents the life of the war nurse, nationalist, larrikin and occasional conservative. The poetic Robert Adamson tells of growing up around Sydney Harbour and the Hawkesbury in Inside Out (Text, March) - his adolescence was one of misadventures with love and the law before he became a wordsmith of lucidity. There's similar emotional clarity in Shooting the Moon (Picador, July), Louis Nowra's well-anticipated sequel to his bestselling memoir The Twelfth Of Never, and in Nicholas Shakespeare's personal memoir/history of Tasmania, The House At The End Of The World (Random House, Oct). Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin have an impending jackpot with The Man Who Died Twice (Allen & Unwin, March), the remarkable story of George Ernest Morrison (aka Morrison of Peking), who reported on the Boxer Rebellion and helped bring down a dynasty.
In the visual arts, Alasdair McGregor showcases Frank Hurley (Penguin, Sept), the authority-phobic nonconformist famous for photographing the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic expeditions. As iconoclastic was Sunday Reed, the founder of Heide and free-spirited patron to a plethora of painters - Janine Burke's biography of her, The Heart Garden (Knopf, Aug), will inevitably be controversial. In the more definedly theatrical, Kate Fitzpatrick recalls knowing - and loving - some of the world's more notorious identities in Name Dropping (HarperCollins, April) while former fighter pilot Charles Tingwell raises the curtain on four decades of stage and screen success here and in Hollywood in Bud Tingwell (Pan Macmillan, May). Ingo Petzke presents the authorised Phil Noyce biography (Pan Macmillan, June) with behind the camera out-takes, and choreographer/director Noel Tovey pulls no punches in Little Black Bastard (Hodder, July) - raised amid alcoholism and sex abuse in Melbourne's slums, he later worked in Europe's greatest theatres. As anecdotally and personally revealing is Graeme Blundell's What's He Doing Here (Pan Macmillan, Nov), a backstage and upfront expose of thespian Australia circa the '60s/'70s from a theatrical renaissance man who came from the wrong side of the tracks. And candid has a capital C in Stephanie Clifford-Smith's life of celebrity chef Bernard King (Random House, April): always out there and outrageous, the caustic King held nothing back from his biographer.
There are few secrets too in Hard Road: The Life and Times of Stevie Wright (Random House, Aug), Glenn Goldsmith's disturbing story of The Easybeats singer who went from stardom to heroin addiction, alcoholism and mental illness before achieving rehabilitation. Mark Dodshon's Beds are Burning: The Extraordinary Career of Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil (Penguin, Nov) is equally forthright - political and passionate, it's not your usual "rockography''. As unconventional is The Un-Wisdom and Anti-Lessons of the Mambo Story (Picador, August) by Mambo and Phantom Records founder Dare Jennings and his acclaimed novelist sister, Kate Jennings - it's autobiography leavened with social document and business text.
I Am What I Am (Penguin, August) is the hide-nothing memoirs of outspoken and often controversial lawyer John Marsden, from growing up gay and Catholic in the 40s to his long-running defamation case over allegations of paedophilia, while The Bagman, aka Jack Herbert, who spent years on witness protection after his evidence helped imprison Queensland's top policeman and corrupt colleagues, gives the inside drum in his memoirs for ABC Books in September.
Human spirit distinguishes both Narelle Biedermann's Tears On My Pillow: Australian Nurses In Vietnam (Random House, April), a "collective memoir" about the reality of the military milieu, and Longy (HarperCollins, Nov), James Knight's stranger-than-fiction narration of Duy Long Ngyuen's journey from black market hustler and prisoner in Vietnam via refugeedom in Sydney's gang-addled suburbs to his present role as masseur to the super rich and sporting.
In sport, Pan Macmillan has a cross-codes triple treat for footy fans in August, with World Cup winning rugby union coach Bob Dwyer's Memoirs, Tim Watson's many-sided look at one of the more enigmatic AFL coaches in Kevin Sheedy, and - shades of Slaven - rugby league identity Reg Reagan's It's All About the Biff, which underwrites the appeal of fake moustaches and beer-guts. The eloquent Frank Devine takes a perceptive look at the incomparable Bradman (Duffy & Snellgrove, August), based on many hours of intimate interviews; The Australian's Nicole Jeffery has liaised with Alison Annan to record the enigmatic Hockeyroo's story (Simon & Schuster, April); and Greg Hunter dives behind the headlines and the gossip in Ian Thorpe (Pan Macmillan, Nov).
Among overseas offerings, Pat Shipman's The Stolen Woman (Bantam, May) chronicles Florence Baker, whose aristocratic family was murdered and she secreted in a harem before being freed by buccaneering Sam Baker - their African adventures inhabit Rider Haggard territory. As daring was Helene Delangle (aka Helle Nice): considered "fast" for "impenitent promiscuity" and audacious grand prix driving, she provides rich material for Miranda Seymour in The Bugatti Queen (Simon & Schuster, April). For the politically-minded, Anthony Seldon's Blair (Free Press, June) evaluates the media-hating, middle class-courting British PM, Peter Truscott unravels the apparent babushka doll personality of Russia's premier in Putin's Progress (Simon & Schuster, May) and William Taubman distils 15 years' research into just 900 pages for Krushchev: The Man and his Era (Free Press, May).
THERE'S less obvious depth (thus far, at least) in next year's NON-FICTION program, but what has been revealed has appeal. Top this, for instance, as a spicy selling line - at 18, she entered a convent; at 31, she found the courage to leave; by 35 she was working as a prostitute: God's Callgirl (HarperCollins, March) is Carla van Raay's true tale of tumultuous childhood, tempestuous adulthood and the uncovering of dark secrets. Anticipation too for Ten Unbroken Years (Pan Macmillan, June) - Roseanne Catt, who spent a decade in prison after being convicted in 1991 for plotting to kill her husband, alleges she was the victim of a "monstrous conspiracy".
There will be angst aplenty in some quarters given that one of the most famous actions in Australian military history has attracted two authors to identically titled books - Kokoda. Marketing strategies will be critical as Peter Fitzsimons (Hodder, Oct) and Paul Ham (HarperCollins, Nov) vie for the authoritative high ground with their takes on a war of exceptional savagery. Conflict of more recent times disquiets Bob Ellis, whose Night Thoughts in a Time of War (Penguin, August) canvasses migration, refugees and international conflict. The web-blogging Margo Kingston gets down and dirty in a political way in Not Happy, John: What We Can Do to Save Our Democracy (Penguin, April) while Margaret Simons gets down and dirty in a practical way with Resurrection in a Bucket (Allen & Unwin, May), the ultimate "compost compendium'' complete with interviews of high-profile composters. And in Going Native (Hodder, October), Michael Archer & Bob Beale suggest revolutionary if contentious approaches to reinventing ideas of agriculture, conservation and urbanisation.
A sense of journey underpins Country (Text, Nov), in which Tim Flannery weaves travel and natural history, modern culture and history's patterns to explain his own affiliation with Australia. In Back On The Wooltrack (Random House, July), Michelle Grattan traces the route of pre-eminent war historian C.E.W Bean, whose account of his 1909 Wooltrack expedition became an Australian classic, while the erudite Robert Dessaix interlaces the Russian novelist's life with his own thoughts on travel and reminiscence in Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (Picador, Oct) and John Dale blends whodunit, Tasmanian travel and memoir in Wild Life (Allen & Unwin, May), exploring the ripple effects his grandfather's murder had on four families.
Catherine Fox and Helen Trinca suggest that work has taken over from religion and family in Better Than Sex (Random House, June) as they examine how and why, and what it means, while Maggie Hamilton gets self-helpish about achieving goals while leading a fulfilling life within and beyond work in Love Your Work (Penguin, July). Human spirit is writ large in The Mind Bomb (Pan Macmillan, Oct), Susan Wyndham's stirring account of a young pianist, the brain tumour that threatened his life and the neurologist who saved him - courage is the keynote here. And in forensic anthropologist Clea Koff's Bone Woman (Hodder, March): at 23 she went to Rwanda after the 1994 genocide to exhume mass graves for evidence against the perpetrators.
Terrorism of more recent times impelled Sally Neighbour to investigate the Bali bombing and trials in Ravine of Hate (HarperCollins, Sept), in which she raises serious questions over Australia's security, while Denise Leith interviewed the likes of Robert Fisk, Monica Attard, John Pilger and David Brill for Bearing Witness: The Lives of Photojournalists and Foreign Correspondents (Random House, May).
Overseas, an explosion of studies on George W. Bush and the war in Iraq is coming early in 2004: in Allies (Allen & Unwin, Feb), William Shawcross defends the invasion while exploring the war's implications for future détente between the US and the world; Hans Blix details the search for WMDs in Disarming Iraq (Bloomsbury, March); military historian John Keegan analyses strategy and the war machine in The Iraq War (Hutchinson, May); Australian philosopher to the world Peter Singer scrutinizes The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (Text, May) via his policies and actions; and Arundhati Roy deconstructs the US argument for going to war in The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire (Flamingo, Feb), exposing "errors in its thesis, (and) the hypocrisy and false ideology behind the rhetoric".
The less earthbound Dava Sobel blends science, history and biography in her usual inimitable style (think Longitude and Galileo's Daughter) to explore our solar system in The Planets (4th Estate, Sept), while Mark Kurlansky (author of Cod and Salt) gets celestial in a different way when he dissects the revolutionary year 1968 (Jonathan Cape, June) - think music, war, riots, pot and political assassinations.
This article appeared first in The Weekend Australian. Copyright (c) Murray Waldren 2004
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