BY MARY ANN GWINN AND MICHAEL UPCHURCH ILLUSTRATION BY CELESTE ERICSSON

"The Clerkenwell Tales" by Peter Ackroyd (Doubleday). The prolific author of "London: The Biography," "Albion," "Hawksmoor" and other works of fiction and nonfiction pens historical fiction set in 1399 London, where a nun's visions portend trouble for King Richard II.

"The Inner Circle" by T.C. Boyle (Viking). Boyle's latest concerns an innocent young man who becomes a member of sexologist Dr. Alfred Kinsey's "inner circle" of researchers in the 1940s — with unsettling results.

"Queen of Dreams" by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Doubleday). A young artist living in Berkeley is troubled both by the dream journals of her dead mother and by a brutal, 9/11-triggered attack on herself and her Indian friends (for being "terrorists").

"Life Mask" by Emma Donoghue (Harcourt). A new historical novel by the British lesbian writer ("Slammerkin"), set in 18th-century London, with the focus on three Beau Monde celebrities, one of them trying to mute rumors of her "Sapphism."

"The Divine Husband" by Francisco Goldman (Atlantic Monthly). Goldman's third novel ranges from Central America to New York City as it tells the tale of a young woman whose first love is Cuban poet and revolutionary José Marti.

"The Love Wife" by Gish Jen (Knopf). An interfering Chinese-American mother tries to impose a mainland Chinese "nanny" (read: ethnically suitable mate) on her already married son, in the new novel by the author of "Who's Irish?"

"Shade" by Neil Jordan (Bloomsbury). A new novel by the fiction writer ("Night in Tunisia") and filmmaker ("The Crying Game") about a murder victim who, because her body is never found, becomes a "shade," forever "watching — and retelling — the event of her life, and afterlife."

"The Falls" by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco). Niagara Falls provides the setting of Oates' latest novel, about parents and children "challenged by circumstances outside the family."

"Heir to the Glimmering World" by Cynthia Ozick (Houghton Mifflin). The new novel by the author of "The Puttermesser Papers" is about an eccentric family of German refugees living in the Bronx in the 1930s, thanks to their wealthy, wayward benefactor — heir to a children's book fortune.

"The Egyptologist" by Arthur Phillips (Random House). The author of the terrific "Prague" — about American expatriates in Budapest — changes gears with his second novel about "an Egyptologist obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocryphal king."

"The Finishing School" by Muriel Spark (Doubleday). The prize-winning novelist ("The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie") sets her latest book, about a troubled creative-writing class, in a "somewhat louche" Swiss finishing school.

"Danger on Peaks" by Gary Snyder (Shoemaker & Hoard). Snyder's first collection of all-new material since 1983 contains 55 poems and prose-poems, starting with one about his first ascent up Mount St. Helens in 1945.
 
OCTOBER

"The Darling" by Russell Banks (HarperCollins). A leftist radical with the Weather Underground flees to Liberia, where she and her husband become involved with warlord/ex-president Charles Taylor in the 1970s. By the author of "Affliction" and "The Sweet Hereafter."

"About Grace" by Anthony Doerr (Scribner). A first novel about an Alaskan boy who has weather obsessions and a gift for foreseeing the future. By the author of the much-praised story collection "The Shell Collector."

"The Red Queen" by Margaret Drabble (Harcourt). In the latest novel by Drabble ("The Needle's Eye"), an Oxford student mysteriously receives a 200-year-old memoir by a Korean crown princess, just before she makes a trip to Seoul.

"War Trash" by Ha Jin (Pantheon). An unusually hefty novel by the National Book Award-winner ("Waiting"), about the experiences of Chinese prisoners of war held by the Americans during the Korean War.

"Author, Author" by David Lodge (Viking). Henry James is subjected to a novelist's eye for the second time this year (following Colm Tóibín's "The Master"), in a book by the British writer, tracing the events leading up to James' disastrous attempts to become a playwright.

"The Plot Against America" by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin). Speculative fiction from the author of "Portnoy's Complaint," in which aviator and anti-Semite Charles A. Lindbergh beats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election, allies himself with Hitler and strikes fear into the hearts of American Jews.

"The Double" by José Saramago, translated by Margaret Jull Costa (Harcourt). A depressed history teacher catches sight of his younger self in a video and decides to pursue him, in the Nobel laureate's latest novel.

"Dillinger in Hollywood: New and Selected Short Stories" by John Sayles (Nation Books). A retrospective collection of short fiction by the noted filmmaker ("Lone Star") and novelist ("Union Dues").

"Light on Snow" by Anita Shreve (Little, Brown). The best-selling writer ("The Pilot's Wife") takes a father and daughter's snowy afternoon rescue of an abandoned infant as its starting point.

"A Bit on the Side" by William Trevor (Viking). A new collection of stories by the Anglo-Irish master of the form.

"Villages" by John Updike (Knopf). A software company founder's life, from his eastern Pennsylvania boyhood to his East Coast retirement early in the 21st century, is portrayed in the latest novel by the prize-winning author.

NOVEMBER

"Oh, Play That Thing" by Roddy Doyle (Viking). The second volume in Doyle's "Last Roundup" trilogy — the first was "A Star Called Henry." Henry Smart, lover, fighter and ex-IRA assassin, reinvents himself as an American, crossing paths with gangsters, dolls, bootleggers and jazz great Louis Armstrong.

"The Courage Consort" by Michel Faber (Harcourt). Three novellas set, respectively, in the worlds of avant-garde music, archaeology and anthropology, by the author of "The Crimson Petal and the White."

"The Pacific and Other Stories" by Mark Helprin (Penguin Press). New stories, spanning a variety of settings and eras by the imaginative author of "Winter's Tale" and "Memoir from Antproof Case."

"The Line of Beauty" by Alan Hollinghurst (Bloomsbury). The brainy British gay writer ("The Folding Star") takes on Thatcher's Britain and 1980s excess in this London-set social satire.

"Men and Cartoons" by Jonathan Lethem (Doubleday). Fantastical short stories by the prize-winning author of "Motherless Brooklyn" and "The Fortress of Solitude."

"Runaway" by Alice Munro (Knopf). The great Canadian short-story writer ("Open Secrets") has a new book of tales, some of them interconnected.

"Magic Seeds" by V.S. Naipaul (Knopf). The Nobel laureate's sequel to "Half a Life" follows the peripatetic life of protagonist Willie Chandran as he joins an underground movement in India and then returns to England, where more revolutions are under way.
 
"Gilead" by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Robinson's first novel since her 1981 debut, "Housekeeping," portrays four generations of preachers who differ greatly over their approaches to a "God-haunted existence."

"I Am Charlotte Simmons" by Tom Wolfe (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The third novel by the author of "The Bonfire of the Vanities" takes on the academic world, as it tells the tale of an innocent scholarship girl's first encounters with the "privileged elite."

DECEMBER

"The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios" by Yann Martel (Harcourt). Four novellas by the Man Booker Prize-winner ("Life of Pi")..

"Bad Dirt" by Annie Proulx (Scribner). A collection of new stories by the prize-winning author ("The Shipping News"), including one enticingly titled "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?"

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