Biography
Several big political biographies that'll be read intently on both sides of the Irish Sea, and beyond, are due out next year. Mo Mowlam's book, about which there has been much ado, won't - say the cognoscenti - appear in 2000, but David Trimble, A Biography, by the Observer's Ireland correspondent Henry McDonald, will. McDonald has had extensive access to Trimble through his job, and this is Bloomsbury's big biography of the spring. June will bring an alternative volume, Himself Alone: The Life of David Trimble, by Dean Godson, chief leader writer of the Daily Telegraph, who has - according to his publishers HarperCollins - had full access to Trimble and his papers. The book will, the publisher promises, reveal how Trimble, "the bete noire of Irish nationalism and of bien pensant opinion", became a peacemaker. It's a high-risk strategy writing a biography of a key player in a situation where the plot can change overnight - a book can be overtaken by events - but these will both be widely read, no matter what. And for those still intrigued by the Iron Lady there is Margaret Thatcher, Volume One: 1925-1979 by John Campbell from Jonathan Cape.
The Fool of the Family: The Life and Death of J. M. Synge by the Irish academic W. J. McCormack comes from Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The distinguished critic Frank Kermode has Shakespeare, which Penguin describes as "a landmark in Shakespearean studies". And the British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has strayed from verse to investigate a 19th-century aristocratic criminal in Wainewright the Poisoner, which comes from Faber in February. Motion is already a biographer of Larkin and Keats, and the latter was among the many literary acquaintances of Wainewright, whose relatives died in suspicious circumstances and who ended up transported to Tasmania. Faber also has Saul Bellow, A Biography by James Atlas, and Suzanne Jill Levine's Manuel Puig and the Spiderwoman, a first biography of the Argentine writer who died in 1990.
The year 2000 being the centenary of John Ruskin's death, he will figure much this year, and in March Yale University Press will publish John Ruskin: The Later Years by Tim Hilton. Boswell's Presumptuous Task by Adam Sisman is Hamish Hamilton's whopper about the father of modern biography. Borges: A Biography, by Edwin Williamson, comes from Viking. The Quarrel of the Age: The Life and Times of William Hazlitt, by A.C. Grayling, is from Weidenfeld & Nicholson.
Memoir
Autobiography seems to be becoming an increasingly fluid genre, with people focusing on certain elements of their lives, instead of giving us the whole chronological bucket of mash. Books such as these next year include Encode: A Mathematical Journey, by Sarah Flannery, from Profile Books. Since winning the Young Scientist award in January 1999 at the age of 16, Flannery has written the story of her short and extraordinary life to date, the focus being on her love of maths and science. From East to West: A Personal Journey, by Imran Khan, is a political and spiritual memoir : from Macmillan about the two cultures between which cricketer Khan has commuted for much of his life. Ali, My Journey, by Muhammad Ali and Peter Richmond is described as a spiritual memoir of one of the world's most loved and respected sportsmen and comes from Sidwick & Jackson. From Harvill there'll be Robert Hughes's A Jerk at One End: Reflections of a Mediocre Fisherman, the Australian critic's meditations, laced with memories of a lifetime of fishing.
Expect more forensic voyeurism with the publication of The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962, taking in the last 12 years of the poet's life, edited by Karen V. Kukil. This will be published in April by Faber, together with Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the story of Birthday Letters, in which Erica Wagner goes back over the publishing sensation of 1998,the cycle of poems almost entirely about his first wife - the doomed Plath - that Hughes launched on an unsuspecting world just before he died. And you thought this story had run its course . . . think again.
The Blood-Dark Track, A Family History, by Joseph O'Neill, is the story of his two grandfathers - one Irish, one Turkish, both of whom were imprisoned for their nationalism - from Granta, which will also publish Reading and Writing: A Personal Account, by V.S. Naipaul.
Poetry
With Handwriting, Michael Ondaatje publishes his first collection since The Cinnamon Peeler; a collection that focuses on his home country of Sri Lanka and will be published by Picador.
Michael Schmidt, who edits the poetry journal, PN Review, is the editor of The Harvill Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, described tactfully as "reliably thoughtful and properly controversial", by the British Poet Lauerate Andrew Motion.
Laureates feature also in Tony Harrison's Laureate's Block, from Viking; Harrison revels mischievously in being "free to blast and bollock Blairite Britain", since he is not the one taking the Queen's shilling.
Carcanet will publish John F. Deane's Toccata and Fugue: New and Selected Poems as well as Paula Meehan's Selected Poems. From Faber comes Thom Gunn's Boss Cu- pid; and The Donkey's Ears by Douglas Dunn.
A debut collection from the Northern Ireland poet, Colette Bryce, The Heel of Bernadette, is due from Picador. Jonathan Cape will have both The Weather in Japan from Michael Longley and, from Donegal-born poet Matthew Sweeney, A Smell of Fish.
Essays
Out as we speak is More Matter: Essays and Criticism, a jaw-dropping 50th book by John Updike, from Hamish Hamilton. Bloomsbury's Anthology of Prefaces, by Alasdair Gray, is a history of English literature from the seventh century onward, as seen through prefaces. Poet Craig Raine has a collection of essays of literary criticism, which he has written since 1972, Haydn and the Valve Trumpet, from Picador. And Toolbox by Fabio Morabito (Bloomsbury) could well do for hammers and screws what Dava Sobel did for clocks in Longitude, with inventive essays on each item common to toolboxes.
General
April will see the publication of Bloody Sunday by Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson, the original Sunday Times Insight team reporters who investigated the cataclysmic events in Derry in January 1972. To be published by Fourth Estate, it promises no less than "the truth of what happened".
This month Granta will publish Tom Nairn's apparently scathing analysis of British politics and New Labour's plans for Scotland, called After Britain: New Labour and the Return of Scotland, in which he ultimately forecasts an independent Scotland.
Harvill's Underground, by Haruki Murakami, is the story of March 20th 1995, when the Toyko subway was targeted by nerve gas, as told through interviews with 60 of the victims. Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by the cultural commentator Michael Ignatieff is billed rather bleakly by Chatto & Windus as a book to be read "as we stand on the brink of a new era of warmaking". Meanwhile Tim Judah's Kosovo: War and Revenge is described by Yale University Press as a " revealing account of the last great European war of the 20th century"; it will appear in March. Journalist Judah is an old Balkan hand, living in Belgrade between 1990-95 to cover the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and going on to cover the Kosovo conflict.
To the Edge of the Sky from Viking is a first book by Anhua Gao, a Wild Swans-style story of growing up in Red China. Hungry for Home, Leaving the Blaskets: A Journey from the Edge of Ireland (Viking) by journalist Cole Morton follows the story of what happened to those who left their craggy homes off the Kerry coast in the 1953 evacuation.
On the cookery front, Jamie Oliver strips again for The Naked Chef 2, from Michael Joseph. Headline offers TV chef's Antonio Carluccio's Vegetables. Headline's Looking for a Fight: How a Writer Took on the Box- ing World from the Inside, by David Matthews, tells the story of a journalist-turned-boxer in search of stories. And to coincide with the Euro 2000 championships in Holland and Belgium in June, David Winner has Brilliant Orange: A History of Dutch Football, to be published by Bloomsbury.
Travel/Guides
A chance to see ourselves from an outsider's perspective comes from Silver Lining: Travels Around Northern Ireland, (Little, Brown) by Martin Fletcher, ex-Washington correspondent for The Times. One wonders how Northerners will feel about being described as living in "a place caught in a time-warp since the 1960s". Hodder & Stoughton has McCarthy's Bar, by Pete McCarthy; a travel book about Ireland from the perspective of the endless McCarthy's bars throughout the land. Expect plenty of Guinness-inspired discussion. Harvill's Journey to Portugal is by the 1998 Nobel Literature prizewinner, Jose Saramago; the story of his journeying through his own country in a veteran car, which probably wouldn't pass our upcoming NCT. Fresh-Air Fiend: Travel Writings 1985-2000 by Paul Theroux is a collection of pieces mostly unpublished outside the US, by the infamously rude traveller; from Hamish Hamilton. Being hyped as "the true successor to Bruce Chatwin" is a first book from Kevin Patterson, The Water in Between, of a journey by boat from the northwest of Canada to Tahiti, as he recovers from a broken relationship; from Viking. Caryl Phillips has The Atlantic Sound, from Faber, a book billed as a personal quest to understand the painful legacy of the Atlantic slave trade; the book takes in Liverpool, a city built by the slave trade, and Charleston, where a third of black Americans were once bought and sold, and Phillips travels from the Caribbean to Britain by boat, repeating a seminal journey he himself made as a child in 1958.
Business/Economics
Man's fascination with money over the ages will be tracked in both a six-part BBC series and an accompanying book, The Wealth of Man, by the BBC's Economics Editor Peter Jay. It will be published in April by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which also offers Falling Eagle: The Decline of Barclays Bank, in which Martin Vander Weyer takes in everything from the Thatcher years to the Asian crisis of 1998. From Hugo Dixon, who writes the Financial Times's Lex column, comes The Lex Guide to Finance, a guide to the central principles of modern capitalism, from Penguin Business. The World Tomorrow: The Promise of Globalization by Economist journalists, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, is from Heinemann.
Century will publish The Pound, "the story of the currency that ruled the world and lasted a thousand years", by David Sinclair, while The Valley, by New York Times reporter John Heilemann, the story of the struggle for control of Silicon Valley will be published by HarperCollins in April.
Science
An in-your-face title from Weidenfeld is The Maths Gene: Why Everyone Has It But Most People Can't Use It by Keith Devlin; also from Weidenfeld is The Man Who Found the Missing Link: The Life and Times of Eugene Dubois, by Pat Shipman, winner of the 1997 Rhone-Poulenc Science Prize. And in March, Jonathan Cape will publish Stephen Jay Gould's collection of essays, The Lying Stones of Marrakech: Penultimate Reflections in Natural History.