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Book lists,like ageing,are an annual afflictionand there is no escape. Looking forward to a years books is worse than looking back.

Book lists,like ageing,are an annual afflictionand there is no escape. Looking forward to a years books is worse than looking back. All you have is the author,the title,a synopsis of a few lines and then hope. Like a weatherwoman with her guesstimate in degree Celsius,like a stockbroker with her probable blue-chip list,like a tarot reader with his deck of cards,you hope that when you finally hold the spine of the book (or the edge of the e-reader),smell the pages,trace the font,read the dedication,and move on to line 1,page 1 you wont be let down. We will leave the debut

writers with the task of surprising us pleasantly and peg that thing called hope on the tried-and-tested names.

Luka and the Fire of Life
by Salman Rushdie (Random House)
Rushdie wrote childrens books because his children demanded them. Twenty years ago,his eldest son Zafar asked him why he didnt write a book that he could read and Rushdie came up with the delightful Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). Now he has written a sequel,Luka and the Fire of Life ,for his youngest son Milan. Here,Luka,the younger brother of Haroun,must help his ailing father,this time by going on a quest to find the fire of life.

Way to Go
by Upamanyu Chatterjee (Hamish Hamilton)
Chatterjees The Last Burden (1993) was a portrait of a middle-class Indian family. Three of its characters,Shyamanand,now 85 and half paralysed,and his sons Jamun and Burfi,reappear in similarly dark Way to Go that will be out in February .

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The Mountain Shadow
by Gregory David Roberts (Hachette)
Follow up to Shantaram. Lin,apparently,has found happiness and love. Then he gets a call that a friend is in danger. Lin has to help him,even though he knows that will put everything at risk. When he arrives to fulfil his obligation,he enters a room with eight men: each will play a significant role in the story that follows.

Beatrice and Virgil
by Yann Martel
If you have enjoyed the tale of the 3.14 boy,you can look forward to this one,a Holocaust tale told through taxidermied animals,including Beatrice the donkey and Virgil the howler monkey. Intriguing,at the very least.

Solar
by Ian McEwan (Random House)
Just right for these Cop15 times,Solar is about a Nobel prize-winning physicist Michael Beard who discovers a way to fight climate change. In an interview in early 2009,McEwan said,I devised a character into whom I poured many,many faults. Hes devious,he lies,hes predatory in relation to women; he steadily gets fatter through the novel. Hes a sort of planet,I guess. He makes endless reforming decisions about himself: Rio,Kyoto-type assertions of future virtue that lead nowhere.

Adventures in Neuroscience
by V.S. Ramachandran (Random House)
The neuroscientist dissects the human brain and asks the big questions: How did abstract thinking evolve? What is art? Why do we laugh?

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The Grand Design
by Stephen Hawking with Leonard Mlodinow (Random House)
If you have bought (not necessarily read) A Brief History of Time ,you might want to take a look at Hawkings new theory on the origins of the universe. It argues that scientific obsession with formulating a single new model may be misplaced,and that,instead,by synthesising existing theories we may discover the key to finally understanding the universes deepest mysteries. It examines the differences between past and future,explains the nature of reality and asks how far we can go in our search for understanding and knowledge.

My Years As President
by APJ Abdul Kalam (Random House)
The title is self-explanatory. If Kalam gets candid about the politics that unravelled in his term,this would be interesting.

Dhoni by Ayaz Memon (Allen Lane)
A portrait of the swashbuckling captain of Team India.