BOOKS OF 2013 - Rebecca Jones

If you found an e-book reader in your stocking this Christmas, what might you be downloading onto it in 2013? Or indeed buying in a bookshop - if that is the way you prefer to do things.



Well, expect to hear a lot of noise around the return of Bridget Jones, as Helen Fielding's girl of the nineties steps into a new decade.

Readers eager for more Hilary Mantel will have to wait. She is hard at work on the final part of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.

But another twice Man Booker prize winning author, JM Coetzee, has a new novel out. The Childhood of Jesus is a mysterious story about a man and a boy who arrive in a new land. In the process though, their memories are wiped out.

There are also new books from former Man Booker winners Julian Barnes and Margaret Atwood.

Mohsin Hamid follows up The Reluctant Fundamentalist with How to get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Written in the guise of a self-help book, it is about a boy who goes from rural poverty to become a corporate tycoon.

Khaled Hosseini, whose debut The Kite Runner was such a sensation, returns with And the Mountains Echoed, his first book in six years.

While other high profile names with books published in 2013, include John Le Carre, Kate Atkinson and Tracey Chevalier.

Look out too for William Boyd's new James Bond novel.Even though he once said: "I can't bear fiction", there's a new novel from Peter Ackroyd. For the first time he uses invented, rather than historical, characters, and Three Brothers is set within living memory.

A Hologram For The King by Dave Eggars arrives on a tidal wave of praise from the United States.

While fellow American writer James Salter, 87, is back with All That Is, his first novel for more than three decades.

And Elizabeth Gilbert, best known for Eat, Pray, Love, returns with her first novel for twelve years, The Signature of All Things.

For readers more interested in new talent one of the most eagerly anticipated debuts is a family drama from the British-born, American-raised Taiye Selasi, Ghana Must Go.

Expect plenty of fanfare in August, with the global publication of the first novel in a seven part fantasy series by Samantha Shannon, called The Bone Season.

And the following month, much attention will be paid to Stephen King's sequel to his horror novel The Shining. Thirty six years after the original was published, Dr. Sleep will follow Danny Torrance, the young boy who survived the horrific events of the first book.

Happy Reading.