All you'll want for Christmas — according to the publishers that be — are celebrity bios and police procedurals. You'll find a few more of those amply represented in the following list. 
Summertime
by J.M. Coetzee
Nobel laureate and two-time Booker-winner J.M. Coetzee has been shortlisted for the third time for the inventive Summertime, a semisequel to the fictionalized memoirs Boyhood and Youth that takes the form of a young biographer's interviews with colleagues of the late author John Coetzee. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature to the South African novelist “who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of the outsider.” The Academy cited the remarkable wealth of variety in Coetzee’s stories, many of which are set against the backdrop of apartheid.
In the incisive, enticing, and often amusing Summertime Coetzee imagines his own life with an unflinching eye, revealing painful moral struggles and attempts to coming to terms with caring for another. A young English biographer is researching a book about the late South African writer John Coetzee, focusing on the struggling, ill at ease, and solitary thirties-so author as he was living in rundown conditions in the outskirts of Cape Town with his widowed father. The biographer interviews – often eliciting painful responses — five people who knew Coetzee well, including a married woman with whom he had an affair (he was “not fully human”), his cousin Margot (he is boring and misguided), and a Brazilian emigrant who met Coetzee when both were teachers in Cape Town (“He is nothing ... an embarrassment”).
And to Sophie Denoël, an expert in African literature, Coetzee is an underwhelming writer with “no original insight into the human condition.” To which the Nobel and the Booker committees may or may not beg to differ.
Breathless
by Dean Koontz
It was the best of tomes. “Perhaps the book with the most impact on my career,” Dean Koontz once declared in an interview, “was A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.” It was a work that instilled within him the game-plan resolve to link genres, and a determination to deliver a variety not only book to book, but also a mix of genres within each book.
I began to think about how modern publishing had compartmentalized fiction into so many narrow genres. A Tale of Two Cities, as a new piece of fiction, would be hard to place on a contemporary publisher's list. It's too much of an adventure story and too much of a love story to win the favor of most editors of "literary" fiction." It is a serious novel of politics and revolution but is also darkly comic in places. Dickens does not shrink from the depiction of evil, and some scenes are horrific, but he also tells a story of redemption and self-sacrifice and hope that some (never me!) would consider almost sentimental.
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