Spring is here, and books, like plants, are emerging in clumps, as if the seeds of a few notions had proliferated madly during winter. Last year saw a remarkable run of novels written as memoirs: Ha Jin's War Trash, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Ward Just's An Unfinished Season. Clearly the memoir, which had so dominated nonfiction shelves during the past decade, broke free and penetrated novelists' imaginations. This year, the dominant idea continues to be 9/11, which has fueled nonfiction books since 2001 but now spreads copiously into the realm of the novel. In his latest work, Saturday, Ian McEwan gives us a portrait of a beleaguered neurosurgeon in nervous, post-9/11 London. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer imagines a precocious boy whose father is lost in the conflagration of the twin towers. We will see more on this theme as the year progresses: The Writing on the Wall, by Lynne Sharon Schwartz; The Good Priest's Son, by Reynolds Price; A Little Love Story, by Roland Merullo; Incendiary, by Chris Cleave; and many others.
Clusters abound, too, in the nonfiction category. Some, like bursts of daffodils, seem downright capricious: a flurry of books about bees! But there are others: Three biographies of J. Robert Oppenheimer (see James Gleick's review of one of them on page 3), numerous histories celebrating the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, scores of works on how different faiths mold us, and an ongoing supply on American presidents. The variety is splendid.
Here is a list of books you may find reviewed in our spring and summer pages. Look to our reviewers to tell you the rest.
FICTION
Acts of Faith, by Philip Caputo (Knopf, May). First world meets third, in this story about relief workers trying to reverse the famine in Sudan, by the author of A Rumor of War.
Alibi, by Joseph Kanon (Holt, April). In post-World War II Venice, a war crimes investigator falls in love with an enigmatic woman and finds himself implicated in a violent murder.
The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman, by Nedjma (Grove, June). A young widow tells the secrets of her erotic life in this presumably autobiographical novel.
Appaloosa, by Robert B. Parker (Putnam, June). Two itinerant lawmen in the wild, wild West find their match in a corrupt rancher. By the author of the Spenser detective series.
Bangkok Tattoo, by John Burdett (Knopf, May). Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep, who made his debut in Burdett's Bangkok 8, delves once more into the Thai underworld, and shenanigans abound.
The Big Over Easy, by Jasper Fforde (Viking, July). Humpty Stuyvesant Van Dumpty is found dead on an Easter morning, and all the evidence points to his equally dead wife.
Blinding Light, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, June). When a blocked writer takes off for Ecuador in search of a rare hallucinogenic he hopes will cure him, things go awry.
Blood From a Stone, by Donna Leon (Atlantic, May). A hawker of fake designer purses in Venice dies a grizzly death; Commissario Brunetti wants to know why.
Captain Altatriste, by Arturo Perez-Reverte (Putnam, May). A 17th-century swordsman-for-hire finds himself in the employ of the Inquisition.
The Closers, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown, May). A dead 16-year-old mixed-race girl, a white supremacist suspect -- Detective Harry Bosch sets out to investigate the connection.
Devil's Corner, by Lisa Scottoline (HarperCollins, June). A young federal prosecutor goes up against West Philly's kingpin of crime.
Eleven on Top, by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin's, June). Stephanie Plum tries to quit her work as a bounty hunter, but the weirdos and stalkers won't let her.
Envy, by Kathryn Harrison (Random House, July). A college reunion unexpectedly triggers a psychiatrist's sexual obsessions.
A Factory of Cunning, by Philippa Stockley (Harcourt, April). It's 18th-century England, and Mrs. Fox is trying to outrun her scandalous French past.
Fire Sale, by Sara Paretsky (Putnam, June). When V.I. Warshawski begins coaching basketball at her old South Chicago high school, she gets drawn into family woes, not to mention murder.
Freddy and Fredericka, by Mark Helprin (Penguin, July). The bumbling Prince of Wales and his frivolous wife are shipped out on a mission to colonize America.
The Good Priest's Son, by Reynolds Price (Scribner, June). An art conservator's New York loft is destroyed by the attack on the twin towers, and his life is irreversibly altered.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling (Scholastic, July) . The long-awaited return of the young wizard-in-training.
