Between the covers: What's really going on in the world of books

This is the last edition of The Independent on Sunday newspaper, leaving its literary editor with a shelf full of books that will never be reviewed in these pages. Indeed, some of the books I am looking forward to reading this year are so strictly embargoed that I can barely even tell you about them. I promise, though, that a summer of great reading awaits.

I never did get to the bottom of why most books are published on a Thursday early each month, but April offers some corkers. Irvine Welsh’s The Blade Artist (Jonathan Cape, 7 April) is about a successful man, living in California, who returns to his native Scotland and his dark past. When I interviewed Welsh in 2008 he was himself back in Scotland from his home in Miami. He was utterly charming, and invited me to the launch of his new novel Crime, on a boat ... and then in a pub ... and then in another pub ... Welsh may be a reformed character but he’s still got it, and The Blade Artist is fab.

One of the first authors I interviewed as the literary editor of this paper was AL Kennedy, and I am still a pathetic fan of her writing, which can make a reader laugh out loud and then cry all in the same sentence. Her next novel, Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape) is not published until 19 May, but I have a copy, and it is, as usual, so beautiful that it makes your heart hurt. I hope her publisher won’t mind me revealing that one character is a springer spaniel called Hector with “black, bewildered ears ... [that] made him look as if he’d recently heard dreadful news and still hadn’t adjusted.”

There is not enough space here for all the best ones: a collection of short stories by various authors celebrating Charlotte Brontë, called Reader, I Married Him (The Borough Press, 7 April); more short stories, by the brilliant Philip Hensher (Tales of Persuasion, Fourth Estate, 21 April); Patrick Cockburn’s Chaos and Caliphate (OR Books, 7 April); Chris Cleave’s thoroughly entertaining Second World War story Everyone Brave is Forgiven, (Sceptre, 21 April); the staggering autobiography Mexican Hooker #1: And My Other Roles Since the Revolution by Carmen Aguirre (Portobello, 14 April) ...

Having this job has been like reading a really good book: being always impatient to turn the next page, but at the same time wanting it never to end. Happy reading, and don’t forget to support your friendly, independent, local bookshop.