E-Mail This Article to a Friend It’s a cruel world Spring books are all too real BY JOHN FREEMAN

A year ago, an avalanche of books relating to the 2004 presidential election began to tumble from publishers’ spring catalogues. Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner) was followed by Richard Clarke’s memoir Against All Enemies (Free Press). By summer, "Bush bashing," as fair and balanced news sources took to calling it, was in full swing.

To those who quickly reached their saturation point for well-timed political broadsides, this spring’s line-up will be blessedly free of Books That Make News And Then Are Quickly Countered With Polemics That Rebut Them. But if you think you can escape into the pages of fiction, think again. The blockbuster titles may have all the ballast and velvet interiority of a novel, but few of them leave this world and its problems behind.

In the wake of Ian McEwan’s recent Saturday (Doubleday), which chooses as its backdrop the giant anti-war protest that clogged London streets in February of 2003, the middle-aged protagonist of Jonathan Coe’s The Closed Circle, (Knopf, May 5) struggles with a similar sense of uneasiness in the England of the War on Terror. Jonathan Safran Foer casts a wider net for his second book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Houghton Mifflin, April 1), employing Sebald-like elements to shape a story of loss that invokes Dresden, Hiroshima, and September 11. Kazuo Ishiguro, who has also written of loss in melancholic tones, continues with this theme in Never Let You Go (Knopf, April 5), an alternative-history novel that imagines that cloning — not nuclear science — was the defining technology of World War II.

If you’d rather read about the real thing, check out American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf, April 5) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, or 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos (Simon & Schuster, May 3) by Jennet Conant, both of which investigate the men who built the bomb. Or Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima (Walker & Co., April 30), Diana Preston’s chronicle of the period between the discovery of radium and the dropping of the bomb.

We may have been dropping the bombs from above, but GIs were on the ground, too. John Glusman’s Conduct Under Fire (Viking, May 5) is about four American doctors who were captured soon after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned in the Philippines. Glusman’s title joins another book about our boys in uniform: Michael Phillips’s The Gift of Valor (Broadway Books, May 31) is about the Marine who became the first American nominated for the Congressional Medal of Honor during the Iraq war.

A lot of wind-blown anchormen have gotten their time on the sand dunes to tell us how things are "on the ground" or "on the Arab street" — but no one will take you there quite like Asne Seierstadt (The Bookseller of Kabul) in A Hundred & One Days (Basic Books, April 5), her book about life as a journalist in Iraq leading up to the moment American bombs began to drop. Wall Street Journal reporter Yaroslav Trofimov has spent some time inn war zones and in the Muslim world, and Faith at War: A Journey on the Front Lines of Islam, from Baghdad to Timbuktu (Holt, May 4) offers his insider’s view.

If all this hasn’t got you down yet, take a gander at National Book Critics Circle–winning author Lynn Nicholas’s Cruel World: The Children of Europe in the Nazi Web (Knopf, May 10), which shows how the Nazi regime’s programs of eugenics and institutionalized racism left millions of children of every origin orphaned, starving, traumatized, or dead.

Two other imports worth watching out for this spring are Andrea Levy’s Small Island, (Picador, April 1), winner of both the Whitbread and Orange Prizes, a dual narrative about a black man in England and a white woman in Jamaica in 1948, and Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory (Riverhead, March 31), which unfolds in Malaysia as it conjures several generations of a single family.

With all this death and destruction in the air, it’s hard not to look to the founding fathers for a little help. Pulitzer-winning biographer David McCullough (Truman) resurrects the mighty struggle to birth our future empire in 1776 (Simon & Schuster, May 24). And Pulitzer winner Stacy Schiff (Vera) has received glowing advance notices for her biography of the cosmopolitan statesman we could so use today, Benjamin Franklin, in A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America (Henry Holt, April 2).

It’s hard to imagine what Franklin would think if he were alive today and could visit the Translation Nation (Riverhead, April 21) that Hector Tobar writes about in his book about America’s Latin population (Riverhead, April 21). Chances are, unlike George Bush, Ben would be fluent in the language outside election season.