- One of the great pleasures of 2016 has been sampling the wares of new imprint DodoInk (you can read what we had to say about Dodge & Burn and Wood Green to see how fanboyish we’ve been) and The Tryst by Monique Roffey is their first book out of the gates in 2017. We’ll be at the front of the metaphorical queue…
- Even casual readers of Bookmunch will have probably picked up on the fact that we have a serious jones for the books of CJ Box. We know it’s not classic hoity toity literature like we know we should all like all the time but do you know what? We just like what Box does. He does it well. And so the imminent arrival of Vicious Circle, the latest outing in the Joe Pickett series, gets us all giddy…
- We were a bit worried when we reviewed End of Watch that we were maybe seeing the last Stephen King book and it certainly still feels like he’s easing up a tad what with only one book on the horizon for 2017, but we’ll take Sleeping Beauties, a novel set in a prison, in which he collaborates with his son Owen King.
- TC Boyle is another writer who we remain consistently in awe of – and 2016’s The Terranauts was merely the latest in a long line of books we’ve been slavishly lapping up for getting on for about 25 years now. And as much as we love his novels, we think we love his short story collections ever so slightly more. The Relive Box & Other Stories looks to be due in the second half of 2017…
- The blurb for You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman sets the bar pretty damn high: “An intelligent and madly entertaining debut novel reminiscent of The Crying of Lot 49, White Noise, and City of Glass that is at once a missing-person mystery, an exorcism of modern culture, and a wholly singular vision of contemporary womanhood from a terrifying and often funny voice of a new generation.” Our Val is on the case so look out for a review early in the new year…
- Not strictly speaking a brand new novel, we know, but just as Ron Rash’s Above the Waterfall appears in trade paperback so The World Made Straight, a novel originally published back in 2006, gets picked up and reissued by those nice people at Canongate. Bookmunch’s kid brother (who has read everything Rash has published) thinks it’s his best…
- In addition to the collab between his brother and his dad, Joe Hill has a new in out next year and, after the epic that was The Fireman (which our Dan described as “Excellent… Really excellent” and who are we to argue?), we get something of a sorbet course in the shape of a short story collection called Strange Weather. If it’s as good as 20th Century Ghosts we’ll be in for a good time…
- By the time Jason’s latest On the Camino it will have been a couple of years since his last, If You Steal – but Jason comics are so great we are more than willing to wait as long as it takes for new product. This is his first out and out autobiographical work about a journey around Spain. Different intrigues us but mostly we just love Jason like goggle-eyed fools.
- We loved Guy Delisle’s travelogue comics and heartily recommend them to any comic book nay sayers as great examples of the kinds of books that entice non-graphically inclined readers. Hostage is a little bit of something different from Delisle: “In the middle of the night in 1997, Doctors Without Borders administrator Christophe André was kidnapped by armed men and taken away to an unknown destination in the Caucasus region. For three months, André was kept handcuffed in solitary confinement, with little to survive on and almost no contact with the outside world…”
- Speaking of graphic novels that blew us away, we loved This One Summer, the collab between Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. Jillian is flying solo on her next book, Boundless, in a collection of graphic short stories. The blurb says, “Tamaki shows herself to be a short story talent equal to her peers Adrian Tomine and Eleanor Davis…” Where do we sign up?
Bookmunch 