The shortlist for the 2009 Man Booker Prize was the strongest in years. The judges chose the winner, Hilary Mantel's historical novel Wolf Hall, from a list containing books by J M Coetzee (Summertime was his best work of fiction in some time), Sarah Waters and A S Byatt, among others. Andrew Motion, chair of the judges for the prize in 2010, will struggle to assemble a list of comparable quality, though his task ought to be made easier by the publication of new novels by several luminaries of English letters.

Chief among them is Martin Amis, whose twelfth novel The Pregnant Widow (Jonathan Cape) will be published in early February. Amis himself has said that the new book is about "what we're living through", or, rather, what we have lived through - specifically, the sexual revolution and its fallout. Early sightings of the novel in proof show the shapeliness of his sentences to be fully intact, while some of the lugubriousness of his recent fiction is happily absent.

Amis's confrère and peer Ian McEwan publishes his first novel in three years in March. McEwan's publisher, Dan Franklin, says that Solar (Jonathan Cape) is "about one of the most serious threats to our world - global warming". The protagonist is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who finds himself on his uppers (this after McEwan's novel before last, Saturday, whose central character was a neurosurgeon).

Another veteran novelist delivering new work is Peter Carey, whose Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber & Faber) is an exploration of the "adventure of American democracy" that reimagines Alexis de Tocqueville's journey to the New World.

Among the other notable novels to be published in the first half of 2010 will be Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Faber & Faber, January), Generosity by Richard Powers (Atlantic Books, January), The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris (Viking, February), Point Omega, a novella by Don DeLillo (Picador, March), Rebecca Goldstein's novel of ideas 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (Atlantic Books, April) and, in May, Andrew O'Hagan's The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, narrated by the canine in question.

It's an election year, and there are a number of new books that either pronounce encomiums upon New Labour or attempt to make sense of Cameronism. The most notable work of the latter kind is by Phillip Blond, perhaps the most significant intellectual influence on David Cam­eron's so-called "progressive conservatism", who publishes Red Tory in April (Faber & Faber, April). From the former category, one looks forward to The End of the Party: the Rise and Fall of New Labour (Viking, March) by the Observer's chief political commentator, Andrew Rawnsley. Martin Pugh promises a more complete history of the Labour Party, from Ramsay MacDonald to Gordon Brown, in Speak for Britain! (Bodley Head, March).

We don't know yet if the obsequies for New Labour will turn out to be premature, but one thing we can be certain about is that publishers will continue to mine another seam that was immensely profitable in 2009: books about the financial crisis of autumn 2008 and its aftermath. The novelist John Lanchester has turned his articles on high finance for the London Review of Books into a full-length treatment of the near-collapse of the global banking system, Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay (Allen Lane, January). The same house offers, as an accompaniment to Lanchester's book, Freefall (Allen Lane, January) by the Nobel Prize-winning American economist Joseph Stiglitz. Battling for readers' attention with those two titles will be The Credit Crunch by David Smith (Profile Books, March), The New Capitalism (Hodder & Stoughton, March) by the BBC's business editor Robert Peston and "Doctor Doom" himself, Nouriel Roubini, whose Crisis Economics (Allen Lane) is due in May.

Will Hutton tries to imagine a set of economic and political arrangements that might replace the neoliberal model that was discredited by the crash in Them and Us: Politics, Greed and Inequality - Why We Need a Fair Society (Little, Brown, March). And in The Enigma of Capital (Profile Books, April), the "radical geo­grapher" David Harvey examines the birth and near-death experiences of capitalism.

Meanwhile, the bull market in popular narrative history shows no sign of turning "toxic". Highlights from a crowded list in the first half of the year are Germania: a Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern by Simon Winder (Picador, February), Alex Butterworth's history of late-19th-century anarchism, The World That Never Was (Bodley Head, March), Norman Stone's "personal history" of the Cold War, The Atlantic and Its Enemies (Allen Lane, May) and The Man on Devil's Island, Ruth Harris's study of the Dreyfus affair, due from Allen Lane in June.

Jonathan Derbyshire is culture editor of the New Statesman