The publishing year begins with fond goodbyes to two writers known for their humanity and, in different ways, their gifts for storytelling. Henning Mankell, the creator of Inspector Wallander, and David Cesarani, an authority on modern Jewish history, died last October. Quicksand (Harvill Secker, February) is a collection of Mankell’s essays tackling “what it means to be human”, and in Final Solution: the Fate of the Jews 1933-49 (Macmillan, January) Cesarani draws on decades of scholarship to question assumptions about the causes of the Holocaust.
Many thought that by now we would also have bid farewell to Clive James and the Dr Feelgood co-founder Wilko Johnson, yet both, miraculously, have endured their illnesses. Johnson’s Don’t You Leave Me Here: My Life (Little, Brown, May) will consider his complicated relationship with mortality as well as his rock’n’roll youth. The prolific James has three books lined up: Collected Poems: 1958-2015 (Picador, April), Gate of Lilacs: a Verse Commentary on Proust (Picador, April) and Play All: a Binge-Watcher’s Notebook (Yale University Press, August), in which he gets to grips with the television box set streaming revolution.
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