After a fair-to-middling 2022, it’s not unreasonable to hope that 2023 will see several stars burn brightly in the literary firmament. Whether what promises to be the most talked-about book of the year, Prince Harry’s Spare (out tomorrow with Bantam), is included in this number remains to be seen. On the plus side, the Prince has the estimable J.R. Moehringer as his ghostwriter; on the negative side is the fact that his every public appearance over the past few years has been so combative that we might expect little more than a 416-page exercise in score-settling.
More reliable pleasures await. Pamela Anderson’s memoir Love, Pamela (Headline, January) should be a revelatory and fascinating dive beyond the usual bimbo clichés. On the other side of the coin, legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act (Canongate, January) is an intriguing-sounding blend of self-help and spirituality, mixed, hopefully, with some high-quality anecdotes about people he has worked with, not least Johnny Cash.
In biography, Jonathan Eig’s King: A Life (Simon & Schuster, May) promises to be the most revelatory and thorough account of Martin Luther King Jr’s life yet. Lisa Hilton returns with a new life of the 17th-century playwright and spy Aphra Behn in Unlawful Love: Aphra Behn and Lady Henrietta Berkeley (Penguin, July). And Oliver Soden’s Masquerade: The Lives of Noel Coward (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, March) sets out to use new material to put this ever-fascinating cultural figure in his perspective.
Meanwhile, D.J. Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life (Constable, May) allows the critic and biographer to revisit the life of one of the 20th century’s most cited – often inaccurately – writers, thanks to the discovery of copious quantities of new material since his earlier biography.
There are more unusual titles. Poet Amy Key’s Arrangements In Blue (Jonathan Cape, April) is a deconstruction of what we expect from musical biographies, in which, explicitly inspired by Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, she seeks to ‘examine the volatile scales of romantic feeling as she has encountered them’. New Yorker critic Janet Malcolm’s final book Still Pictures (Granta, February) promises to be a fascinating and rich study of the interplay of memory and photography. Wesley Lowery’s American Whitelash: The Resurgence of Racial Violence in Our Time (Allen Lane, June) will undoubtedly be one of the year’s most controversial titles in the US due to its unflinching focus on white supremacy in the post-Obama age.
There are, as ever, numerous novels coming out as well. Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (Jonathan Cape, February) would have been highly anticipated under any circumstances, but his near-fatal stabbing last year has turned its publication into An Event That Cannot Be Missed.
And while modesty forbids me from saying anything about my own forthcoming book, The Windsors at War: The King, His Brother and A Family Divided (St. Martin’s Press, April), the great Tina Brown was kind enough to say that it is ‘genuinely revealing, politically insightful, scrupulously researched, and has the narrative pace of a champion thoroughbred’.
There are many more titles coming out, plenty of which we shall be covering in the magazine or online. Some will be brilliant, others atrocious. But in any case, we wish you happy reading throughout 2023.
A version of this article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition.
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