Spring books | New titles by Sherman Alexie, Ann Rule and Nancy Pearl top list

Like other sentient beasts, the publishing industry has its rhythms. Autumn is for Major Literary Events; the fall 2006 list was crammed with books by Name Authors, to the delight of readers and the chagrin of critics and editors trying to keep up. Summer is the silly season: papal conspiracies, pirate tales and widows in search of rich widowers, desperate either to marry them or murder them. In other words, beach books.

So what does spring portend?

We could invoke a "slow greening" or some other tortured seasonal metaphor, but let's just say: everything except the kitchen sink. Noteworthy are the scads of books by local authors: Jonathan Raban was first out of the block with January's "Surveillance," but Sherman Alexie, William Dietrich, Nicola Griffith, Michael Gruber, Mark Lindquist, Nancy Pearl and Ann Rule all have new books coming out, keeping company with a slew of books on local history and regional subjects. When you add in highly anticipated books by authors like Michael Chabon and Barbara Kingsolver, there's even more to look forward to. Here's a preview, February through May. You're going to like at least a dozen of them. (And for yet more titles, go to www.seattletimes.com/books.)

Nonfiction

February

"The White Cascade: The Great Northern Railway Disaster and America's Deadliest Avalanche" by Gary Krist (Henry Holt). A new account of the 1910 avalanche, near the Cascade Mountain town of Wellington, which marooned 100 passengers on the Great Northern Railroad and put them in mortal peril. "Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life" by Allen Shawn (Viking). The son of the brilliant New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother of playwright-actor Wallace Shawn tells the story of his fear of just about everything, and how his struggle with agoraphobia has shaped his life.

"Back on the Fire: Essays" by Gary Snyder (Shoemaker & Hoard). New essays by the revered California poet.

March

"Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The Romantic, Impractical, Often Eccentric, Ultimately Brilliant Making of a Food Revolution" by Thomas McNamee (Penguin Press). A gossipy biography/history of the rise of food pioneer Waters, whose Berkeley restaurant just celebrated its 35th anniversary.

"Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas" by Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher (Doubleday). Two Washington Post journalists track the personal odyssey of "perhaps the least understood man in Washington [D.C.]." Thomas grew up poor in Georgia and ascended into the ranks of the nation's elite, and his judicial philosophies will affect American jurisprudence for years to come.

"Mississippi Sissy" by Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's). The memoir of a celebrity journalist who grew up in Mississippi "running wild in the South," pretending to be Arlene Francis, making friends with Eudora Welty and generally turning "the word sissy on its head."

"The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam" by Tom Bissell (Pantheon). The author of an impressive travel book ("Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia") and a knockout collection of short stories ("God Lives in St. Petersburg") delivers a memoir about traveling with his father to Vietnam 40 years after his dad fought there.

April

"The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn't, and Why" by Jabari Asim (Houghton Mifflin). A Washington Post book editor takes a look at our most-charged racial epithet, examines its history and considers who, if anyone, should use it today.

"Washington Then and Now" by Paul Dorpat and Jean Sherrard (Westcliffe). Photo-historian Dorpat expands his then-and-now photographic comparison technique to a survey of the entire state.

"Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance" by Atul Gawande (Metropolitan). Gawande, who is both a staff writer for the New Yorker and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, writes about how doctors "strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance" in a profession where matters of life and death come up every day.

"The Mistress's Daughter" by A.M. Homes (Viking). The brilliant writer of fiction ("This Book Will Save Your Life") turns to memoir, telling the story of what happened when, 30 years after she was adopted, her birth parents came looking for her.

"Archeology in Washington" by Ruth Kirk and Richard D. Daugherty (University of Washington Press). An up-to-date survey on what's been learned about the state's prehistory and environments, from Olympic Peninsula mastodons (14,000 years ago) to the coastal excavations at Ozette, where "mudslides repeatedly swept into houses, burying them and preserving them."

"Edith Wharton" by Hermione Lee (Knopf). A landmark biography of Wharton, America's chronicler of the Gilded Age. Lee has authored biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather.

"The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring" by Richard Preston (Random House). A noted nonfiction author ("The Hot Zone") tells the story of sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood, its canopy and the couple that discovered the three-dimensional ecosystem that dwells there.

"Ralph Ellison: A Biography" by Arnold Rampersad (Knopf). The first major biography of the African-American writer whose prize-winning novel, "Invisible Man," immediately became a classic of American literature.

"Too Late to Say Goodbye" by Ann Rule (Free Press). Seattle's queen of crime documents the case of an Atlanta dentist who was is implicated in his wife's death, and the chain of clues and coincidences that led leads authorities to an earlier, similar shooting.

"Last Harvest" by Witold Rybczynski (Scribner). A distinguished architectural writer takes on America's real-estate obsession, focusing on the development of one subdivision in Pennsylvania's Chester County.

"Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place" by Coll Thrush (University of Washington Press). A look at Native American life in Seattle, from the frontier town of the 1850s to today.

May

"The Reagan Diaries" by Ronald Reagan and Douglas Brinkley (HarperCollins). A prominent popular historian examines Reagan's handwritten diaries kept during both his terms as president.

"Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven Hopp and Camille Kingsolver (HarperCollins). The "Poisonwood Bible" author and her family leave the "industrial food pipeline" to live a rural life in which they vow to buy food raised only in their neighborhood or by themselves.

"Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations" by David. R. Montgomery (University of California Press). Montgomery, a UW professor and author of "King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon," writes a natural and cultural history of soil and its role as the foundation of civilization. He draws an ominous conclusion — we are using up our dirt.

"Book Crush" by Nancy Pearl (Sasquatch). Everybody's favorite librarian is back with a book of recommendations for kids and teens.

"The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters" by Sarah Susanka (Random House). The author of the influential "Not So Big House" series expands her topic beyond architecture to write about making our lifestyles "not so big."

"On Puget Sound" by Art Wolfe with Philip Kramer, text by William Dietrich (Sasquatch). The Seattle-born photographer and international nature photographer turns his lens back toward home.

Fiction

February

"Napoleon's Pyramids" by William Dietrich (HarperCollins). The Seattle Times writer spins a story of an American expatriate who tags along with Napoleon and finds amazing things in Egypt, including "an ancient medallion that may unlock one of the greatest mysteries in history."

"Ten Days in the Hills" by Jane Smiley (Knopf). The Pulitzer Prize-winning author's new novel is set in 2003 Hollywood and follows the activities of a circle of show-biz friends just after the Oscars and just as the invasion of Iraq begins.

March

"Whitethorn Woods" by Maeve Binchy (Knopf). The ever-popular Irish writer delivers a novel about a small Irish town in turmoil over whether a new highway about to bypass the town — and raze a local church — will do more harm than good.

"Christine Falls" by Benjamin Black (Holt). "Benjamin Black" — the author of this crime novel set in 1950s Dublin and Ireland — is actually a pseudonym for Irish writer John Banville, winner of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for "The Sea." This surely marks the first time any author has followed up his Booker win with a whodunit written under a pen name.

"A Miracle of Catfish" by Larry Brown (Algonquin). A final, almost-completed novel, about a year in the life of four Mississippi men and one young boy, by the Southern writer ("Joe," "Dirty Work") who died at age 53 in 2004.

"Burning Bright" by Tracy Chevalier (Dutton). In her new historical novel, the author of "Girl with a Pearl Earring" turns her eye to the London of poet William Blake.

"You Don't Love Me Yet" by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday). The newest novel by the National Book Critics Circle Award-winner ("Motherless Brooklyn") is about a woman who works at something called The Complaint Line, where anonymous callers air their grievances. Her mistake: meeting one of those callers in the flesh.

"When the Light Goes" by Larry McMurtry (Simon & Schuster). The latest novel about Duane Moore, protagonist of "The Last Picture Show," "Texasville" and "Duane's Depressed," finds McMurtry's hero attempting to come to terms with his wife's death.

"The Post-Birthday World" by Lionel Shriver (HarperCollins). The Orange Prize-winning author ("We Need To Talk About Kevin") serves up an either/or novel, in which a woman's near-kiss with an old flame triggers two narratives — one in which things go well beyond that kiss, the other in which her fidelity to her romantic partner becomes suffused with unrealized sexual fantasies about the old boyfriend.

April

"Flight" by Sherman Alexie (Black Cat). Alexie's first novel since "Indian Killer" goes into the head of a foster teenager, about to commit a "massive act of violence," who is propelled back through time to experience other moments of violence in American history.

"Boomsday" by Christopher Buckley (Twelve/Warner). The latest novel by satirist Buckley ("Thank You for Smoking") is about a 29-year-old blogger who suggests that the cure for Social Security debt is for all Baby Boomers to kill themselves when they reach age 75. Generational warfare ensues.

"Always" by Nicola Griffith (Riverhead). The Seattle-based British writer brings back "six-foot-tall fury" Aud Torvingen, the heroine of her earlier novels "Stay" and "The Blue Place," whose self-defense classes have yielded some "shocking consequences" and whose investigation of a real-estate fraud case is also taking a troubling turn.

"The Book of Air and Shadows" by Michael Gruber (Morrow). Seattle author Gruber leaves Miami, site of his previous thrillers, to pen an intricate puzzler about a man who encounters a hidden 17th-century document that could lead him to a lost Shakespeare play.

"The Custodian of Paradise" by Wayne Johnston (Norton). The Canadian writer offers a companion novel to his wonderful 1999 book, "The Colony of Unrequited Dreams," set in Newfoundland and focusing on newspaper columnist Sheilagh Fielding, who apparently has some long-harbored secrets about to be revealed. A number of Canadian newspapers named "Custodian" their book of the year.

"A Tranquil Star" by Primo Levi, translated by Ann Goldstein and Alessandra Bastagli (Norton). Seventeen stories spanning the entire career of the Italian fiction writer and Holocaust memoirist whom Italo Calvino called "one of the most important and gifted writers of our time."

"The King of Methlehem" by Mark Lindquist (Simon & Schuster). Frequent Seattle Times contributor and team chief of the drug unit for the Prosecuting Attorney in Pierce County writes a novel about a veteran police detective embroiled in a world of "addiction, destruction, and madness" as he tries to track down a methamphetamine distributor.

"Angelica" by Arthur Phillips (Random House). The author of "Prague" and "The Egyptologist" shifts gear again with a novel, narrated from four different points of view, that is "part psychological puzzle, part Victorian ghost story, part murder-mystery."

"The Naming of the Dead" by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown). Rankin's brilliant, borderline alcoholic Inspector John Rebus investigates the trail of a possible serial killer in the middle of a conference of world leaders in Scotland, and even manages to make President Bush fall off his bike.

"The Good Husband of Zebra Drive" by Alexander McCall Smith (Pantheon). The eighth novel about big-hearted (and big-boned) Precious Ramotswe and her No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency involves more "adventures, challenges, and intrigues."

May

"The Yiddish Policemen's Union" by Michael Chabon (HarperCollins). The what-if premise of this new novel by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer: Suppose Franklin Roosevelt had followed through with his proposal that Alaska, not Israel, become the homeland for displaced Jews after World War II. Chabon ("The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay") imagines what that Yiddish-speaking "Alyeska" would be like in this eagerly awaited novel.

"Bad Luck and Trouble" by Lee Child (Delacorte). Guilty pleasure time — a new thriller featuring tall, strong, enigmatic and principled Jack Reacher, the ex-military cop who investigates a conspiracy to kill off old friends.

"The Ministry of Special Cases" by Nathan Englander (Knopf). The author who made a huge splash with his debut story collection, "For the Relief of Unbearable Urges," delivers a first novel set in 1970s Argentina — the time of the Dirty War and the Disappearances.

"Up in Honey's Room" by Elmore Leonard (Morrow). A change of pace for the crime-fiction writer: a World-War-II-set novel about a German-born butcher living in Detroit, his free-spirited American wife and a Ukrainian spy-ring leader "better looking than Mata Hari," all of whom are being investigated by a U.S. Marshal who's on the lookout for traitors and escaped German POWs.

"Fellow Travelers" by Thomas Mallon (Pantheon). The gifted novelist-critic ("Bandbox," "Two Moons") sets his new novel in 1950s Washington, D.C., where two gay men find themselves endangered by Joe McCarthy's hunt for "sexual subversives" working in government.

"After Dark" by Haruki Murakami, translated by Jay Rubin (Knopf). A brief novel about two sisters, a model and a young student, and their lives among the "night people" of Tokyo. By the author of "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle."

"Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey" by Chuck Palahniuk (Doubleday). The latest from the author of "Fight Club" is a novel in the form of an oral history, recounting the life of a man who "may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time."

"Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Susan Vreeland (Viking). A novel based on the Renoir masterpiece, by the author of "Girl in Hyacinth Blue."

"Chaos: A Novella and Stories" by Edmund White (Carroll & Graf). A novella and two long stories by the author of "The Farewell Symphony" and "A Boy's Own Story," about older gay men who are still pursuing sex and adventure with a fervor that they can't quite sustain.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn@seattletimes.com

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com