From studies of grief to memoirs from Melvyn Bragg and Jarvis Cocker, along with Norman Scott’s account of a very English scandal, here are the titles coming your way next year
• Fiction to look out for in 2022
It’s getting quite hard to ignore the fact that publishers are increasingly hunting in packs, seemingly driven more by trends than by taste. Next year’s nonfiction lists are dominated to an almost ridiculous degree by books about identity and, perhaps more surprisingly, by essay collections, and the result, seen from afar, is both repetitive and a touch flimsy-seeming (great as it is that publishers are suddenly mad for essays, this is a form that requires a lot of craft and deep thinking even to be half successful). Meanwhile, pitiful neglect sets in elsewhere. If nature writing is (at last, some might say) in retreat, thunking great literary biographies are positively on the run, though we can, I’m happy to say, look forward to Katherine Rundell’s Super-infinite: The Transformations of John Donne(Faber, April), a new and groovy-sounding account of the life of the great poet of sex and death.
Ah, yes: death. Grief is big business for publishing, an industry all of its own. In The Reactor: A Book About Grief and Repair (Faber, January), Nick Blackburn, a psychotherapist, worries away in modish fragmentary style at the sudden loss of his father. In This Mortal Coil: A History of Death (Bloomsbury, February), the historian Andrew Doig offers a portrait of the final exit across the centuries. Naturally, illness is all around, too. Those who have found Professor Devi Sridhar’s expertise and calm advice invaluable since the arrival of Covid-19 will be glad to know that she has written Preventable: the Politics of Pandemics and How to Stop the Next One (Viking, May). More cheerily, Gavin Francis, the Edinburgh GP who wrote so well on the pandemic last year, has now switched his attention – put the Lucozade on ice! – to life after illness in Recovery: The Lost Art of Convalescence (Wellcome Collection, January).
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