Grisham and King Sequels, Series News, and More!

Two sequels fans have awaited for years make their debuts this year.  The first is John Grisham’s Sycamore Row, which picks up some time after the events of A Time To Kill, his first novel.  Before wealthy Seth Hubbard commits suicide, he writes a new will—one that leaves most of his fortune to his black maid instead of his adult children. Lawyer Jake Brigance finds himself embroiled in another controversial trial in which racial tensions and long held secrets come to the surface in a Southern town.

The other is Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, which tells what happened to Danny Torrance after The Shining.  As the book opens, a middle-aged alcoholic Danny is using his gifts to ease the passage of the dying and trying to keep a low profile.  Then he meets a young girl who is being stalked because of her own paranormal gifts, and has to find it in himself to try to save her.  According to the prepublication reviews, you don’t need to have read The Shining to enjoy this one.

After two non-fiction books (the memoirs Eat, Pray, Love and Committed), Elizabeth Gilbert is back with a novel.  The Signature of All Things is a sweeping saga, which opens in 1800 with the birth of a baby girl, Alma Whittaker.  She grows up to be an accomplished young woman, learning Latin and Greek, and is a naturalist but her plain looks and intelligence seem to promise spinsterhood until she meets an artist with some unorthodox views on marriage. The story moves from America to Europe and expresses the wild intellectual expanse of the period, when amateurs created revolutions in science from geology to biology.

The Last Dark by Stephen Donaldson is subtitled The Climax of the Entire Thomas Covenant Chronicles which sounds as if it’s pretty definite.  The series began in 1977; The Last Dark is the tenth book in the series, which started as a trilogy.  (Don’t they all?)

On the other hand, there’s a rather surprising sequel in the works:  British author Sophie Hannah has been authorized to write a new Hercule Poirot novel thirty eight years after the publication of Agatha Christie’s final word on the detective.  Christie’s grandson acknowledged that his grandmother had provided an ending in order to prevent other writers from picking up the story, but believes that she would approve in the interest of bringing new readers to her work. The book is scheduled for publication in September 2014, which gives us plenty of time to reread Dame Agatha’s body of work.