What an exciting year in books we have ahead of us! Literary treats are virtually queueing up to be read. Highlights for us include Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Colson Whitehead’s new novel The Nickel Boys and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. But most of all, we look forward to be surprised by a debut novel from an author we’ve never heard of before.

Fans of Leila Slimani‘s dark novel Lullaby will want to seek out Adele, a story of a Parisian woman with a sex addiction. Expect to be shocked. (February)

Marlon James, Booker Prize winner for A Brief History of Seven Killings in 2015, is publishing Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the first in a richly imagined, fantasy trilogy set in Africa. (February)

Eduoard Louis, French author of the controversial The End of Eddy and History of Violence has written about poverty, masculinity and his ambivalent relationship with his father in Who Killed My Father. (February)

We absolutely adored Max Porter‘s moving and quirky Grief Is the Thing With Feathers. Lanny, Porter’s second novel, is about a little English village and its inhabitants, present and past. (March)

Following on from Autumn and Winter, Ali Smith‘s perfectly timed Spring, the third in her series of four books in the Seasonal Quartet. We have to admit we’re a bit puzzled as to the plot of this book after having read the publisher’s blurb, but we’ll probably get more details closer to the time. (March)

Dave Eggers‘ Heros of the Frontier was a disappointment, especially after the hugely entertaining The Circle and A Hologram for the King. Will his next book, The Parade, a story about two very different men sent to build a highway in a fictional war torn country, see him back on form? (March)

Sadie Jones‘ The Snakes is about a family, rotten to the core. Jones’ first contemporary novel. (March)

A new Ian McEwan novel is always a hugely anticipated event in the publishing world. Machines Like Me offers an alternative 1980s in which Britain has lost the Falklands war and Alan Turing is around to develop artificial intelligence. Sounds intriguing.(April)

We loved Elizabeth Gilbert The Signature of All Things, her new book City of Girls is set in wartime New York City and follows a young girl who sets up as a seamstress at one of the city’s disreputable theatres. (June)

We’re very much looking forward to Colson Whitehead‘s, author of the brilliant The Underground Railroad, new book. The Nickel Boys follows two black boys at a reform school in racially segregated America. (August)

Without a doubt, one of, if not the, most anticipated new novel of the year. Margaret Atwood‘s The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale will pick up where the original left off. Atwood combines readability with superb literary fiction like no one else. Can’t wait! (September)

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of eye-opening non-fiction book Between the World and Me, and one of America’s most prominent black journalists and writers, is coming out with his first novel. (September)

Grand Old Dame of Irish literature Edna O’Brian writes about the children abducted by Boko Haram in Girls. (September)

Zadie Smith’s will publish her first short story collection, Grand Union, mixing new and old writing. (October)

Jung Chang’s biography of three women who shaped China in the 20th century, Big Sister, Little Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China should appeal to fans of Chang’s Wild Swans. (October)