E-Mail This Article to a Friend Between covers Fiction and non-fiction by new and old names BY JOHN FREEMAN

Last year was devoid of big names (neither John Updike nor Don DeLillo nor Philip Roth returned from Hades last spring), and this season doesn’t look to be much different. All the same, there are some exciting new books coming out that will beat seeing Starsky & Hutch for the third time.

In April, two superb African novelists deliver what promise to be their best books yet. Neustadt Prize winner Nuruddin Farrah publishes Links (Riverhead), the tale of a Somali man who returns to Mogadiscio for the first time since Somalia’s civil war. Moses Isegawa’s Snakepit (Knopf) also tells the story of a homecoming gone awry; here a man returns to Uganda and winds up traveling into his own heart of darkness.

If lighter fare is your thing, note that Karen Joy Fowler has written a sparkling novel about the intrigue and romance surrounding a book club in The Jane Austen Book Club (Putnam). Princeton grads Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason prove they did more than join dining clubs in college with their debut, The Rule of Four (Dell), which reads like a cross between Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

Family novels are always big, and George Minot adds his take to the ongoing Minot saga (begun with sisters Susan and Eliza) with The Blue Bowl (Knopf). Elizabeth Berg returns with The Art of Mending (Random House), a family-reunion novel in which — surprise, surprise — secrets are revealed. A happy family also dissolves before our eyes in Anne Donovan’s hilarious debut, Buddha Da (Canongate), which revolves around a middle-aged father’s decision to take up Buddhist meditation.

Or if domestic stories of unrest make you antsy, take a gander at two new books by former Prix Goncourt winner Jean Echenoz, who publishes a novel about a man sent into hell, Piano (New Press), and a noir-like novelette called Chopin’s Move (Dalkey Archive Press) that incorporates the great composer, a foreign intelligence agent, and a woman who gets in over her head.

In May, readers who lose their heads over short fiction get their due with two books of short stories by masters of the novel — A.S. Byatt, who publishes the Little Black Book of Stories (Knopf), and E.L. Doctorow, who brings out Sweet Land Stories (Random House). If new voices is your things, look to Mary Potter Engel’s debut, Strangers and Sojourners (Counterpoint), to take you to the low country of South Carolina for some literary moonshine, or Imad Rahman’s I Dream of Microwaves (FSG), a collection about a "Pakistani-American actor searching for a way to play himself in ‘real, actual life,’ " to heat up your nights. Short-story writer Dan Chaon graduates to the novel with You Remind Me of Me (Ballantine), and David Leavitt reminds everyone he is way too productive for his own good with The Body of Jonah Boyd (Bloomsbury).

Deceit on the global scale is the name of the game for April non-fiction. Two new biographies of Stalin emerge with The Unknown Stalin (Overlook), by Russians Roy and Zhores Medvedev, and Simon Sebag Montefiore’s fabulously readable Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Knopf). Working backward in time: Americans’ obsession with our founding fathers gets more fodder with two new biographies of Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow’s Hamilton (Penguin Press) is sure to be an instant bestseller; American Machiavelli: Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of U.S. Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press), by Johns Hopkins foreign-policy prof John Harper, is sure to appeal to the hawks in the Bush administration. Moreover, what’s probably the best Mary Queen of Scots biography to date — no small feat — lands at the end of April with John Guy’s magisterial Queen of Scots (Houghton Mifflin).

And just as the sun really begins to shine in May, non-fiction writers will reminds us that it doesn’t always shine forever. In Dark Ages Ahead (Random House), Jane Jacobs predicts that North America may be on brink of a mediæval-like dark ages. Cranking up the paranoia are several books about warfare. In My Life Is a Weapon (Princeton University Press), Christopher Reuter delivers a modern history of suicide bombing. In Plague (Free Press), Wendy Orent says it’s not bombs but microbes that will do us in. And for a happy note after these warnings, try Geoffrey Nunberg’s Going Nucular (Public Affairs), which argues that language, not weaponry, is where we reveal our true state of mind. Now there’s something writers can take solace in.