A Week in Books: UK vs US in 2003

Few events in the literary calendar for 2003 count as predictable, but one does look like a racing cert. When, in the spring, Granta magazine unveils its third array of "Best of Young British Novelists", we shall witness a re-run of fiction's Battle of the Atlantic. Last year saw a pretty lively skirmish. Groundless reports that the Man Booker Prize would open its doors to US authors unleashed not-so-friendly fire from critics. Some saw British novelists as small-minded, parochial pygmies, compared to the world-bestriding grandeur and glamour of their American rivals.

This is a circular, and pointless, row, which among the pro-Yank ranks often reduces to a battle-cry of "Never mind the quality, feel the width". Under this tatty standard, Gone with the Wind will start to seem like a greater work than Pride and Prejudice. And yet ... as I drew up a list of promising novels due in this year's first half, something like that old transatlantic gulf did begin to take shape. It's not that Brits lack ambition or that North Americans (I'm afraid I include Canada here) lack finesse. Rather, grand themes and high ideas often attract – on this side of the ocean – compact and intensive treatment. On the other, they may stretch out over far broader expanses of space and time.

In May, Margaret Atwood will explore an apocalyptic future in Oryx and Crake (Bloomsbury) while Don DeLillo brings the entire globalised planet home to New York in Cosmopolis (Picador). Earlier, Dave Eggers goes on weird round-the-world travels in a fictional début, You Shall Know Our Velocity (Hamish Hamilton), as William Gibson's hi-tech nightmares lead him to London in Pattern Recognition (Viking) and T C Boyle finds drama among eco-warriors in Drop City (Bloomsbury). America's vexed ethnic histories underlie wide-ranging novels from Richard Powers (The Time of our Singing, Heinemann) and Louise Erdrich (The Master Butchers Singing Club, Flamingo). And the US art scene, in all its globe-conquering glory, shades new fiction from both the ancient (John Updike's Seek my Face, Hamish Hamilton) and the modern (Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved, Sceptre). Yet Americans can do local and particular, too – whether in Annie Proulx's Texas panhandle (That Old Ace in the Hole) or in Nicholson Baker's miniaturist imagination (A Box of Matches, Chatto).

Over here, the hopes and fears of multicultural Britain will fill major novels by Tim Parks (Judge Savage) and Caryl Phillips (A Distant Shore, both Secker & Warburg). James Wood broaches no less a topic than the war of faith and doubt, in The Book against God (Cape). Rose Tremain returns to the epic travails of 19th-century New Zealand in The Colour (Chatto), but Shena Mackay uncovers modern London's past in one apartment block: Heligoland (Cape). Both Matt Thorne and Andrew O'Hagan take a planetary curse – premature celebrity – and examine its local dimensions in (respectively) Child Star from Weidenfeld and Personality from Faber. And very peculiar places drive new novels by Gordon Burn (The North of England Home Service, Faber) and Esther Freud (The Sea House, Hamish Hamilton). Meanwhile, a hidden past haunts Graham Swift's The Light of Day (Hamish Hamilton), and memory propels a bold experiment in fictionalised autobiography from Hilary Mantel, Giving up the Ghost (Fourth Estate).

Novelists can find vast scope and sweep within a modest canvas. Two books from Hamish Hamilton will help to prove that case: Glenn Patterson's Number 5 (set in a single Belfast house) and Ardashir Vakil's One Day (set over 24 hours in London). "Think globally; act locally" is a maxim that talented writers have always understood.