Cloying sagas, pseudo-literary fiction and soft-porn silliness - Stuart Kelly on the year ahead in books

Reading catalogues is a kind of ghastly purgatory for reviewers. Even before you open the pages you know what you will see. There will be thrillers called things like The Girl Who Broke Her Dollies; there will be lifestyle fads based on Scandinavian languages like Ro Deg Ned: The Norwegian Approach To Calm; there will be aggravatingly coy and cloying sagas with titles like Tillie Higginbottom’s Heartache and even more annoying quirky pseudo-literary fiction with ludicrous monikers such as The East Cheam Archaeological Tunnel-Diggers’ Conundrum. There will be books with bold capital titles such as GRAVE MISDEMEANOUR or LAST CHANCES or ENOUGH ALREADY. There will be a Star Wars tie-in that reveals precisely nothing. There will be a lot of books about economics, Donald Trump, the Rise – or Fall – of China, and brexineering or remoaning. There are – and here we leave satire, albeit inadvertently – soft-porn sillinesses called things like Quiver and Tremble (these are, unfortunately, real) as if Fifty Shades Of Grey never went away to fester in Oxfam. There is, predictably, a new Irvine Welsh – Dead Men’s Trousers – yet another sequel to his one good novel. At the rate he is excavating the bottom of that barrel we can expect the gang to all be meeting up in Australia before long.