The Rules of Play by Jennie Walker is a first-person narrative of a London woman having an affair whose 16-year-old stepson goes missing during the course of a cricket Test Match. Partly as a distraction, she asks for the rules to be explained to her, by both her husband and her lover. This first novel by a British poet is a perfectly crafted, bittersweet and bewitching story about love, family, passion and whether or not one should always play by the rules. “This is a little marvel. It’s funny, clever, illuminating, deeply kind-hearted, and doesn’t outstay its welcome…. Every word has been chosen with care” (Guardian). The Rules of Play will be published by Soho Press in January 2010. Jennie Walker’s primary agent is Antony Topping at Greene & Heaton Ltd. in London.

Aryn Kyle follows her national bestselling debut novel, The God of Animals, with Boys and Girls Like You and Me, a collection of twelve wickedly funny stories which are often populated by intelligent young women whose search for love and connection falls poignantly short. In “Nine,” a young girl given to exaggeration escapes a humiliating ninth birthday celebration with the help of her father’s new girlfriend. The dubious benefits of sleeping with one’s boss are revealed when a bookstore manager defends an employee from an irate customer in the hilarious “Sex Scenes from a Chain Bookstore.” And in “Boys and Girls Like You and Me,” a raid on a neighbor’s meth lab foments the unlikely friendship between a solitary woman and the goth teenage girl who lives in the apartment below her. Kyle’s stories have been chosen for BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, and she received the National Magazine Award for fiction. Scribner will publish Boys and Girls Like You and Me in April 2010.

Three Wishes, a memoir by Carey Goldberg, Beth Jones, and Pamela Ferdinand, is the funny and poignant tale of three women, eight vials of sperm, and love found. The authors are three accomplished women friends (all, as it happens, brilliant journalists), and as the story opens, they are about to hit 40 and decide that, since they have not found their life mates, they will go it alone and become single mothers. Things happily don't work out exactly as planned. Three Wishes captures the challenges of a generation of professional women who find success at work easier to achieve than success in love and who worry they will not find a mate in time to have children. Little, Brown will publish Three Wishes in April 2010.

Insectopedia by Hugh Raffles is a compendium (arranged alphabetically with 26 entries) of his explorations, investigations, and discoveries, across history and culture, of the remarkable ways humans and insects come together to create new experiences, new technologies and new understandings of the world. Along the way, Raffles encounters everything from nomadic bee brokers in northern California and bio-engineers who study spiders’ webs for secrets that might lead to new weapons for the U.S. military to a refugee Flemish miniaturist in sixteenth-century Prague who painted the world’s first book of insect studies and, in doing so, found in insects a way to express his rejection of intolerance. An essay drawn from the book was selected for BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS 2008. Pantheon will publish the book in March 2010.

Gary Shteyngart’s eagerly-awaited third novel, Super Sad True Love Story, is the story of a Russian and a Korean immigrant whose relationship hits a snag in the New York of the near future, in which a small elite is on its way to achieving immortality. The book takes as its themes materialism, information culture, immigration and daily threats to contemplative life in a world that knows too much but thinks too little. Shteyngart’s last novel, Absurdistan, was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “One of the funniest books in recent memory” and the novel was named one of the 10 New York Times Best Books of the Year in 2006, selling to 21 countries. Random House will publish Super Sad True Love Story in August 2010.

As Michael White’s extraordinary debut novel, Weeping Underwater Looks A Lot Like Laughter, opens, 17-year-old George Flynn is moving with his family from Davenport to Des Moines, Iowa. Soon after landing in Des Moines, George becomes deeply infatuated with the magnetic, fiercely independent Emily Schell. Although Emily is the object of George’s yearnings, it’s his budding friendship with her younger sister Katie, with her penchant for time capsules, her socially crude but scathingly accurate way of seeing people, and deadpan humor in the face of her battle with MS that affects him most profoundly. The author was raised in Missouri and Iowa and received his MFA at Columbia University in 2006. White’s novel will be published by Putnam in February 2010. (www.michaeljwhitebooks.com)

In April 2010, Random House will publish Harvey Sachs' The Ninth: Beethoven and the World in 1824, a vivid portrait of the creation and 1824 premiere of Beethoven's revolutionary Symphony No. 9. This book places Beethoven’s landmark work in its proper political and cultural context and charts its influence on other important artists at work at that time.

Kevin Canty’s fourth novel, Everything, is a shimmering novel about unexpected redemption by a writer of deep empathy and prodigious talents. Eleven years after the death of her husband Taylor, June, a childless hospice worker, finally declares she’s “nobody's widow anymore." Anxious for a new beginning, June considers selling her beloved house, which she discovers is worth more than she ever imagined. Taylor’s boyhood friend RL, a divorced empty-nester, faces a major change as well, when he agrees to lodge his old college girlfriend while she undergoes chemotherapy. Caught between Betsy’s anguish and June’s hope, the cynical RL is brought face to face with his own futility and the longing to experience the kind of love that “knocks you down.” Everything will be published by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday in August 2010.

When Harvey Sachs' first book, a biography of Toscanini, was published in 1978, it was proclaimed as the best book on the subject. He is now at work on a new biography for Oxford University Press, which draws on an extraordinary amount of new material, including 1,200-plus hours of tapes of Toscanini talking to family and friends, the archives of several key opera houses, starting with La Scala, and, above all, the Toscanini family's archives, which were still in limbo in the '70s. Sachs has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Times Literary Supplement (London), La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, Guardian, Observer and dozens of other newspapers and periodicals.

In Aftermath, journalist Nir Rosen tells the story of Iraq and the Middle East after the U.S. withdrawal and takes up the question of who is responsible for destroying Iraq. The book challenges the U.S. administration narrative that failure in Iraq is the fault of Iraq, and it also highlights the terrible impact the Iraq war has had on the region. Rosen was the first western journalist to penetrate the insurgency and he has testified before Congress on Iraq’s refugees. He also provided footage from Iraq for No End in Sight, the Academy Award-nominated documentary about American policy in Iraq that won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival. Nation Books/Perseus will publish the book in July 2010.

In January 2007, Time magazine placed Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary second in their list of The 10 Greatest Books of All Time. Award-winning translator Lydia Davis has been commissioned by Viking/Penguin to prepare a new translation of this universally-acknowledged masterpiece, delivery of which is expected in 2009. Of her translation of Swann's Way (published in 2005), Frank Wynne of Irish Times wrote, "What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language, and fidelity to the cambers of Proust's prose . . . Davis's translation is . . . magnificent, precise."