Based on this month’s new titles, the publishing industry clearly has love or, to be honest, its corollary — sex — on its mind. Most of the selections give prominent play to the libidinous side of life, in terms that are sometimes disturbing, sometimes passionate and sometimes, well, commercial. If that last sounds familiar these days, so be it.

A MAP OF IRELAND
By Stephanie Grant
197 pages. Scribner. $22.

Stephanie Grant’s slim new novel is told in the smart, smart-aleck voice of Ann Ahern, about to turn 18 and looking back from the perspective of two years in reform school. “My junior year in high school was a wild year, full of wild, what you might call, improbable change,” she says. “It was the year when Nixon resigned and Ford became president; when Patty Hearst got kidnapped, then robbed a bank, and became Tania.” It was 1974, the year that busing came to South Boston. Ann is a pyromaniac, a basketball player and a lesbian — “Everybody in Southie knew that I liked girls only, and liked them that way” — and Ms. Grant charts her coming of age against the chaos of her times and the demands of loyalty, conscience and love.

KILLER HEAT
By Linda Fairstein
370 pages. Doubleday. $26.

Linda Fairstein, the former prosecutor turned crime novelist, returns with the 10th in her series of Alex Cooper books, “Killer Heat.” It is August in New York City, and a serial killer is on the prowl, torturing and murdering young women, then dumping their bodies in remote spots. At the same time Cooper, who runs the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, is in the middle of a cold-case rape trial revived by DNA evidence, and someone in the Latin Princes gang is trying to send her a not very friendly message. The book’s strands — and the investigation — play out along the city’s coastline, from Ruffle Bar in Jamaica Bay to Governors Island off the tip of Manhattan. Cooper’s detective sidekick Mike Chapman is along to provide the New York history, as well as to watch her back. She needs him. As a character in the book notes about one of the murder victims, “That girl and trouble, they was always together.”

MUDBOUND
By Hillary Jordan
328 pages. Algonquin Books. $22.95.

In Hillary Jordan’s first novel, the forces of change and resistance collide with terrible consequences. Set in Mississippi just after World War II, the story is told by a chorus of narrators who alternate throughout the book: Laura McAllan, whose husband, Henry, has moved her from her city life in Memphis to a Mississippi Delta farm; Henry himself; his charming drunken brother Jamie; and the farm’s share tenants, Florence and Hap Jackson and their son Ronsel, a veteran who fought in Europe. It is a novel of place as much as people. “Here was a long, rickety house with a warped tin roof and shuttered windows that had neither glass nor screens,” Ms. Jordan writes of Laura’s first view of the farm. “Here was a dirt yard with a pump in the middle of it, shaded by a large oak tree that had somehow managed to escape razing by the original steaders. Here was a barn, a pasture, a cotton house, a corncrib, a pig wallow, a chicken coop and an outhouse.

“Here was our new home.”

The book won the 2006 Bellwether Prize for Fiction, which goes to an unpublished manuscript that addresses issues of social justice. The $25,000 prize is awarded in even-numbered years; it was founded and is financed by the writer Barbara Kingsolver.

WILLING
By Scott Spencer
244 pages. Ecco. $24.95.

At 37 Avery Jankowsky has never quite made it to adulthood. He has a sputtering career as a freelance writer; a foundering romance with his younger girlfriend, Deirdre; and a tangled relationship with his mother. When he finds out that Deirdre has been sleeping with another man, Avery accepts his uncle’s offer of a spot on a high-priced globe-trotting sex tour. (“Women, beautiful women,” his uncle explains. “Grown-up women for grown-up men. Scotland, Sweden, Liechtenstein for crying out loud.”) Avery quickly sells a proposal for a book about the tour, which will provide him the first real money he has ever earned. He plans to write it without sleeping with any of the women he encounters. Things don’t quite work out that way. Mr. Spencer is the author of eight previous novels, including the best-selling “Endless Love.”

BLOOD KIN
By Ceridwen Dovey
183 pages. Viking. $23.95.

Ceridwen Dovey’s first novel takes place in a nameless country and with a cast of characters identified only by their relationships to a despot known as The President. There are His Chef, His Barber, His Portraitist and then the women involved with them: His Barber’s Brother’s Fiancée, His Chef’s Daughter, His Portraitist’s Wife. When The President is deposed in a coup, the three men are held prisoner in a summer palace outside the capital. Narrating each chapter by turn, the characters reveal their own complicity, as well as the deeper web of connections among them.

WE DISAPPEAR
By Scott Heim
293 pages. Harper Perennial. $13.95.

In Scott Heim’s new novel the main character, also named Scott, returns home to Kansas to care for his mother, Donna, who is dying of cancer. Donna has long been obsessed with stories of missing children, because she’d been abducted as a childherself, though she has claimed she can’t remember what happened to her. Now, as she grows sicker, she changes her story, telling Scott one version, his sister another, a family friend still another about being taken by an older couple who were either cruel or kind to her, depending on whom she is telling. Scott also finds a young man named Otis living in his mother’s basement, seemingly playing out his own abduction. As Donna grows weaker, Scott tries to puzzle out what actually happened to her, while also dealing with his addiction to crystal meth. “Mysterious Skin,” an earlier novel of Mr. Heim’s, was made into a cult-hit movie by the director Gregg Araki; this book is being published as a paperback original.

Piers Morgan is asked: 'Are you gay?'

Comments

SUNDAY, March 2
I flew into Dallas for the second leg of America's Got Talent auditions tonight, and got asked by a customs officer: "So Piers, I've gotta ask ? are you gay?" Whaaaatttttt?

I'm used to tricky interrogations at US immigration desks but this was ridiculous.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I didn't mean to offend you, but there's a promo running on NBC for Celebrity Apprentice that says you might be?"

I raced to my hotel faster than a cocaine-dosed greyhound and switched on the TV. Within a few minutes, there indeed was Donald Trump saying: "You're calling Piers a homosexual?"

Cue dramatic drum roll and a Henry Kissinger-style voice saying: "How did Piers react? Find out on Thursday?"

The trouble with filming a month's worth of reality TV is that you forget half the stuff that happens, and I can't for the life of me remember what prompted Trump to say this. Even worse, I'm going to have to wait four long days to find out?

MONDAY, March 3
Simon Cowell has done a deal to make a Hollywood movie out of the phones-to-riches life of Britain's Got Talent opera-singing winner Paul Potts. And this has predictably led to a flurry of speculation about who will play the judges on the big screen.

I emailed my LA agent that George Clooney might be appropriate for my role. "Clooney booked," came his reply an hour later, "but Stephen Hawking available."

TUESDAY, March 4
I tried to get in my hotel lift this afternoon, only to be stopped by a burly security guard.

"Sorry," he growled, "no entry."

I was bemused.

"Why? Someone more important using it?"

"Yes, sir," he said, without a trace of discomfort.

Texans, as we know from Dubya, don't even understand what irony is, let alone deploy it. Seconds later, a cavalcade of limos swept up to the hotel entrance.

Presidential candidate John McCain emerged from one, swept past me and marched straight into the lift. He looked small and old.

It turned out that McCain is here to celebrate his formal nomination as the official Republican candidate with a huge party in the hotel's ballroom tonight.

I toyed with gate-crashing, but didn't want to be caught on camera "endorsing" him.

Obama is the man for me. The planet needs an articulate, inspiring, young, black African-American president right now ? it's as simple as that. As I stood in the busy lobby bar waiting for a taxi, I received a vivid reminder of the need to have a catchphrase if I want to really make the big time.

Jerry Springer walked by, greeted by raucous chants of "Jerry! Jerry!" Then came The Hoff, who received shouts of "Don't Hassle The Hoff!" And, finally, I saw Henry Winkler, AKA "The Fonz", fending off fans cooing "Aaaaayhh!" I'd prefer mine, on balance, not to be "Hey Piers, are you gay?"

WEDNESDAY, March 5
Tony Blair is in Dallas, too, receiving some Freedom of the City honour for being George Bush's warmongering mouthpiece.

It really is quite sickening to see the adulation ? and huge amounts of cash ? that he is being showered with in America for making fatuous speeches about how desperately he wants peace in the Middle East.

It's like a fox being paid to address the world on why we should be nice to hens ? once he has gorged himself in the coop.

Talking of hens, I had dinner with Sharon Osbourne tonight, and we both drank a little too quickly.

At 12.30am, she burst into a self-created song called I Love My Husband's Willy! which she proceeded to sing at the top of her voice (and not, it must be said, completely in tune) as her assistants and I hustled her swiftly along various corridors to her room.

When I left Sharon at her door she was still shrieking her unique anthem to Ozzy.

Now that really is true love.

THURSDAY, March 6
I threw a Celebrity Apprentice screening party tonight to see the historic questioning of my sexuality get its airing.

This episode pitted me as rival project manager against my b?te noir ? a vile reality-TV creature called Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth.

Things have got increasingly personal between us, to put it mildly, culminating in her screaming, "Even your ****ing kids hate you!" during a previous episode. Which my sons assure me is untrue?

The challenge was to sell art in a gallery, and I hit every contact I knew to try to finish her off.

Tycoon Sir Philip Green paid $25,000 over the phone for a painting he couldn't even see, Gordon Ramsay $5,000 ("I ****ing love art," he lied), Soho House owner (and Mr Kirsty Young) Nick Jones $10,000, former Arsenal boss David Dein $10,000, and Welsh movie star Ioan Gruffudd $5,000.

When we entered the boardroom, Donald Trump revealed that I'd raised $170,000 to her $7,000.

"This isn't just a beating," Trump told my stricken victim, "this is the biggest slaughter in the history of the Apprentice."

I was ushered out into the victory room, at which point Omarosa alleged I was "in the closet".

"You're calling Piers a homosexual?" roared Trump, thankfully with an incredulous look on his face.

"I wonder what he thinks of that?"

I, as he well knew, was watching it all on a TV monitor outside. I stood up and charged into the boardroom ? with absolutely no idea what I was going to do until I got there.

On arrival, I saw Omarosa, and next to her Trace Adkins, the 6ft 7in unreconstructed redneck cowboy country-singing star.

There was only one thing for it ? I raced over, lent down and kissed Trace firmly on the right cheek, telling him: "I've always loved a beautiful cowboy."

Trace recoiled in horror, Trump recoiled in laughter, and I recoiled back to my room where Lennox Lewis was waiting in hysterics to high-five me.

"Dude," he chortled, 'that was crazy!' Omarosa, the most hated reality-TV contestant in American history, was fired minutes later, a decision that puts me into the final five contestants.

FRIDAY, March 7
America is ecstatic.

"Are there enough words in the English language to describe last night's episode of Apprentice?" wrote one reviewer.

"It was a rout, beating, cakewalk, clobbering, debacle, disaster, drubbing, shellacking? Omarosa made General Custer look like Alexander the Great."

Ratings jumped to nearly ten million viewers, and as I walked through Dallas airport, an endless stream of jubilant people ran up to shake my hand and thank me.

I've gone from panto villain to national hero in America? or as one woman put it in Starbucks this evening: "I just love to hate you!"

• 'Don't You Know Who I Am?' by Piers Morgan is published in paperback by Ebury Press, priced at £7.99.