Fiction to look out for in 2020

With new titles from the likes of Hilary Mantel, Ali Smith and Sebastian Barry, 2020 bodes well for lovers of the novel

• Rachel Cooke on nonfiction highlights of 2020

This has not been a vintage year for the novel. The joint Booker winners and perhaps a handful of others aside, I’m not sure that much fiction published in 2019 will be read a decade hence. The good news is that I’ve spent the past several weeks joyfully immersed in proof copies of next year’s novels and can confirm that 2020 is shaping up to be a blinder. I’ve tried here to concentrate on the first half of the year.

One of the year’s biggest novels is sure to be the final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (4th Estate, March), which is under strict embargo. Will it be great? Probably. Will it win the Booker? Possibly (although there’s serious competition). It could well be pipped to the prize by Maggie O’Farrell’s miraculous Hamnet (Tinder Press, March) – a beautiful imagination of the short life of Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, and the untold story of his wife, “Agnes” Hathaway, which builds into a profound exploration of the healing power of creativity.

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SzPvGx