January

5 Costa prize category winners announced – best novel, first novel, biography, poetry collection and children’s book. The writer who will follow The Shock of the Fall author Nathan Filer as overall winner will be revealed on 27 January.

12 Winner of TS Eliot poetry prize (with value increased to £20,000) announced a week after the 50th anniversary of Eliot’s death in 1965.

16 UK release of Wild, adapted by Nick Hornby from Cheryl Strayed’s book about her 1,100-mile hike of self-discovery down the Pacific coast of the United States.

23 UK release of Ex Machina, SF thriller written and directed by Alex Garland of The Beach fame.

24 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, who was a Nobel literature laureate.

30 UK release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, the first screen version of a Thomas Pynchon novel.

Looking over the literary landscape for 2015

Fiction

Lurid & Cute by Adam Thirlwell (Jonathan Cape). An ordinary man wakes up and finds himself plunged into a Technicolor world of crime, revenge and lust in a characteristically playful novel from the author of Politics and The Escape.



Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper (Fig Tree). In her keenly anticipated debut, Canadian writer and musician Hooper heads for the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan to tell the tale of an elderly woman who decides to walk 2,000 miles to see the ocean for the very first time.

An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (Corsair). The Bad Feminist author’s debut novel, about a Haitian woman at the mercy of her kidnappers, gets a UK release.

10:04 by Ben Lerner (Granta). A follow-up to the acclaimed Leaving the Atocha Station, about love and literature in a New York under threat.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday). The Gone Girl title-a-likes just keep coming – but the toxic relationship this girl has with alcohol marks out an impressive thriller debut.

Poetry

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing by Paul Muldoon (Faber). The sense of a generation moving up infuses Muldoon’s 12th collection, which opens with a long poem dedicated to the memory of Seamus Heaney.



Non-fiction

Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari (Bloomsbury). The controversial Hari, repentant plagiarist, enters the drugs debate with a look at the past 100 years of prohibition.



Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Canongate). A harrowing account of over a decade of incarceration without charge, by a detainee still in the Cuban prison.

Quite a Good Time to be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975 by David Lodge (Harvill Secker). The author of Changing Places and Nice Work charts the momentous social developments that unfolded during the first half of his life.

Fifty Shades of Grey. Photograph: Universal Pictures/PA

February

11 75th anniversary of death of John Buchan. Also 100th anniversary of birth of Patrick Leigh Fermor.

13 Valentine’s Day eve UK release for film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson.

17 National Theatre production of George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman, starring Ralph Fiennes, starts its run.

21 Jewish Book Week begins.

Fiction

The Illuminations by Andrew O’Hagan (Faber). The story of an officer in the Royal Western Fusiliers, returning to Scotland from a tour of Afghanistan, is interwoven with his grandmother’s early life as a pioneer of British documentary photography.

A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler (Chatto). The celebrated author of The Accidental Tourist and Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant is back with a Baltimore-set novel about generations of the Whitshank family.

The First Bad Man by Miranda July (Canongate). “Never has a novel spoken so deeply to my sexuality, my spirituality, my secret self,” says Lena Dunham. The first novel by July, the cult writer, film-maker and artist, tackles motherhood, ageing and the need to be loved.

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman (Headline). “Short fictions and disturbances” from the all-conquering fantasy writer, in which the old gods clash with the new in modern America.

Second Life by SJ Watson (Doubleday). Follow-up to memory-loss smash Before I Go to Sleep is a psychological thriller featuring a woman leading a double life.

We Are Pirates by Daniel Handler (Bloomsbury). A “pirate story for grownups”, about a teenage girl causing mayhem in San Francisco bay, from the author more commonly known as Lemony Snicket.

Nobody Is Ever Missing by Catherine Lacey (Granta). A young American walks away from her life and pitches up in New Zealand, in an unnerving debut that has made a splash in the US.

Poetry

In Poems (Little, Brown), Iain Banks’s friend and collaborator Ken MacLeod collects their verse according to the late writer’s wishes.



Disinformation by Frances Leviston (Picador). Eagerly awaited follow-up to her 2007 debut Public Dream, from one of our highly regarded younger poets.

Kim Kardashian’s Marriage by Sam Riviere (Faber). Second collection from the winner of 2012’s Forward prize for best debut.

Non-fiction

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson (Picador). When his online identity was stolen, Ronson rapidly rooted out the culprits. But it prompted this meditation on the exponential growth in the power of contemporary public shaming, not least in social media.



The Rise of Islamic State: Isis and the New Sunni Revolution by Patrick Cockburn (Verso). The award-winning foreign correspondent traces the rapid strengthening of the jihadi movement.

Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller (Penguin). A sequel to Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Fuller’s memoir of her childhood in Rhodesia, this time revisiting her tempestuous 20-year marriage.

Gods and Kings: The Rise and Fall of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano by Dana Thomas (Allen Lane). The world of high fashion viewed through the stories of two of its most dominant figures in recent years.

Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia by Peter Pomerantsev (Faber). A riveting account of the creation of Putin’s Russia.

To Explain the World: The Discovery of Modern Science by Steven Weinberg (Allen Lane). A history of science from the Nobel prize-winning theoretical physicist.

Girl in a Band by Kim Gordon (Faber). Much excitement surrounds this memoir from the bassist, singer and co-founder of Sonic Youth.

Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land by Robert Crawford (Cape). The early life of the 20th century’s most important poet, 50 years after his death.

Cameron’s Coup by Polly Toynbee and David Walker (Faber). A pre-election journey around Britain to assess the damage the coalition has done.

Kazuo Ishiguro. Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

March

13 UK release of Saul Dibb’s film Suite Française, based on Irène Némirovsky’s second world war novel posthumously published in 2004.

23 Second winner of Folio prize announced, chosen from a longlist of 80 books, to follow George Saunders, who won the inaugural prize for his collection of short stories Tenth of December.

26 100th anniversary of publication of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out.

Fiction

The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber). His first novel since Never Let Me Go a decade ago is a striking departure, set in a mythical post-Roman England where memories of Arthur are fading and Britons and Saxons live in uneasy peace.



Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker). After last year’s Boyhood Island, Knausgaard’s autobiography-fiction hybrid arrives at the threshold of adult life, as the 18-year-old narrator finds himself teaching in a remote fishing village and beginning to write short stories.

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy (Cape). A narrator known only as U who works as a “corporate anthropologist”, a dizzying proliferation of information and a spiral of narratives usher us in to the avant-garde world of McCarthy, author of Man Booker-shortlisted C.

I Am Radar by Reif Larsen (Vintage). Larsen follows his picaresque debut The Selected Works of TS Spivet, which was shortlisted for the Guardian first book award, with a globetrotting epic about a boy with mysterious origins.

A Decent Ride by Irvine Welsh (Cape). It’s another outing for “Juice Terry”, the lusty taxi driver whom we first encountered in Glue – and who now finds himself with an ailing libido. Can a burgeoning love of golf help? Probably not.

The End of the Story by Lydia Davis (Hamish Hamilton). A reissue of the acclaimed short-story writer’s only novel, first published in 1994: the fragmentary tale of a failed love affair that an unnamed narrator is struggling to turn into a novel.

The Girl in the Red Coat by Kate Hamer (Faber). This hotly tipped debut centres on an eight-year-old girl who goes missing at a festival, and her mother’s attempts to find her.

The Dirty Dust by Máirtín Ó Cadhain (Yale). First English-language translation for an exuberant novel set in a graveyard and told entirely in the voices of the dead, which has been described as the most important prose work in modern Irish.

Get in Trouble by Kelly Link (Canongate). Short stories from one of the most interesting fantastical writers around.

Poetry

Multi-award winning Sean O’Brien returns with The Beautiful Librarians (Picador) featuring “infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar – but none more heroic than the librarians of the title”.



Non-fiction

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad (Virago). The author of The Bookseller of Kabul explores the events surrounding the massacre of 2011, and their effect on Norwegian society.



Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton). Journeys through Britain, with an emphasis on how language has captured the natural world.

Visitants by Dave Eggers (Hamish Hamilton). Twenty years of travel writing, from Cuba to Croatia and Syria to South Sudan.

Wasted: How Misunderstanding Young Britain Threatens Our Future by Georgia Gould (Little, Brown). As election day draws ever closer, Gould’s audit of the country’s younger generation reveals a social group facing immense challenges that is far from apathetic.

The Retreat: How the West Ignored Pakistan and Lost Afghanistan by Christina Lamb (William Collins). An expert’s eye on how intervention in Afghanistan foundered.

Honourable Friends? by Caroline Lucas (Portobello). Britain’s first Green MP presents a manifesto for radical change in Westminster.

Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure by Cédric Villani (Bodley Head). What goes on inside the mind of a rock-star mathematician?

Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy (Random House). LA Times reporter Leovy has been embedded with LA’s homicide department for a decade. This is the story of America’s worst homicide epidemic; Martin Amis has already called it “exceptional”.

Toni Morrison. Photograph: Guardian/Eamonn McCabe

April

14–16 London Book Fair. After China, Turkey and Korea, this year’s market focus will be on Mexico.

23 100th anniversary of death of Rupert Brooke from the infection of a mosquito bite received en route to Gallipoli.

23 Poetry is added to this year’s World Book Night, and the anthology Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy – featuring TS Eliot, Philip Larkin, Edwin Morgan and the Polish Nobel laureate Wisława Szymborska – is one of 20 books being given away to readers by writers including Roddy Doyle, David Almond, Rachel Joyce, Lynda La Plante and Elif Shafak.

24 200th anniversary of birth of Anthony Trollope, author of 47 novels and the man who introduced the pillar box to the British postal system.

Fiction

God Help the Child by Toni Morrison (Chatto & Windus). A new novel from the Nobel laureate exploring the way childhood trauma reverberates into adulthood.



Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals by Jesse Armstrong (Cape). The debut novel from the co-writer of TV comedies Peep Show and The Thick of It takes us back to 1994, and a group of idealistic youngsters who set off for Bosnia to try to stop the war.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (Atlantic). The latest from SF’s brainiest author is set 30,000 years in the future, after a meteorite storm has rendered the earth’s surface uninhabitable.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold by Magnus Mills (Bloomsbury). A parable of power, stasis and change from the author of The Restraint of Beasts.

Pleasantville by Attica Locke (Serpent’s Tail). Revisiting the territory of Locke’s Orange prize-shortlisted Black Water Rising, Pleasantville focuses on the case of a missing girl during a contentious mayoral campaign.

The Wolf Border by Sarah Hall (Faber). A woman returns to the Lake District as part of a project to reintroduce wolves to the landscape in a novel about wilderness and personal transformation.

The Discreet Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa (Faber). The Nobel prize-winner weaves a tale of two men, each heroic in his own way – one the victim of blackmail, the other determined to avenge himself on his useless sons. Previous Vargas Llosa characters make an appearance.

Poetry

Sentenced to Life by Clive James (Picador). Since James announced he is in the latter stages of a terminal illness he has produced a series of heart-rending yet clear-eyed poems looking back over his life and considering his situation.



The Curiosities by Christopher Reid (Faber). A typically playful and clever collection containing 27 poems that “cluster round the letter C”.

Non-fiction

Alfred Hitchcock by Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus). A new life of the eccentric director, from his isolated childhood to his meteoric career.



Gun, Baby, Gun by Iain Overton (Canongate). An investigation into gun culture and its aftermath that spans over 25 countries.

The Story of Alice by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (Harvill Secker). As Alice in Wonderland celebrates its 150th birthday, a fresh look at Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell and the Alice books.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky (Hamish Hamilton). The activist intellectual on American hegemony.

Words Without Music by Philip Glass (Faber). Memoir of one of the most influential forces in contemporary classical music across opera, symphony and film scores.





Far from the Madding Crowd. Photograph: Allstar

May

1 UK release of Thomas Vinterberg’s film of Far from the Madding Crowd, adapted by David Nicholls with Carey Mulligan as Bathsheba.

19 Sixth winner of biennial Man Booker International prize announced. Judges chaired by Marina Warner will name a successor to Lydia Davis, who won in 2013.

21 Hay festival begins (to 31).

Fiction

A God in Ruins by Kate Atkinson (Doubleday). This companion volume to Atkinson’s 2013 novel Life After Life, about the many lives of Ursula Todd, focuses on the fortunes of her younger brother Teddy, RAF pilot and would-be poet.



Flood of Fire by Amitav Ghosh (John Murray). The final novel in his historical trilogy covers colonial government in India.

Quicksand by Steve Toltz (Sceptre). Fate, faith and friendship are the subjects of this follow-up to Toltz’s turbo-charged 2008 success, A Fraction of the Whole.

The Art of Flying by Antonio Altarriba (Cape). This graphic novel based around the suicide of the author’s father was a huge success in Spain.

The Green Road by Anne Enright (Cape). The author of The Gathering explores family life once again, this time centring on the Madigans, a County Clare clan that scatters to the four corners of the globe before coming back together again.

Poetry

Marrying the Ugly Millionaire: New and Selected Poems (Carcanet) by Sophie Hannah, bestselling crime writer and Agatha Christie sequelist.



Non-fiction

Naked at the Albert Hall by Tracey Thorn (Virago). The Everything But the Girl star and author of Bedsit Disco Queen on the art and practice of singing.



Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes (Cape). The writer’s explorations of artists from Géricault and Delacroix to Howard Hodgkin and Lucian Freud.

Do It Like a Woman by Caroline Criado-Perez (Portobello). The feminist activist celebrates campaigners for women’s rights around the world and sets out an agenda for the future.

The Life of Saul Bellow Vol 1 by Zachary Leader (Picador). The first part of a major biography of one of 20th-century America’s greatest writers.

Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble by Antony Beevor (Viking). The story of Hitler’s ill-fated final stand, the battle that finally broke the Wehrmacht.

Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis (Profile Books). A lyrical field guide to the human body from the award-winning author of Empire Antarctica.

A Day in the Life of the Brain by Susan Greenfield (Pelican). The renowned scientist contributes to this series of accessible introductions.

China Mieville. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

June

3 Baileys women’s prize for fiction ceremony will crown a successor to 2014 winner Eimear McBride for her debut novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing.

10 100th anniversary of birth of Saul Bellow: “In an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.”

13 150th anniversary of birth of WB Yeats: “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

Fiction

I Saw A Man by Owen Sheers (Faber). After the death of his wife, Michael Turner moves to London and befriends the family next door, who represent much of what he has lost. But disaster is not far away …

Three Moments of an Explosion by China Miéville (Macmillan). New stories from the master of the New Weird.

In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume (Picador). In her first adult novel for 16 years, based on her own childhood, the revered writer for children and young adults tells the story of a community reeling in the wake of a series of freak plane accidents.

Love + Hate by Hanif Kureishi (Faber). Short fiction and essays including a long piece of reportage about the conman who stole Kureishi’s life savings.

Poetry

John Ashbery continues his close inspection of the pleasures and absurdities of the everyday world in Breezeway (Carcanet).



The Remains by Annie Freud (Picador). The blending of images and poetry in Sung Dynasty works on paper inspired this collection, which Freud has illustrated herself.

Non-fiction

London Overground by Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton). The heroic pedestrian walks around the “Ginger Line”, London’s new orbital overground.



Walking Away by Simon Armitage (Faber). A new odyssey for the poet after the success of his walk along the Pennine Way, recounted in Walking Home.

Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis (Quercus). Burton, Taylor and the age of showbiz excess.

JK Rowling. Photograph: Andrew Milligan/PA

July

29 Man Booker longlist announced. Chair Michael Wood and fellow judges Ellah Allfrey, John Burnside, Sam Leith and Frances Osborne whittle their books down to a Booker dozen of 13 hopefuls.

31 JK Rowling turns 50, having very possibly published a new book as usual in July.

Fiction

The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton). From the author of Skippy Dies comes the tale of a Frenchman marooned in Dublin who meets an author who wants to put him in a book. The author’s name? Paul Murray …



You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Benjamin Markovits (Faber). One of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists comes up with a tale of two college friends – one successful, one less so – who hit on a plan to revitalise impoverished neighbourhoods in Detroit.

The Dust that Falls from Dreams by Louis de Bernières (Harvill Secker). Set around the first world war, this is a return to the epic romance of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Non-fiction

Zero Zero Zero by Roberto Saviano (Allen Lane). A meticulous examination, in the form of a “non-fiction novel”, of the international cocaine trade and its consequences, by the author of the bestselling Gomorrah.



The Black Mirror: 35 Meditations on Mortality by Raymond Tallis (Atlantic). The philosopher and former Professor of Geriatric Medicine contemplates the failing mind, being remembered and being mourned.

Petina Gappah. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

August

15 Edinburgh international literary festival starts (to 31 August)

Fiction

Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie (Cape). Add it up and you’ll realise that it comes to 1,001 nights: this new short novel is inspired by ancient traditions of storytelling.

The Book of Memory by Petina Gappah (Faber). Zimbabwean-born Gappah’s short-story collection An Elegy for Easterly won the Guardian first book award in 2009; her debut novel focuses on a woman convicted of murder telling her story from a Harare prison cell.

Noonday by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton). The trilogy about a group of characters in the London Blitz that began with 2007’s Life Class.

Poetry

Waiting for the Past by Les Murray (Carcanet). Long-awaited new collection that draws on Australian topography and language in its exploration of those things – old-fashioned typewriters, unlikely saints, farming in the spirit of ancestors – that have been lost in the modern world.



Non-fiction

Postcapitalism: A Guide to our Future by Paul Mason (Penguin). Where we go next, from Channel 4’s economics editor.



The Battle of the Atlantic by Jonathan Dimbleby (Viking). The most destructive naval campaign in all history – and the one that ultimately determined the outcome of the second world war.

A Farewell to Ice by Christopher Wadhams (Allen Lane). A professor of oceanography on the importance of ice to our planet, in a year in which the north pole is likely to be ice-free for the first time in history.

Electric Shock: How Popular Music Made the Modern World by Peter Doggett (Bodley Head). The story of pop, from the birth of recording in the 1890s to the digital age.

Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

September

15 Man Booker shortlist announced

Fiction

Purity by Jonathan Franzen (Fourth Estate). A young woman called Pip tries to untangle the mystery of her family, suggesting a Dickensian twist to the latest of Franzen’s dissections of contemporary America.



The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood (Bloomsbury). Atwood follows her MaddAddam trilogy with this near-future tale of haves and have-nots, in which a poor young couple sign up for a social experiment – with tempestuous consequences.

Merciless Gods by Christos Tsiolkas (Atlantic). Love, sex, death, family, betrayal and more in a new collection of short stories from the author of The Slap.

Bream Gives Me Hiccups by Jesse Eisenberg (Grove Press). Short stories – one is in the voice of a nine-year-old child watching a divorce, one is set in pre-eruption Pompeii – from the star of The Social Network.

The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions). The fourth and final instalment of Ferrante’s spellbinding Neapolitan series, in which a female friendship is painstakingly charted over time.

Sweet Caress by William Boyd (Bloomsbury). With his Bond duties performed, Boyd returns to the panoramic novel, this time animating the 20th century through the eyes of ambitious female photographer Amory Clay.

New Bond novel by Anthony Horowitz (Orion). But 007 just won’t die: this new hommage from Horowitz, who also writes Sherlock Holmes novels, will be based on unseen material by Ian Fleming.

Arcadia by Iain Pears (Faber). The future starts here: Pears’s tale of the imagined worlds of spy turned academic and writer Henry Lytten will be published as both a trad book and an interactive app, the better to showcase its time-slipping narrative.

City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (Cape). It’s a debut novel. It’s 900 pages. His US publishing deal was worth $2million and he’s sold the film rights to Scott Rudin. Can you afford not to read this novel of race and class in 1970s New York?

Hear the Wind Sing/Pinball 1973 by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker). New translations of the Japanese author’s first and second novels.

Tennison by Lynda La Plante (Simon & Schuster). This prequel to the Prime Suspect TV series goes back to the early 70s, when Jane Tennison is starting her police career in Hackney.



The Past by Tessa Hadley (Cape). A new novel from the much-respected author of Clever Girl, The Master Bedroom and other books.

Non-fiction

The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare (Faber). The acclaimed playwright and director’s memoir, taking us from his childhood to the moment that Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979.

Black Earth by Timothy Snyder (Bodley Head). Snyder’s groundbreaking Bloodlands told the “what” of the Holocaust; now he moves to the “why”.

The Face of Britain: A History of the Nation Through its Portraits by Simon Schama (Viking). From the Tudors to the present through portraits. Accompanies a major BBC TV series.

Universal by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw (Allen Lane). How to think like a physicist.

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist by Niall Ferguson (Allen Lane). First part of a major new biography that examines the controversial statesman and the era he dominated.

Memoir by Elvis Costello (Viking). The story of the 40-year career of the pop icon and Attractions frontman, which began with the single “Less Than Zero” in 1977.

Deep South by Paul Theroux (Hamish Hamilton). After a lifetime of journeying, Theroux sets out for the southern states of the US that he has never before explored and discovers a new country as strange and as satisfying as any he has visited.

Robert Harris. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

October

2 Cheltenham literary festival starts (to 11).

13 Man Booker prize awarded.

17 100th anniversary of birth of playwright of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller: “It is rare for people to be asked the question which puts them squarely in front of themselves.”

Fiction

A Strangeness in my Mind by Orhan Pamuk (Faber). The ninth novel from the Nobel laureate conjures the changes in Turkish society over the last few decades from the point of view of an Istanbul street vendor.



Where My Heart Used to Beat by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson). With a title taken from Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Faulks’s latest novel explores memory, desire and the madness of the 20th century.

Dictator by Robert Harris (Hutchinson). The final book in his trilogy about power-politics in ancient Rome.

Poetry

The Poems of TS Eliot edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (Faber). An annotated edition of the complete poetry with commentary and textual history.



The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith, edited by Will May (Faber). The illustrations and poems from Smith’s original volumes brought together for the first time

Non-fiction

SPQR by Mary Beard (Profile). How did Rome go from unimportant village to a global superpower? Mary Beard investigates.



The Cabaret of Plants by Richard Mabey (Profile). The celebrated nature writer explores how plants work on our imagination.

John le Carré by Adam Sisman (Bloomsbury). Biography of the leading spy writer of his generation.

1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear by James Shapiro (Faber). From the author of the award-winning 1599 comes an account of the year in which Shakespeare wrote both King Lear and Macbeth.

Charlotte Brontë biography by Claire Harman (Viking). Includes discoveries of new Brontë material, in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of her birth in 2016.

The Great British Dream Factory by Dominic Sandbrook (Allen Lane). The success and the meaning of Britain’s modern popular culture, coinciding with a BBC TV series.

Alice in Wonderland. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

November

Samuel Johnson prize for the best non‑fiction book announced. In 2014 it was won by Helen Macdonalds’s H is for Hawk.

12 100th anniversary of birth of French literary theorist and critic Roland Barthes: “Language is never innocent.”

13 UK release of Nicholas Hytner’s film The Lady in the Van, adapted from Alan Bennett’s play and starring Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings.

26 150 years since the publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Fiction

Salinger’s Letters by Nils Schou (Sandstone Press). The Danish author draws on his personal correspondence with Salinger to create a novel about depression and love.



Verticals and Horizontals by Helen Simpson (Cape). A new short-story collection is promised from the incomparable Simpson.

Non-fiction

Sontag on Film by Susan Sontag (Hamish Hamilton). The first collection of Sontag’s film writing drawn from her life as an avid movie-goer and occasional movie-maker.



Dinaw Mengestu. Photograph: Linda Nylind/Guardian

December



The Guardian first book award is announced. Who will follow in the footsteps of Zadie Smith, Alex Ross, Dinaw Mengestu and 2014’s winner, Colin Barrett?

200th anniversary of publication of Jane Austen’s fourth novel, Emma (1815): “Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”

16 50th anniversary of death of W Somerset Maugham.

30 150th anniversary of birth of Rudyard Kipling: “If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”

Fiction

Death by Water by Kenzaburō Ōe (Atlantic). The Nobel prize-winning author’s novel about an internationally acclaimed author’s investigation into the mysterious death of his father.

