There often seems to be something unshakable about the gestation cycles of great novelists. Over a career, favourite writers settle on a publishing rhythm that both suggests an unwillingness to be hurried by commercial pressure and a kind of psychological imperative. Lives are measured not in years but in books. Ardent readers of EL Doctorow, for example, will have come to expect a big novel from him just about exactly once every five years for the past half century.

The special pleasure of a Doctorow novel is that each inhabits a perfectly self-enclosed time and place – the 1920s New York of 1975's Ragtime, the epic civil war journey through the southern states of 2005's The March – yet is imbued with his perfectly pitched authorial voice. His new novel, Andrew's Brain, written in his 82nd year and published in January, takes him inwards, to the loops and pathways of a neurologist's mind. It reflects a "late period" for the novelist that bears comparison with that of his contemporary Philip Roth.

If Doctorow has earned a degree of patience from his readers in his steady output, a different kind of commitment has been required of the devotees of Joyce Carol Oates's work. She has published well over 100 books, including more than 40 novels, lately at the rate of at least one a year, a quantity that is remarkable for the quality control of both her storytelling and her sentences.

The spring sees two new books to add to her voluminous career. In January, Carthage weaves the tale of a missing child with the psychological fallout of an Iraq war veteran over 500 compulsive pages; while Evil Eye, four novellas about love gone bad, is due in June. At 75, Oates still runs most days, and when she is not running, she is writing. The challenge for her readers is to keep up.

One of the thrills of encountering first novels that you love is in the anticipation of what will come next. Harriet Lane's Alys Always was one of the most memorable fictional debuts of recent years, a seemingly simple story that discovered subtle ways to unsettle, and which found elegant, disturbing insights into familiar English obsessions with class and status. Lane's new book, Her, due in June, promises to be this year's unmissable summer novel. Among Lane's antecedents is the pin-sharp prose of Patricia Highsmith and the Ripley author is also an inspiration for Phil Hogan, the Observer's TV critic, whose A Pleasure and a Calling, out in March, told in the voice of that most unreliable of narrators, the small-town estate agent, is a wonderfully sinister fable of property and obsession.

Among younger American novelists, Joshua Ferris is well into his unconventional stride. His brilliant first book, And Then We Came to the End, told entirely in the first person plural, remains the smartest satire of contemporary corporate culture, a Catch-22 from the front line of PowerPoint and internal comms. He followed that with a strangely moving book, The Unnamed, about a man who could not stop walking. His new novel, due in June, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, will explore the darker psychology of digital double lives and internet personae.

Also looking to build on bestselling literary success is Christos Tsiolkas, who follows his Booker-shortlisted exploration of down under manners in The Slap with Barracuda, which is concerned with the incendiary rivalries in an Australian swimming team. Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees was every book group's must-read novel. The Invention of Wings, out in January, which explores the lives of two young girls in 19th-century Charleston, one an heiress, the other her slave, promises to repeat the trick.

Every year seems a strong year for Irish fiction and the first part of 2014 is no exception. Sebastian Barry's The Temporary Gentleman is the fictionalised memoir of an Irish volunteer in the British army during the second world war. Hugo Hamilton's Every Single Minute, the poetic tale of a writer's final journey to Berlin, arrives with glowing advance notices, not least from Colm Tóibín, whose Nora Webster, set on the west coast of Ireland in the 1960s, is out in June. Other previous Booker nominees with likely contenders for next year's prize include Damon Galgut (Arctic Summer, March), Rachel Seiffert (The Walk Home, April), Andrew O'Hagan (The Illuminations, May), Philip Hensher (The Emperor Waltz, July) and Hanif Kureishi (The Last Word, February).

First novelists hoping to join them range from Zoe Pilger (daughter of John) with Eat My Heart Out (Jan) to Miranda Carter, biographer of Anthony Blunt, who has a tale of East India Company intrigue out in the same month, to James Naughtie, who has written a cold war spy novel, The Madness of July, which gets ahead of itself by coming out in March.