The next chapter: books to watch for in 2014 David Malouf will mark the occasion of his 80th birthday in March with the publication of a new collection of poetry. Picture: Andy Tyndall Source: News Limited Ian McEwan is set to publish a new novel this year. Picture: Eamonn McCabe. Sonya Hartnett will release 'an urban gothic tale' for adults, The Golden Boys, in June. Picture: Renee Nowytarger Source: News Limited Favel Parrett and Tony Birch were both shortlisted for the Miles Franklin in 2012 and will publish their second offerings this year. Picture: Dan Himbrechts Source: News Limited IF 2013 was a blockbuster 12 months for local fiction, with JM Coetzee, Tim Winton, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright, Alex Miller, Christos Tsioklas and Tom Keneally publishing novels, this year international authors will take centre stage. We can expect new works from Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Joyce Carol Oates, Emma Donoghue, EL Doctorow, Isabel Allende, Haruki Murakami and many others. But let's return home to kick off this preview of the books of 2014. David Malouf, one of the finest writers this country has produced, turns 80 on March 20 and the occasion will be marked by the publication of a new collection of poetry, Earth Hour (UQP, March), his first since the award-winning Typewriter Music (2007). I've had a sneak preview of this volume, which brims with the intelligence, elegance and wit we have come to expect from Malouf. While the poems are wide-ranging, there is an understandable interest in mortality - of the individual and potentially of the planet we share. This is from the title poem: " ... we sit behind moonlit / glass in our McMansions, cool / millions at rehearsal / here for our rendezvous each with his own / earth hour." The poem ends with the disturbing image of "our green accommodating tomb." Footloose, a Senior Moment, is a lovely piece dedicated to fellow poet Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who will turn 80 two months after Malouf. In it the Brisbane-born poet crystallises a quintessential Australian childhood memory: "the Bay / all glitters and my father / on the skyline steeping away out / of reach." I could go on, but I will leave you to discover the pleasures of this volume for yourself. Also in March, Random House will bring out a collection of Malouf's "writings on life and culture." Another significant anniversary this year is that it's 50 years since Keneally published his first novel, The Place at Whitton. Like Malouf, Keneally is someone I know a little and admire a great deal. He will mark the occasion with the publication, in the second half of the year, of the third instalment of Australians (Allen & Unwin), taking his history of this nation up to the 1960s. In 2012, Favel Parrett (Past the Shallows) and Tony Birch (Blood) shared the distinction of having their first novels shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Both, pictured above, are due to publish new books this year. Parrett's second novel, When the Night Comes (Hachette, September), is set in Hobart and Antarctica and centres on a friendship between "a young girl" and "a modern Viking." Birch's The Promise (UQP, May) is a collection of short stories sure to tap into the sort of ordinary, desperate, hopeful lives that made Blood so compelling. As a huge fan of Melbourne writer Craig Sherborne - his memoirs Hoi Polloi and Muck are masterpieces of the form - I am looking forward to his second novel, Tree Palace (Text, April), which is centred on an itinerant family in rural Victoria. Text will also publish Stephen Orr's fourth novel, One Boy Missing, billed as a literary crime thriller (February); Chris Flynn's second, The Glass Kingdom (June), described as "a breakneck tour of rural Australia's underbelly"; and a sequel to Graeme Simsion's smash hit The Rosie Project. And it is promising new novels by Wayne Macauley and Krissy Kneen later in the year. However, the Text project that most intrigues me is a new novel by Mark Henshaw, due in September. Henshaw's first - and so far only - work of fiction, the experimental, extraordinary Out of the Line of Fire, published in 1988, remains one of my favourite Australian novels. In a similar vein, Text has In Certain Circles (May), a previously unpublished novel by Elizabeth Harrower, the 85-year-old Sydney writer who burst back into the public consciousness when her 1966 novel The Watch Tower was republished as a Text Classic in 2012. Joan London's The Good Parents was one of the standout novels of 2008. It's been a bit of wait (though not as long as with Henshaw!), but Random has her new novel, The Golden Age, scheduled for August. Booker Prize winner DBC Pierre has been busy: last year he served up an amuse bouche in Petit Mal; this year he's giving us a horror-thriller novella, Breakfast with the Borgias (Random, June). Random is also promising a new novel by multiple Miles Franklin shortlistee Gail Jones, as well as a "Charles Bean novel" by Matthew Condon (September) and Analogue Men, by Nick Earls (July), which explores male midlife crises in the digital age. Pan Macmillan has an as yet untitled novel by Liz Byrski scheduled for September and will also have new books by blockbuster authors Matthew Reilly and Di Morrissey in time for the Christmas market. Sonya Hartnett, below, writes brilliantly for children, young adults and adults: in the last category the Miles Franklin shortlisted Butterfly (2009) still unnerves in the memory. So I am braced for her new novel for adults, The Golden Boys, (Penguin, June), "an urban gothic tale." Braced is probably a good position to be in for Only the Animals Can Know (Penguin, May) by South African-Australian social anthropologist and writer Ceridwen Dovey. In this story collection, major events of the 21st century are told by the souls of 10 animals killed in human conflict. Linda Jaivin has a new novel, Empress Lover (Fourth Estate, April). Penguin will also publish new novels by Honey Brown (Through the Cracks, May) and Wendy James (The Lost Girls, March), as well as Beams Falling (March), a follow-up to the fabulous The Old School by Sydney detective turned crime writer PM Newton. While we're thinking about crime fiction, Peter Corris and the indestructible Cliff Hardy go around the block again in Silent Kill (Allen & Unwin, out now) and Tony Cavanaugh's haunted homicide cop Darian Richards returns in The Train Rider (Hachette, March). Cavanaugh's novel carries a blurb by my colleague Graeme Blundell: "As good as Harlan Coben." Well, the mega-selling Coben is back, too, with Missing You (Orion, March), in which a New York detective's past comes back to terrorise her. Speaking of terrifying types, Jack Reacher will be doing his thing for Lee Child in Twenty Seconds Ago (Random, August), and we're told the author will be visiting Australia to promote the book. The reigning king of Nordic noir, Jo Nesbo, is back with The Son (Harvill Secker, April), in which a model prisoner escapes from prison to try to learn the truth about his father's death. First Australian novels that are on my radar at this stage include Ray Glickman's Reality and Robert Edeson's The Weaver Fish, published by Fremantle Press in February and March respectively, Suzanne McCourt's The Lost Child (Text, February), Here Come the Dogs (Penguin, June), the fiction debut of Sydney poet and rapper Omar Musa, and Anna George's What Came Before, promoted as a "literary thriller in the vein of Gone Girl." Having run through that impressive list of Australian novels - which are only the ones I've heard about - I'm less sure about my opening claim that 2014 will be the year of the international author. But let's see. Few would argue that the most anticipated work of fiction on the horizon is The Mirror and the Light, the concluding book in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England trilogy. The first two, Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, each won the Booker. What a thing it would be if the final novel delivered Mantel a record third Booker, something that has eluded the only other dual winners, Coetzee and Peter Carey. At the time of writing publisher HarperCollins said The Mirror and the Light did not have a publication date and that 2015 was much more likely than 2014 ... so perhaps I'm cheating a bit by mentioning it, but I don't think it's a beheading offence. Further, the publisher confirmed there would be at least one new work of fiction by Mantel published in 2014, a short story collection with an attention-grabbing title: The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher. Expect it in the first half of the year. At the risk of doing a Rumsfeldian glide from known unknowns to known knowns, I do know that Amis, who will be here next month for the Perth Writers Festival, Rushdie and McEwan, above right, will each publish new novels this year, all with Random, but I don't know any more about them. One novel I do know about, because I've read an advance copy, is Hanif Kureishi's The Last Word (A&U, February). This is a funny, insightful story about a young English writer who is commissioned to write the authorised biography of a septuagenarian Indian-born literary lion. If this reminds you of the young English writer Patrick French writing an authorised biography of VS Naipaul a few years ago, I am sure the coincidence is entirely intentional. I also know a little bit about Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the new novel by perennial Nobel Prize contender Murakami, because it sparked a run on Tokyo bookshops when published in Japanese earlier this year. Random will bring out an English translation in October, which is fast for a Murakami. Sticking with the house of Random, there's also a new Doctorow, Andrew's Brain (out now), a "radical trip into the mind of a man who, more than once in his life, has been an inadvertent agent of disaster," a World War I novel, The Lie, by Orange Prize winner Helen Dunmore (February), Chuck Palahniuk's Beautiful You (August), which the author describes as "a mash-up of mommy porn and chick-lit," James Ellroy's Perfidia (June), the first of four planned novels that take as their catalyst the murder of a Japanese-American family in Los Angeles on the day Pearl Harbor is bombed, Sadie Jones's Fallout (July), a love triangle set in London's West End in the 1960s, and as yet untitled and unscheduled novels by Rose Tremain, Louis de Bernieres and Ben Elton. Elton's World War II epic Two Brothers was one of my favourite books of 2011. As mentioned in our summer reading guide a few weeks ago, I have been immersed in My Struggle, the six-part autobiographical novel by Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. The English translation of volume three, Boyhood Island, is due from Random in April. The writing machine known as Joyce Carol Oates is fast out of the blocks this year with Carthage (HarperCollins, February), a novel set in the upstate New York village of the title and centred on the disappearance of a girl and the possible involvement of a disturbed Iraq war veteran. Also coming from HarperCollins in February is Isabel Allende's Ripper, a thriller about a serial killer at large in San Francisco and a group of online gamers who try to crack the case. Emma Donoghue, author of the Booker shortlisted Room, also chooses San Francisco as the setting for her new novel, Frog Music (Picador, April), but about 150 years earlier, with the city ravaged by smallpox and shaken by a bizarre murder. Siri Hustvedt's new novel, The Blazing World (Sceptre, April) is sure to strike a nerve: it's about an ignored artist who suddenly finds fame when she shows her work under the guise of a male identity. The brilliant Lorrie Moore will test our verities in Bark (Faber, February), a suite of eight stories that circle the defining events of recent American history. Here's a taste, the opening sentence of the third story, Paper Losses: "Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organising, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other." The Nigerian-born American writer Teju Cole is one of the hot youngish (he's 38) authors of the moment. In his new novel, Every Day is for the Thief (Faber, April), a young man decides to visit Nigeria after years of absence and face up to his past and the paradox of his homeland. David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame has a new novel, The Bone Clocks (Sceptre, September). Tom Rachman's 2010 debut novel The Imperfectionists is as good an account of the world of the foreign correspondent as I have read. His new one is The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (Text, June). Text will also publish A Mile Down (March), the first book written by American novelist David Vann (Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island and, most recently, Goat Mountain). This one is a memoir of the author's disastrous (and short) career in the charter yacht business. Speaking of career shifts, English author Glen Duncan wrote a handful of well-received, low-selling literary novels before he hit the jackpot with lycanthropes and vampires in The Last Werewolf and Talulla Rising. He completes the trilogy with By Blood We Live (Text, March). George Orwell's Animal Farm clearly is not a new book, but Don Watson's introduction to Text's Book Club Edition (out now) is. Watson is also due to resume his words-first campaign in a follow-up to his 2002 book Death Sentence (Random, May). American writer Rebecca Mead details her obsession with another old book in The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot (Text, February). High on my must-read list is Arctic Summer (Atlantic, March), by South African writer Damon Galgut, author of the mesmerising The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room. This new one would appear to be his most ambitious work yet: a fictional reimagining of EM Forster's first trip to India and his development as a writer in the years that followed. Equally high on my list is anything by Scottish writer Andrew O'Hagan, whose literary criticism is a constant source of pleasure. So a new novel by him is a special treat. The Illuminations (Faber, May) is about a British officer who returns home to Scotland after a tour of Afghanistan, a "story about love and memory, modern war and the complications of fact." Sebastian Barry's The Temporary Gentleman (Faber, April) is also about a man who returns home from war, in this case Ireland and the conflict of 1939-45. And American Iraq war veteran Kevin Powers, whose The Yellow Birds (2012) is one of the best war novels I've read, will publish his debut poetry collection, Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (Sceptre, April). There were precious few lulls in the fighting during Julia Gillard's prime ministership. We've read the accounts of her rise and fall by political writers and writer-politicians, but in October we will hear from the woman herself when she publishes her memoir with Random imprint Knopf. Gillard has said she wants "to distil for readers what I achieved; what drove me; where I erred; my personal resilience and how I coped." I wonder if the prospect of that makes anyone feel a little nervous. While on politics, journalist Madonna King is penning an authorised biography of Treasurer Joe Hockey (UQP, March), while A&U will publish a memoir by his Labor predecessor, Wayne Swan, in the second half of the year. A&U also has a memoir by Rob Oakeshott, who is out of the game now, The Independent Member for Lyne (June), and a biography of his fellow independent Tony Windsor, due in the second half of the year. Award-winning journalist Paul Toohey is at work on a Black Inc Quarterly Essay about Tony Abbott and the asylum-seeker question, due in March. An aside: Toohey's 1996 short story collection, God's Little Acre, contains some of the funniest writing published in this country - or at least that's how I remember it. And author and broadcaster Susan Mitchell is writing a book about Gough and Margaret Whitlam (Hachette, October). Gough was great but there is great and then there is, well, Nelson Mandela. Expect a slew of books about the former South African leader in the wake of his death last month. The first one I've spotted promises to be one of the more unusual: Mandela: My Prisoner, My Friend (NewSouth, March), by Christo Brand, who was a prison guard on Robben Island, where Mandela was incarcerated for 27 years. In February, Random will publish a political biography of the woman who yet may be US president: HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes. And the sharpest thorn in the paw of Western politics, Edward Snowden, is the subject of The Snowden Files (Guardian-Faber, April) by Guardian journalist Luke Harding. The fearless Russian journalist Masha Gessen takes on the Pussy Riot case in Words Will Break Cement (A&U, March). Meanwhile, Scribe has just published an insider's account of the CIA, John Rizzo's Company Man. The big history event of the year is, of course, the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Indeed, there was barrage of Great War books last year as publishers launched a pre-emptive strike - but the campaign will only intensify during the coming 12 months. Leading the charge is the inimitable Peter FitzSimons, who, having warmed up with Kokoda and Tobruk, will tackle the big one in Gallipoli (Random, November). Jonathan King tells the Diggers' stories in their own words in Gallipoli Diaries: The Anzacs Own Story, Day by Day (Scribe, April). MUP has a beautiful anniversary edition of Peter Cochrane's Simpson and the Donkey (out now) with a new introduction by the author. Another popular writer of histories, Roland Perry, will consider Australia's role in the Pacific theatre during World War II in The Fight for Australia (Hachette, April). Peter Edwards, the official historian of Australia's involvement in Southeast Asian conflicts, will publish Australia and the Vietnam War (NewSouth, March). The multi-talented Mark Dapin promises a controversial take on national service and the Vietnam War in Nashos (Penguin, second half of the year). And David Hill will consider conflict of a different sort, the Federation debate, in The Making of Australia (Random, TBA). Australian cricket great Keith Miller, an air force pilot during World War II, famously dismissed the idea of stress on the sporting field with the line: "Pressure is a Messerschmitt up our arse." Even so, Australia's cricketers must feel a sense of relief at having reclaimed the Ashes. The incomparable Gideon Haigh will offer his perspective in Ashes to Ashes: Ten Tests in England and Australia 2013-14 (Penguin, March). Sure, there were no Messerschmitts in the 1970 rugby league grand final between South Sydney and Manly-Warringah, but John Sattler's effort to lead Souths to a 23-12 victory despite breaking his jaw minutes into the match remains the yardstick for courage on the pitch. Sattler, now 70, will tell his story in Peter Badel's Glory, Glory: The John Sattler Story (Black Inc imprint Nero, October). Nero will also publish The Voice, a memoir by the greatest rugby league commentator in the business, Ray Warren (August). Earlier I said Craig Sherborne memoirs were masterpieces of the form. So are Mandy Sayer's Dreamtime Alice and Velocity. Next month the Sydney writer will publish her much anticipated third instalment, The Poet's Wife (A&U), which follows chronologically Dreamtime Alice, documenting her early adulthood, first successes as a writer (she won The Australian-Vogel Literary Award in 1989) and, centrally, her tempestuous first marriage to celebrated African-American poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Two other memoirs to catch the eye are Kate Ceberano's I'm Talking: My Life, My Words, My Music (written with Tom Gilling, Hachette, April) and A Bone of Fact (Pan Macmillan) by David Walsh, the eccentric professional gambler who founded the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart. And even though I've already given my colleague Blundell a bit of a plug, I should mention that he is hard-ish at work on Bert, a biography of Bert Newton, due November-ish from Hachette. Still on the entertainment beat, Scribe has Insider Trader (February), the memoir of Australian actor Ronald "Trader" Faulkner, and Dan Bischoff's Gandolfini: The Real Life of the Man Who Made Tony Soprano (May), while Random has John Cleese's autobiography slated for October. Australian microsurgery pioneer Earl Owen tells his remarkable life story in Under the Microscope (Random, February), while award-winning biographer Brenda Niall is at work on life of Daniel Mannix, archbishop of Melbourne from 1917 to 1963 (Text, November). Former detective Clive Small will offer a personal account of the investigation into Australia's worst serial killer in Milat (written with Tom Gilling, A&U, May). Journalist Jessica Irvine is one of the better explainers of economic matters, an heir to Ross Gittins. She turns her attention to one of Australia's biggest health problems in The Bottom Line: Foolproof Weight Loss Forever (A&U, out now). Melbourne philosopher Damon Young blends mind and body in How to Think About Exercise (Macmillan, out now). And anyone tempted to poke fun at the differently weighted should check out Empathy: A Handbook for Revolution (Random, February), by Sydney-born social thinker Roman Krznaric. To finish with a publishing growth story, Andy Griffiths and Terry Denton's fantastic treehouse, a structure that fires the imaginations of children Australia-wide, will add another 13 levels this year to become The 52-Storey Treehouse (Macmillan, August). I know I'm not alone in saying I can't wait to see what's inside.