2018 in books: a literary calendar
Peter Carey. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
January


Non-fiction
The Monk of Mokha by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton). Eggers tells the story of a fellow San Franciscan and coffee enthusiast Mokhtar Alkhanshali, raised by Yemeni immigrant parents, who travelled to Yemen to learn about the origins of coffee making and is caught up in the civil war.
Writer’s Luck: A Memoir 1976-1991 by David Lodge (Harvill Secker). This second volume of autobiography covers the years of the British author and academic’s greatest success, with the publication of novels such as Nice Work.
Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir by Amy Tan (4th Estate). The author of The Joy Luck Club writes about her traumatic childhood and her complex relationship with her father.
The Growth Delusion by David Pilling (Bloomsbury). The story of our ill-judged obsession with GDP, and how we should be measuring societies.

Fiction
A Long Way from Home by Peter Carey (Faber). The double Booker winner scrutinises Australian identity, indigenous and white, through the story of one woman’s involvement in a brutally punishing 1950s round-Australia motorsport race.
The Reservoir Tapes by Jon McGregor (4th Estate). Spinoff tales about the characters from the Costa-winning Reservoir 13.
Lullaby by Leila Slimani (Faber). This French bestseller, which won the Prix Goncourt, probes fault lines of class, race and gender through the tale of a nanny who is fatally attached to the family she serves.
Turning for Home by Barney Norris (Doubleday). The follow-up to the playwright’s debut novel, the quietly brilliant Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain, focuses on a family gathering.
The Unmapped Country by Ann Quin (And Other Stories). Rare stories and unpublished fragments from the radical 1960s writer.
Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Oneworld). Generations of a family suffer under a curse in a Ugandan epic spanning the last 250 years that blends oral storytelling, myth and folklore and has been described as “the most important book to come out of Uganda for half a century”.

Poetry
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Chatto). An interrogation of race, sexuality and social justice featuring a sequence imagining the afterlife of black men shot by the police.

Events and anniversaries
15 TS Eliot prize awarded.
30 Costa book of the year chosen from the winners of the five categories: novel, first novel, biography, poetry and children’s.
Zadie Smith. Photograph: Brian Dowling/Getty Images
February

Non-fiction
Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton). Smith is as accomplished an essayist as she is a novelist; her subjects here range from Quentin Tarantino to Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch (Cape). An examination of everyday racism in Britain and why liberal attempts to be “colour-blind” have caused more problems than they have solved.
The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History by Aida Edemariam (4th Estate). A narrative of Ethiopia over the past century that centres on Edemariam’s remarkable and long-lived grandmother.
Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker (Allen Lane). In a follow-up to his bestselling The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Harvard psychologist argues that our turbulent times require not despair but reason and Enlightenment values.

Fiction
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson (Cape). The cult American author, who died last year, was most celebrated for his only short story collection, Jesus’ Son; this posthumous collection, completed shortly before his death, sees him contemplating memories and mortality.
The Only Story by Julian Barnes (Cape). A man looks back on how, as a disaffected youth, he fell gloriously in love with a married older woman at the local tennis club; the book gradually darkens into the tragedy of a destroyed life.
The Melody by Jim Crace (Picador). From the author of Harvest, a fable about grief, myth, music and persecution, in which a widowed musician indavertently sparks a campaign of violence against the paupers scratching a living on the fringes of town.
Force of Nature by Jane Harper (Little, Brown). The Dry was one of the stand-out crime debuts of 2017; Australian author Harper follows it with a story of women hiking in the bush – five go out, but only four come back.

Children’s
The Wren Hunt by Mary Watson (Bloomsbury). YA debut about a girl caught between rival magical factions.

Events and anniversaries
1 Centenary of the birth of Muriel Spark.
2 Film adaptation of RC Sherriff’s first world war play Journey’s End.
Neil MacGregor. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
March

Non-fiction
Living With the Gods by Neil MacGregor (Allen Lane). The book of the British Museum exhibition and BBC Radio 4 series from the author of A History of the World in 100 Objects.
Debussy: A Painter in Sound by Stephen Walsh (Faber). The acclaimed classical music writer on the French impressionist composer.
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading by Lucy Mangan (Square Peg). The journalist takes a trip back to Narnia and Wonderland, and gets reacquainted with some of the favourite characters of our collective childhoods.
Free Woman by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury). The prolific scholar and reviewer on the life and works of Doris Lessing.

Fiction
Dead Men’s Trousers by Irvine Welsh (Cape). The Trainspotting crew return; Renton is now an international jetsetter and Begbie a famous artist. But with Sick Boy and Spud trying their luck in the world of organ-harvesting, who’s wearing dead men’s trousers?
Bizarre Romance by Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell (Cape). Riffs on life and love in prose and comic strip form, from the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and her graphic artist husband.
The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey (Cape). A Somerset man is drowned and the village priest must investigate … a medieval mystery from one of the UK’s most exquisite stylists.
Upstate by James Wood (Cape). Why do some find life so much harder than others? The leading literary critic delves into depression and the meaning of existence in a novel about family relationships.
Almost Love by Louise O’Neill (Riverrun). First adult novel from the author of the scorching YA book about rape culture Asking for It charts the abusive relationship between a young woman and an older man.

Poetry
Anecdotal Evidence by Wendy Cope (Faber). In Cope’s first new collection since 2011, she engages with figures from Shakespeare to Eric Morecambe.

Children’s
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi (Macmillan). Epic fantasy YA debut of magic and war, inspired by the history and myth of west Africa.

Events and anniversaries
Centenary of publication of Marie Stopes’ Married Love.
13 Macbeth begins an RSC season in which the new productions are all directed by women, including a musical about Joan Littlewood.
18 250th anniversary of the death of Laurence Sterne.
28 150th anniversary of the birth of Maxim Gorky.
Viv Albertine … To Throw Away Unopened. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian
April

Non-fiction
The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli (Allen Lane). The bestselling author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics is back with an exploration of the meaning of time.
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton). The author of novels Hot Milk and Swimming Home also wrote Things I Don’t Want to Know, a “living autobiography” on writing and womanhood. This short memoir is the second instalment.
To Throw Away Unopened by Viv Albertine (Faber Social). In her followup to the much-praised Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys., the former Slits guitarist uncovers truths about her family.
Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose (Faber). It’s always the mother’s fault … the renowned feminist critic on the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings.
Rosie by Rose Tremain (Chatto). The novelist’s first non-fiction book is a childhood memoir that casts a revealing light on the “vanished” world of 1940s and 1950s England.

Fiction
Agency by William Gibson (Viking). The new novel from the colossus of SF switches between a world in which Hillary Clinton won the US election and London two centuries in the future, after most of the global population has perished.
Circe by Madeline Miller (Bloomsbury). The Song of Achilles won the Orange prize in 2012; Miller’s follow-up stays in the world of Homer’s Odyssey to explore the story of the witch-goddess who turns Odysseus’s men into pigs.
I Still Dream by James Smythe (Borough). A 17-year-old girl builds herself an AI system in her bedroom: as the decades pass, it grows with her. An investigation into artificial and human intelligence, which extends into the past and future.
Never Greener by Ruth Jones (Bantam). A debut novel about second chances from the actor and screenwriter best known for Gavin and Stacey.
The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal (Viking). In the follow-up to My Name Is Leon, a young Irish woman in 70s Birmingham is caught up in whirlwind romance – and tragedy.
Macbeth by Jo Nesbø (Hogarth). The project to novelise Shakespeare continues, with the Norwegian crime writer imagining the antihero of the Scottish play as a drug addict turned cop.
Patient X by David Peace (Faber). The author of GB84 and The Damned Utd is here inspired by the life and stories of the great Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa, best known for Rashomon.

Poetry
Europa by Sean O’Brien (Picador). The multi-prize-winning poet focuses on past and uncertain future entanglements between Britain and continental Europe.

Events and anniversaries
10-12 London book fair, with the Baltic countries as this year’s “market focus”.
20 Release of Mike Newell’s film Guernsey, set in the late 40s and based on the novel The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society.
23 Women’s prize for fiction shortlist.
Zora Neale Hurston … Barracoon. Photograph: Little & Brown Publishing
May

Non-fiction
Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston (HarperCollins). A previously unpublished work, in which the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God recounts the true story of the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade.
How to Change Your Mind: Exploring the New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan (Allen Lane). The author celebrated for “eat food, not too much, mostly plants” takes a voyage to the frontiers of human consciousness.
Arnhem: The Last German Victory by Antony Beevor (Viking). The bestselling historian on the great airborne battle for the bridges in 1944.
Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change by Gavin Francis (Profile). The GP and author of the bestselling Adventures in Human Being combines case studies with cultural observation as he examines how our minds and bodies undergo constant change.
Behold, America by Sarah Churchwell (Bloomsbury). A “partial history” of US rightwing isolationism and the America First movement.

Fiction
Last Stories by William Trevor (Viking). One of the publishing events of the year: a posthumous collection of 10 final stories from the Irish master of the short form.
Whistle in the Dark by Emma Healey (Viking). The followup to Elizabeth Is Missing is the story of a 15-year-old-girl who goes missing, and comes back unharmed – but changed.
Kudos by Rachel Cusk (Faber). A female writer travels round a turbulent Europe in the final volume of Cusk’s innovative trilogy about how we construct our own identities.
The Neighbourhood by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber). The latest from the Peruvian Nobel laureate features two wealthy couples in 1990s Lima embroiled in political corruption and erotic intrigues.
A Shout in the Ruins by Kevin Powers (Sceptre). Six years after winning the Guardian first book award with his Iraq novel The Yellow Birds, the former soldier explores the violence of the American civil war.

Children’s
The Colour of the Sun by David Almond (Hodder). The real and the imaginary blend for one Tyneside boy on one sunny day, in the new novel from the author of Skellig.

Events and anniversaries
75th anniversary of first publication (in the US) of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets.
8 Rathbones Folio prize awarded.
22 Man Booker international prize ceremony.
24 Hay festival opens (continues until 3 June).
Bill Clinton … The President Is Missing. Photograph: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP
June

Non-fiction
Liquid: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives by Mark Miodownik (Viking). The scientist and broadcaster discusses liquids in a book structured around a plane journey.
Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani (Verso). This influential voice on the British left looks at automation, machine learning, gene editing and asteroid mining to argue that communism is possible: the third disruption after agriculture and the industrial revolution.
Room to Dream by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna (Canongate). Part memoir from the film-maker and part biography, incorporating interviews with his friends, subtitled a “life in art”.
Fallout: Disasters, Lies and the Legacy of the Nuclear Age by Fred Pearce (Granta). The science and environment journalist in a “shocking” book that considers seven decades of nuclear technology.

Fiction
The President Is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Century). The former president brings insider detail to a political thriller written with the mega-selling Patterson.
Warlight by Michael Ondaatje (Cape). His first novel since 2012’s Cat’s Table is set in London after the blitz, as two children are apparently abandoned and left in the care of an eccentric, possibly criminal figure.
Girl, Balancing and Other Stories by Helen Dunmore (Hutchinson). Dunmore became the posthumous winner of the Costa poetry prize for Inside the Wave; this collection of stories will be published a year after her death.
Crudo by Olivia Laing (Macmillan). Set in the febrile summer of 2017, an autobiographical fiction debut from the author of The Lonely City, about hitting 40 and finding intimacy in a world that seems to be spiralling out of control.
You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian (Cape). The debut collection from the author of 2017’s most discussed short story, “Cat Person”, is expected to be published some time in the summer.

Poetry
Blackbird, Bye Bye by Moniza Alvi (Bloodaxe). A collection unified by an engagement with birds that examines immigration, grief and art.

Events and anniversaries
6 Women’s prize for fiction winner announced.
15 Film version of On Chesil Beach, self-adapted by Ian McEwan, starring Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle.
Sjon. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian
July

Non-fiction
Out of My Head by Tim Parks (Harvill Secker). The bestselling novelist embarks on a quest to discover more about consciousness.

Fiction
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (Cape). The pitch-black Eileen made the 2016 Man Booker shortlist; this dark new novel features a privileged woman whose alienation is exacerbated by medication and an awful shrink.
CoDex 1962 by Sjón (Sceptre). A genre-blending novel about a child made of clay and brought from second world war Germany by his Jewish father to Iceland, from the Icelandic author of Moonstone.
Days of Awe by AM Homes (Granta). Blackly comic short stories about contemporary America, from the winner of the Women’s prize for fiction.
So Much Life Left Over by Louis de Bernières (Harvill Secker). A bittersweet sequel to 2015’s The Dust that Falls from Dreams, delving into the lives and loves of a family in Britain between the wars.

Events and anniversaries
6 Release of Mary Shelley, biopic marking Frankenstein’s bicentenary starring Elle Fanning and Douglas Booth.
28 50th anniversary of John Mortimer winning his landmark appeal against the banning of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn for obscenity.
30 Bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth.
Karl Ove Knausgard … The Fruits of my Labour. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer
August


Non-fiction
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari (Cape). Hard on the heels of the astonishingly successful Sapiens, which looked back, and Homo Deus, which looked forward, Harari presents lessons on the here and now.
Red Thread: On Mazes and Labyrinths by Charlotte Higgins (Cape). The Guardian’s chief culture writer takes a labyrinthine journey through myth, art, literature, history, archaeology and memoir.
Rise by Gina Miller (Canongate). A rallying cry that draws on a lifetime of fighting against injustice, sexism, racism and bullying, from the woman who took the UK government to the supreme court over article 50.

Fiction
The Fruits of my Labour by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Harvill Secker). The final volume in the epic Norwegian autobiographical series includes a long essay on Hitler and a consideration of the personal fallout from his earlier books.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free by Andrew Miller (Sceptre). Costa- and Impac-winner Miller is known for his masterful historical novels: here, a soldier home from the disastrous campaign against Napoleon in 1809 runs from his demons towards the Hebrides.
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail). The Man Booker-shortlisted author of Half-Blood Blues returns with a novel based on a 19th-century criminal case about a young field slave in a Barbados sugar plantation who becomes servant to an eccentric abolitionist obsessed with flight.
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton). The craze for rewriting Greek myth continues, as a great chronicler of 20th-century war retells The Iliad from the perspective of Briseis, the captured Trojan princess fought over by Achilles and Agamemnon.

Poetry
Playtime by Andrew McMillan (Cape). The 2015 Guardian first book prize winner returns with a collection exploring the complex territory of being different as a child.

Children’s
The Lost Magician by Piers Torday (Quercus). A fantasy adventure from the author of the trilogy The Last Wild, about a group of children in 1945 who step through a magical library door, where they find a fairytale world under threat.

Events and anniversaries
11 Edinburgh international book festival begins, running until 27 August.
16 25th anniversary of publication of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.
24 Release of film version of Naomi Alderman’s novel Disobedience, starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams.
Sebastian Faulks … Paris Echo. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian
September

Non-fiction
Thomas Cromwell by Diarmaid MacCulloch (Allen Lane). A biography of Cromwell from the expert on the English Reformation.
Nine Pints by Rose George (Portobello). An exploration of blood from the versatile journalist and author.
Breaking News by Alan Rusbridger (Canongate). Former Guardian editor-in-chief on who controls the news in this era of transformation and why it matters.
I Am Dynamite! by Sue Prideaux (Faber). A study of Friedrich Nietzsche from the biographer of Munch and Strindberg.
The Lies That Bind by Kwame Anthony Appiah (Profile). One of a number of books out this year on identity and how it works, from the philosopher and chair of judges for the 2018 Man Booker prize.

Fiction
Transcription by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday). Atkinson won two Costas in a row for Life After Life and A God in Ruins; in her new novel, a woman who gets involved in the secret service during the second world war reaps the consequences of her idealism.
This Storm by James Ellroy (William Heinemann). From a titan of US crime fiction, the follow-up to 2014’s Perfidia, which delved into the murder of an LA-based Japanese family in the wake of Pearl Harbor.
Paris Echo by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson). A new novel from the Birdsong author contrasts the lives of Hannah, an American academic researching women during the German occupation of Paris, and Tariq, a Moroccan teenager on the run, to explore France’s troubled history.
Red Birds by Mohammed Hanif (Bloomsbury). A teenager in a refugee camp and an American pilot who has crashlanded in the desert find their paths colliding, in a black comedy about a world in crisis.
Love Is Blind by William Boyd (Viking). A young Scottish musician heads to fin-de-siècle Paris to find himself, and is swept up in an obsessive love affair that takes him to Russia and back.

Children’s
Further into the Jungle by Katherine Rundell (Macmillan). Origin stories about the characters from Kipling’s The Jungle Book, from the author of 2017’s Costa-winning The Explorer.
The Restless Girls by Jessie Burton (Bloomsbury). A feminist retelling of the fairytale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” from the author of The Miniaturist.

Events and anniversaries
30 150 years since publication of the first volume of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.
Carol Ann Duffy … new collection. Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian
October

Non-fiction
The Life of Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy (Faber). The acclaimed author of biographies of William Morris, Eric Gill and others posits Gropius and Bauhaus as the beginning of a new way of thinking.
Identity by Francis Fukuyama (Profile). Still best known for The End of History, Fukuyama takes on populism, politicised Islam, the fractious “identity liberalism” of college campuses and white nationalism.
Brothers York: An English Tragedy by Thomas Penn (Allen Lane). The author of the prizewinning history Winter King moves on to three brothers of the House of York.

Fiction
Melmoth by Sarah Perry (Serpent’s Tail). The third novel from the author of The Essex Serpent is inspired by Charles Maturin’s 1820 gothic masterpiece Melmoth the Wanderer, and promises to investigate good and evil through a time-travelling narrative.
Berta Isla by Javier Marías (Hamish Hamilton). From the author of The Infatuations, this story of Tomás, a half-Spanish, half-English man forced into the British secret service, and Berta, the woman he loves, examines the power of the state and a marriage built on lies.
American Weather by Jenny Offill (Granta). Offill made her name with 2014’s Dept. of Speculation; her new heroine is a librarian navigating polarised political opinion and family crises in turbulent contemporary America.

Poetry
Title to be confirmed by Carol Ann Duffy (Picador). Her final collection before stepping down as poet laureate next year, Duffy’s book will be a frank exploration of loss and remembrance.

Children’s
The Tales of Beedle the Bard by JK Rowling (Bloomsbury). Chris Riddell illustrates Rowling’s fables from the Potterverse in a deluxe charity edition.

Events and anniversaries
5-14 Cheltenham literature festival.
16 Man Booker prize winner announced.
28 20th anniversary of the death of Ted Hughes’ death in 1998; three months later he posthumously won the Whitbread award for Birthday Letters..
31 50 years since the first night of Alan Bennett’s first play Forty Years On.
Philip Larkin … Letters Home. Photograph: Jane Bown/taken from picture library
November

Non-fiction
The Life of Saul Bellow Vol 2 by Zachary Leader (Cape). Leader picks up the story of the American novelist in the mid-60s.
Francis Bacon by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (William Collins). The Pulitzer prize-winning authors of De Kooning make use of material discovered since Bacon’s death.

Fiction
The Land of the Living by Georgina Harding (Bloomsbury). A lyrical novel about war and memory, as a Norfolk man is haunted by his time in the jungles of India during the second world war, from the author of the Orange-shortlisted The Painter of Silence.
To Kill a Mocking Bird illustrated by Fred Fordham (William Heinemann). A graphic novel adaptation of Harper Lee’s classic, by the artist behind Philip Pullman’s The Adventures of John Blake.

Poetry
Philip Larkin: Letters Home 1936–1977, edited by James Booth (Faber). A collection that presents the last major unpublished Larkin archive: the letters to his family, chiefly his “conservative anarchist” father and beloved mother.

Events and anniversaries
50th anniversary of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea.
4 Centenary of the death of Wilfred Owen, a week before hostilities ended.
9 Centenary of the death of French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who was wounded in the war but died of Spanish flu; bicentenary of birth of Ivan Turgenev.
16 Release of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a follow-up also scripted by JK Rowling.
28 50th anniversary of the death of Enid Blyton.
Edward Snowden … a study, by Barton Gellman. Photograph: Guardian video
December

Non-fiction
Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the Surveillance State by Barton Gellman (Bodley Head). A study of “the hidden superstructure that connects government espionage with Silicon valley” from the journalist and author who shared the Pulitzer prize for his role in bringing Snowden’s revelations to light.

Events and anniversaries
11 Centenary of the birth of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1970.
20 50th anniversary of death of John Steinbeck, Nobel prize winner in 1962.