Much of the fun of reading is in the anticipation. Before its spine is cracked open, every book is perfect, unsullied by boredom or disappointment or, worst of all, abandonment. These are some of the year's most eagerly awaited titles. And don't worry about the books you won't finish or won't even crack open. Regrets and recriminations are for endings not beginnings.FICTION

Few second novels can have been more freighted with expectation than The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Arundhati Roy's Booker-winning debut, The God of Small Things, turned her into a literary superstar and a symbol for India's growing self-confidence.

But instead of rushing another novel into print, Roy abandoned fiction-writing to become an activist and a dogged critic of untrammelled state power. Now, though, Roy has finally written the second novel she's put off for two decades, and her publishers have been ratcheting up the hype. "Language of the utmost freshness, joyfully reminding us that words are alive too," fawned one acolyte. "Utterly original... well worth the wait," gushed another. Expected out in June, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness will be the literary spectacle of the year.

If no novelist will want to be competing with Roy for column inches in June, there is much to look forward to in the first half of the new year. Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, best known for The Reluctant Fundamentalist, revisits familiar territory with Exit West-a love story set in a country on the cusp of civil war. An advance notice has described the novel, due out in March, as "one of the most bittersweet love stories in modern memory". Presumably modern memories are not as short as modern attention spans.

Balli Kaur Jaswal's Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows, also out in March, sparked a bidding war among British publishers. Deborah Moggach, who wrote The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, has provided a blurb. But there is reason to hope that the novel will not just be nostalgic, sentimental kitsch for British audiences, as Jaswal won prizes in Australia for her debut Inheritance, set among the Sikh diaspora in Singapore.

Hari Kunzru, a British novelist with Kashmiri Pandit antecedents, won several awards for his 2003 debut, The Impressionist. He has since moved to New York and written three more novels and hundreds of pages of incisive journalism. His fifth novel, White Tears, spills America's dirty secrets via early blues music. In 2012, Kunzru joined a small group of writers who responded to Salman Rushdie being prevented from attending the Jaipur Literature Festival by reading from The Satanic Verses, still banned in India. Jeet Thayil was among their number. A poet whose debut novel, Narcopolis, was shortlisted for the Booker that year, Thayil's second novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, is expected in the summer.

Another poet publishing her second novel in 2017 is Meena Kandasamy, whose When I Hit You, or A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, is slated for May. The book portrays a young woman bullied out of life as an academic and writer by her abusive husband, a university professor for whom a marriage contract is akin to indentured labour. Other notable novels include Shanthi Sekaran's Lucky Boy, her second, expected in January. A teacher of creative writing, based in Berkeley, Sekaran is not particularly well known in India but she asks an interesting question of economically successful Indian immigrants to the US-who have long been portrayed as the 'model minority'. How does your good fortune reflect in your attitude towards other immigrants? A debut novel by another Indian American writer, Rahul Mehta, out in February, tells the story of a young boy coming to terms with being gay. Set in India and rural New York in the 1980s and 1990s, No Other World has already been called a work of "astonishing emotional subtlety". It shows that while some jaded readers complain about diaspora fatigue, there are parts of the immigrant experience that remain underexplored. Incidentally, Sahitya Akademi award-winner Jerry Pinto's new novel, Murder in Mahim, out on January 12, is a murder mystery set among gay men in Mumbai.

NON-FICTION

This year is not just the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Indira Gandhi was born in 1917, too. Making the most of the anniversary, Juggernaut has announced a new biography to be written by the journalist and novelist Sagarika Ghose. Titled Indira Gandhi: Her Life and Afterlife, the book is expected around June and will be Ghose's first work of non-fiction. Jairam Ramesh, former minister for rural development, is reportedly working on an "environmental biography" of the 'Iron Lady', drawing on unpublished letters to shed light on a little examined part of her legacy.

2016 was a difficult year for people who style themselves as politically liberal, or even moderate centrists. What are the origins of the popular anger that, analysts argue, has manifested in growing nationalism, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump? The man with the answers is Pankaj Mishra, described by his publishers as "one of our most important public intellectuals". His contention in his new book, Age of Anger, out in February, is that it is "impossible to understand the current upsurge of anti-western sentiment in China, Russia and India without acknowledging the role played by humiliation".

Early in 2017, there are a number of important state elections in India, not least in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh. Milan Vaishnav, an academic and senior fellow in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the author of When Crime Pays, a comprehensive study of the nexus between politicians and criminals in India. In stores by March, the book promises to explain how Indian democracy became so infected by wrongdoers, and why the criminal backgrounds of candidates appear to matter so little to both political parties and voters. Political Corruption in India is the prosaic title of a book by N. Ram, publisher of The Hindu newspaper, expected to be out in the summer. Ram draws on Hegel to muse on the "great and general corruption" that infects India to its very core. Aleph, Ram's publishers, promise that the book will end with a "forecast on whether India will be able to root out corruption from its polity in the conceivable future". Our guess: The answer is no. Jaya Jaitly's memoir, out next winter, is called Life Among the Scorpions. Given how vigorously she continues to defend herself from charges of accepting a bribe as leader of the Samata Party, the scorpions of the title could well be journalists.

Kuldip Nayar's new book Close Encounters: People I Have Known from Jinnah to Modi (slated for summer) focuses, like most Indian non-fiction, on the elite. But two other anticipated books by journalists Yashica Dutt and Tripti Lahiri focus on Indians of less power and renown. Dutt, in the wake of Rohith Vemula's suicide, wrote a widely shared post about using her education and a skin tone that was "dusky but still not dirty" to hide being a Dalit. She has now expanded that post into a book, Coming Out as Dalit, about "living a lie" that will be published in the autumn. Nothing "can change the fact that we were born as Dalits", Dutt writes. "Any effort towards erasing that necessary detail will only confine us in inferiority. Ultimately it is about discovering pride in our history."

Out this spring, Lahiri's Maid in India aims to demystify the complex relationships between domestic help and their employers-who live side by side if not under the same roof. Training a reporter's gimlet eye on the upper-class homes of Delhi and Gurgaon, Lahiri tells the stories of maids working to secure a white-collar future for their children, and the abusive, benign and sometimes generous people who employ them. Far from urban centres, people scratch out a meagre living in border towns, peripheral in every way to mainstream India. Journalist Pradeep Damodaran travels to these places to interview local people who cling to their Indian identities despite their isolation. Borderlands is an inquiry into how the 'idea of India' can take root in areas where alienation should by rights be the more common experience.

THE INTERNATIONAL PRESS

On the back of the success of his debut novel, The Sympathiser, which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among a host of other prizes, Viet Thanh Nguyen will publish a collection of short stories in February. Born in Vietnam in 1971, Nguyen came to the US with his family when they fled their homeland after the North Vietnamese took Saigon in 1975. Drawing on that experience, the stories in The Refugees move back and forth from San Francisco to Ho Chi Minh City, telling the stories of people displaced by the war and making their lives anew. Several big-name American novelists have new books out in the early months of the year, including Paul Auster, who turns 70 this year. A once iconoclastic writer turned grand old man of literature, Auster hasn't published a novel in seven years. But 4321, due at the end of January, is already being described as a "tour de force". George Saunders, a writer's writer known for his brilliant short stories, has finally written a novel. Coming in February, Lincoln in the Bardo is an unconventional historical novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln's 11-year-old son. A number of writers have turned to Greek tragedy as inspirations for new novels, including Kamila Shamsie, whose Home Fire, out in August, retells Antigone as a story of two British Muslim families in contemporary London. Hitting the shelves later this month, award-winning journalist Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark unveil "the extraordinary inside story of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda in the years after 9/11" in The Exile-which draws on first-person testimony from bin Laden's family and closest aides to unpack mysteries from Abbottabad to the rise of the Islamic State. A number of books mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian revolution, but one of the most intriguing is October by China Miville-a writer much admired for his science fiction. Miville's book is out in May. And though the new year has only just started, appetites are already being whetted for Hit Refresh, the autobiography Satya Nadella, the Indian-born CEO of Microsoft, out in November.

-Compiled by Shougat Dasgupta and Jason Overdorf