As 2007 draws to a close, publishers', and writers', thoughts are turning to Last Things - the military, political, economic and climatic chaos that will surely engulf us in 2008.
In Rivals (Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, April) and When China Rules the World (Allen Lane, June) Bill Emmott and Martin Jacques predict the uncomfortable effects of Asia's growing economic dominance, while in The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (Picador, March) and The Angel of Grozny (Virago, March) the acclaimed journalists Philip Gourevitch and Asne Seierstad examine the devastation wreaked by military adventures in Chechnya, Iraq and Afghanistan. Inevitably, Martin Amis weighs in - this time with The Second Plane (Jonathan Cape, January), a volume of collected writings on the 11 September 2001 attacks.
And all this global meltdown is satirised in Will Self's allegory The Butt (Bloomsbury, April), set in an imaginary country "part Australia, part Iraq and part Greenland".
In the face of such gloom, it is essential to take refuge in the past, a hippie commune, Australia, or all three. The boy hero of Peter Carey's His Illegal Self (Faber & Faber, February) escapes New York to do just that, while Hanif Kureishi revisits 1970s suburbia in Something to Tell You (Faber, March) and the less-than-prolific but extravagantly talented Adam Mars-Jones goes back to the 1950s in Pilcrow (Faber, April).
Merrier escapism is offered by the hotly tipped Dominican writer Junot Díaz's story of a "ghetto nerd" in New Jersey, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Faber, February), and by a welcome return from the Russian Zen surrealist Victor Pelevin - The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Faber, February), in which magical foxes roam Moscow's five-star hotels. Equally bizarrely, Sebastian Faulks borrows Ian Fleming's mantle for his first James Bond novel, Devil May Care (Penguin 007, May).
And if spirits should still need shoring up against catastrophe, Boris Johnson's The British (HarperPress, March) will remind us of the great and lasting things - the Union flag, the monarchy, Big Ben and the London Eye.
