By JOHN WILLIAMSJUNE 13, 2014
When BookExpo America, the annual trade convention, took place in Manhattan two weeks ago, the publishing industry turned its gaze to the traditionally heavy-hitting fall season.
The floodgates open early this year, on Aug. 12, with the release of Haruki Murakami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage,” about a man who travels to reunite with old friends from high school and to find out why they eventually shunned him. It sold more than one million copies in its first week on sale in Japan last year.
David Mitchell, the author of “Cloud Atlas” and other ambitious novels, is back with “The Bone Clocks.” In a YouTube video introducing the novel, Mitchell says that it follows its female protagonist from 1984 to 2042, and that “it’s about a particularly vicious vendetta between two circles of semi-immortals.” Also spanning time is “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” by Marlon James, which takes place in Jamaica and New York over three decades, beginning with the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976.
On a more placid plane, “Lila” is Marilynne Robinson’s third novel set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa. This time she adopts the perspective of a troubled young woman who meets and marries the Rev. John Ames, who narrated the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Gilead.” Meanwhile, Jane Smiley starts her own multivolume epic — this one a trilogy — with “Some Luck,” about an Iowa farm family.
James Ellroy’s novel “Perfidia,” set in California in the days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, is the first installment of a four-part series. He recently told ShortList magazine that the new project “seamlessly” adds to his previous books “and makes my oeuvre as a historical novelist one inextricable 11-novel whole.”
Throw in new books by Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Sarah Waters, Colm Toibin, Tana French, Richard Ford and Denis Johnson, and it’s hard not to wish away the summer before it even gets started.
Quotable
“If you are going to write autobiography, don’t expect that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it doesn’t alleviate anything.” — Maya Angelou, in an interview in The Paris Review, in 1990
From:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/books/review/behold-the-fall-harvest.html?_r=0