Pronounced dead earlier this century, and several times since, the novel form has disregarded all medical advice and continues to procreate at quite a rate. The year 2000 offers new work from several established masters, as well as some strong emerging voices. As ever, the publishers' catalogues are replete with hype and more variations of the word genius than most of us have had hot dinners.
Harvill is continuing to spread the message of the genius of US giant William Maxwell. His Jamesian novel, The Chateau, praised for its vitality and humour on its original publication by Elizabeth Bowen, is set between the Old and New World cultures in the wake of the second World War. What better way to begin a new publishing year, a new publishing century? (Harvill/January)
David Gates is another US writer. Preston Falls is the account of one man's midlife crisis as spent restoring an old farmhouse. All is complicated by a binge which brings more trouble to our beleaguered hero. This should be about as dark and funny as anyone wanting to brighten up the post-Christmas season could hope for (Gollancz/this month).
As Harvill has served Maxwell, so Granta has promoted the intriguing Central European writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) whose work so brilliantly chronicles the culture which died with the fall of the Austrian Empire. Rebellion, his final work, here translated by Michael Hofmann, follows the one-legged war veteran Andreas Pum on his adventures (Granta/January).
Should you like your fiction clever and very English, look no further than John Lancaster's (the author of The Debt to Pleasure) day in the life of Mr Phillips, a commuter who decides to go AWOL (Faber/January).
Mary Morrissy quickly established a reputation with the stories in A Lazy Eye, and her first novel Mother of Pearl was deservedly short-listed for the Whitbread Prize. The Pretender takes the mystery of the Grand Duchess Anastasia and explores a claim which lived for 60 years. Truth, reality and self-deception provide the themes, and Morrissy's instincts provide the rest in what should be one of the best novels of the year (Cape/February).
Playwright David Mamet takes on Tristram Shandy in Wilson - a Consideration of the Sources, which takes a long overdue satirical treatment on the subject of false scholarship (Faber/February).
Colum McCann's Everything in This Country Must is a new collection of short stories about the Troubles and is marked by, according to the publishers, "a mythic rather than political feel" (Weidenfeld/ March). His fellow young Irish writer Anne Enright publishes her second novel, What Are You Like? in which 20-year-old Maria sets off on the track of her other self (Cape/ March).
The Paris-based American writer Edmund White is the master of the thoughtful, conversational tone. The Married Man is another complex study of relationships, and can be expected to be as candid and as elegant as anything he has written (Chatto/ March).
OK, I'm biased, but the novel I would most like to have in my hands now is Saul Bellow's Ravelstein in which a would-be writer finally not only writes a book of ideas, but also becomes widely famous. Bellow, the 1976 Nobel laureate, remains one of the great writers of the century, and as his late novellas demonstrate, he has lost none of his vision or sharpness. The only catch is the wait for it (Viking/April).
KAZUO Ishiguro won the 1989 Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day. By then, he had already impressed with his two earlier novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and the beautiful elegy An Artist of the Floating World (1986). He suffered a hiccup of sorts, with the publication of the highly surreal puzzle The Unconsoled, in which a concert pianist finds himself wandering about an unspecified Central European city in which he knows everyone and no one. An odd performance, and yet in time, that book might well find its place as a study of the new disease called stress. Five years on Ishiguro returns with When We Were Orphans (Faber/April). Set in 1930s London, it features Christopher Banks as a great detective who has yet to solve the disappearance of his parents when he was a child.
Victor Pelevin is the great white hope of Russian fiction and builds on his reputation with Babylon, a comic satire on the new Western-style greed sweeping Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union (Faber/April).
The late Andre Dubus was a fine US writer, particularly of short stories. His son Andre Dubus III may be following in his father's footsteps; The House of Sand and Fog has been compared with the work of Jane Smiley. High praise indeed, and enough to make one seek out this strong domestic drama (Heinemann/April).
Jeremy Poolman's ambitious, multiple narrative My Kind of America is about a father and son relationship as well as, of course, the history of the US during 100 years of chaos and confusion. The author is also working on a biography of General Custer's widow, Elizabeth, and her struggle with her oddball husband's mixed legacy. (Bloomsbury/April).
Canadian Timothy Findley is one of the best kept literary secrets. Author of Famous Last Words, his approach to fiction has always revolved on a feel for history and story. In Pilgrim, a man who can't die is doomed to survival. A friend then brings him to meet Jung in Zurich (Faber/May).
Also based in Canada is the author of In the Skin of the Lion and The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje, a stylist whose genius is for creating dream atmospheres suspended by lyric images. All we know about his new novel, Anil's Ghost, is its title. It's enough: I'm already curious (Bloomsbury/May).
Haruki Murakami is single-handedly bringing the surreal comedy of modern Japanese fiction, with its focus on the individual at the mercy of everything (including himself), to the West. His novels, including The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and South of the Border, West of the Sun, are sharp portraits of contemporary Japanese society. First published in Japan in 1987, Norwegian Wood is the story of a man on the edge searching for an identity. It is also the book that made Murakami famous. Now newly translated and published in two volumes, this will be one of the most interesting narratives of the year (Harvill/May).
It seems a shame to have to wait until June for a new novel from John Updike. Still, here it is, Gertrude and Claudius, which tells the story of what happened before Shakespeare's play took up the unhappy narrative featuring the royal family of Denmark. Already author of about 50 books, no one writes better than Updike at his best. Surely it is time he was awarded the Nobel prize for his services to fiction? (Hamish Hamilton/June)
T.C. Boyle writes almost as much as Updike. On form he can be a good, if crazed story-teller, a John Irving with a superior imagination. Sometimes Boyle wins, sometimes he loses, but A Friend of the Earth, in which a New York suburban drudge weds a Californian and moves west, might well be worth a look (Bloomsbury/June). Other fiction of Irish interest in the first half of 2000 includes The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins (Phoenix House/this month, McKenzie's Friend by Philip Davison (Cape/February), and The Little Hammer by John Kelly (Cape/March). Pauline McLynn will be launching herself as a novelist with Something for the Weekend (Headline/February). There is also Inishowen by Joseph O'Connor (Secker and Warburg/June) and The Feng-Shui Junkie by Brian Gallagher (Orion/February).
So: Maxwell, Bellow, Updike, Findley, Edmund White, Pelevin and Murakami. I'm not complaining.