Here is my panoramic survey of titles on the horizon for later in the year – rather a feast, I’m sure you’ll agree! From this (of course very early) vantage point I have the following on my radar:

Australian fiction:

In April a simply great debut novel from Readings’ own A.S. Patric, Black Rock White City; Alice Robinson also on debut with Anchor Point; Robyn Cadwallader’s medieval tale The Anchoress, that is being published around the world this year; S.J. Finn’s Down to the River, and many, many more: Abigail Ulman, Amanda Lohrey, Marion Halligan, Tony Birch, Rod Jones, Malcolm Knox, Krissy Kneen, Gregory Day, Eleanor Limprecht, Kári Gíslason, Patrick Lenton, Charlotte Wood, Steve Toltz, Stephen Carroll – I could go on and on!

Allow me one special mention – a ‘Books Desk Hot-Tip’ for 2015, if you like: Antonia Hayes’ Relativity. She’s a former book publicist and bookseller for a start (we do love our own!), but it also turns out she’s a bit of a dark horse, with her debut novel being snapped up by major publishers around the world pre-publication. I think it comes out roughly mid-year, but while you wait I’d urge you to seek out her essay ‘Wolf Like Me’ (on the Meanjin website, and indeed it’s in The Best Australian Essays 2014 volume from Black Inc.), which gives you a sense of the stakes involved in her writing.

Ed note: Find a handy calendar of upcoming Australian titles for the first half of 2015

International Fiction:

Karl Ove Knausgaard of course, for all of those like me for whom his books are read practically intravenously – we now have Volume Four of his My Struggle series, Dancing in the Dark; The Helios Disaster, the first appearance in English of Knausgaard’s wife – Linda Bostrom – will be fascinating too; New Zealander Anna Smail, who might just be taking over the baton from Eleanor Catton with The Chimes; Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, a whole new direction for the celebrated novelist; and the final installment in the Neapolitan series of Elena Ferrante – The Story of the Lost Child.

Plus a list of other highlights: Orhan Pamuk, Kate Atkinson, Amitav Ghosh, Toni Morrison, David Vann, Louis de Bernières, Milan Kundera, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen …

Memoir:

Rebecca Starford’s reckoning with bullying and identity in Bad Behaviour is simply extraordinary: look out for more on this in the March Readings Monthly; another young literary wunderkind Oliver Mol offers us Lion Attack!; Maria Katsonis reckons with coming out and mental illness amidst her traditional Greek Orthodox upbringing in The Good Greek Girl; there’s Hannie Rayson’s memoir of her life as a playwright, Hello Beautiful!: Scenes from a Life; Kate Grenville’s account of her mother’s story, One Life: My Mother’s Story; and, relatedly, a collection edited by Monica Dux on the experience of motherhood, Mothermorphosis.

Omissions here are voluminous and notable I’m sure, but hopefully that gives you a sense of the year to come. Happy reading!

Martin Shaw