Highlights of 2009: Books

Lily Allen's second album, Jude Law as Hamlet, Michael Sheen as Brian Clough, Martin Amis on feminism – 2009 promises a variety of treats in the arts. Our critics predict what will make waves in the coming months

By Boyd Tonkin

Friday, 2 January 2009

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DAVID SANDISON

Striving for a place amid high-flying company will be Sarah Hall , who depicts an iconic artist's life and legacy in How to Paint a Dead Man.

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If the Man Booker Prize ran to form, we could begin to draw up the shortlist and the also-rans for 2009 already. What odds for a final batch that includes AS Byatt's ideas-rich family saga of an English – and European – culture sunk by 20th-century conflict, The Children's Room (Chatto, May); Martin Amis's long-awaited encounter with feminism and its consequences, The Pregnant Widow (Cape, September); Colm Toibin's tale of the Irish coming to America, Brooklyn (Picador, May); Anne Michaels' dig into the past of Egypt, Canada and Poland in The Winter Vault (Bloomsbury, June); Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger, a return to 1940s' Britain (Virago, June); and Amit Chaudhuri's novel of music and family in India, The Immortals (Picador, March)?

Striving for a place amid this high-flying company might be Monica Ali's murder-driven panorama of modern migrant London, In the Kitchen (Doubleday, May), Hilary Mantel's recreation of statecraft and savagery in Henry VIII's era in Wolf Hall (May, Fourth Estate), Sarah Hall's depiction of an iconic artist's life and legacy in How to Paint a Dead Man (Faber, June) or Tash Aw's epic of Indonesia, Map of the Invisible World (Fourth Estate, April).

Some high-profile imports from beyond the "Anglosphere" include the gargantuan tragi-comic 2666 (Picador, January) by the late Chilean master, Roberto Bolano; The Kindly Ones (Chatto, March), the mammoth, contentious novel of war, guilt and genocide by Jonathan Littell; and, from Spain, Carlos Ruiz Zafon's follow-up to Shadow of the Wind, The Angel's Game (Weidenfeld, June).

In non-fiction, our post-boom plight will make most noise. Contenders include Gillian Tett's post-mortem on banking madness, Fool's Gold (Little, Brown, March), Philip Augar's scrutiny of New Labour's courtship of the City, Chasing Alpha (Bodley Head, February), Robert Yates's study of how the British middle way yielded to excess, Extreme Nation (John Murray, February) and Alain de Botton's reflections on The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Hamish Hamilton, April). On the anniversary shelves, Darwin dominates, with highlights such as Steve Jones's survey of his role in British thought, Darwin's Island (Little, Brown, January), Adrian Desmond and James Moore's exploration of the anti-slavery dynamic in his work, Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane, January) and Ruth Padel's verse biography of her ancestor, Darwin (Chatto, February).

Quests to revive non-materialist values loom large, too. Look out for A New Philosophy of Pluralism by Muslim thinker Tariq Ramadan (Allen Lane, May); Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution (Yale, May); philosopher Peter Singer's The Life You Can Save (Picador, March), and, from Barbara Taylor and Adam Phillips, a treatise On Kindness (Hamish Hamilton, January).