Publishers Promise Passion by the Page : Reading: The new year will bring more soul-searching, new tales about relationships--and a blessed absence of diet books.

Stories where love truly triumphs . . . family sagas that actually make you want to read to the end . . . spiritual odysseys that are more than lite literature . . . fiction that grapples with tough and tender issues, like how three women rally around a fourth who is dying of breast cancer . . . a search, via the printed page, for a place called home.

Readers, take heart. The new year in books is upon us--and it promises to be a time of renewed passion for the soul and rekindled joy in relationships.

In a variety of literary guises, values will be reassessed and reclaimed. Intellectual enlightenment will be possible for the ordinary mortal in the form of serious books that inform, without talking down.

Perhaps reflecting the Clintons’ attempt to revise our health care system, books about all aspects of health are in vogue in this new literary year. But diet books are out. “Totally dead,” said Barb Burg of Bantam Books in New York.

Since 1994 will also bring a raft of romantic fiction--which publishers regard as a notch above romance novels--publishing seems to have offered tacit approval to the fantasy of holing up with a mushy book and a bowl of bonbons.

In 1993, a small, sugary novel called “The Bridges of Madison County” made the Midwest sound downright sexy--and in the process became a gigantic bestseller. The influence of Robert James Waller’s fictional foray into the heartland will continue, said his publisher, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, who predicted that “what you will see is bringing books back to Iowa.”

Many fiction writers who have inhabited the world of glitz “are looking to go back home,” said Kirshbaum, president and chief executive officer of Warner Books in New York. “Demographers have always told us that everyone migrated from Iowa to California, and now they are migrating back.”

Julie Garwood’s “Prince Charming,” for example, a 1994 Pocket Books hardcover title, takes the standard romance recipe of a beautiful young Englishwoman who has been dumped by her heartless cad of a fiance--and moves her to Montana.

But readers of fiction will also be exploring their diverse ethnic origins in 1994. Again, it is the wild success of one such multi-generational saga--Amy Tan’s “The Joy Luck Club,” published by Putnam’s in 1989--that has sent publishers, and the public, scrambling for stories of ancestral struggle. “Rise the Euphrates,” by Carol Edgarian, is frankly described by its publisher, Random House, as “ ‘The Joy Luck Club’ for Armenians.”

Sandy Dijkstra, the Del Mar-based literary agent who represents Tan, attributed the growing interest in multicultural fiction to a dual search for roots and gripping stories.

“People want stories,” said Dijkstra, referring to her stable of hyphenated American authors, “and these writers are more in tune with stories” of their heritages.

Often epic in scope--not to mention length--these heroic accounts frequently become fodder for book clubs and reading groups, another exploding literary phenomenon in 1994. Brian Baxter, proprietor of Baxter’s Books in Minneapolis, said literary gatherings are burgeoning in businesses, neighborhoods and churches.

“You’re seeing people using books as a way to create relationships that we haven’t had over the last two or three decades,” Baxter said.

“It’s an artificial society that they are creating, a community,” he said. “They share the experience of a book--and also of their own lives.”

But while Baxter said such reading groups help fuel the demand for “very good fiction,” Dijkstra, for one, worries that this is an endangered category. An onslaught of commercialism has produced “a real crisis in fiction right now,” Dijkstra said. The novel of manners, as one example, is virtually extinct, she said.

Moreover, she added, mainstream fiction targeted at women apparently is not selling as well as it once did.

At Random House, however, there are high hopes that “Talk Before Sleep,” by Elizabeth Berg, will prove to be an exception. The story probes the frank intimacy and the fierce loyalty that mark women’s friendships in the 1990s--and shows how both are put to the test when one friend develops breast cancer.

But a male writer who attempted a similar level of emotional candor might run into problems, Dijkstra said. Men in 1994, she maintained, “are in deep trouble in terms of fiction. What publishers want from men is thrillers--and it’s a tough world for a male writer if he’s not Clancy, Koontz, Crichton or Grisham.”

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But men are not the only ones reading thriller books. Kirshbaum, at Warner Books, said a noticeable trend for the new year is “the muscularization of the novel in terms of female tastes.” Partly as an educational effort--a genuine attempt by women to understand the male portion of the planet, Kirshbaum said--”women are reading more of these books. They are crossing over more into an area we used to think of as ‘men’s fiction.’ ”

Female readers are also showing a steady appetite for tough types of nonfiction. Dijkstra described two recent books she had sold--”Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead” and “The Book of the Woman Warrior”--as “very, very aggressive” books. She predicted that the fierce tenor of the gender wars in books “is going to go on until the end of the century.”

But people cannot live on conflict alone. Fortunately, said Lisa Johnson of E.P. Dutton in New York, there’s sex to pick up the slack.

“When you’re talking about trends for 1994, you’re definitely talking about sex,” Johnson said. A February title from Dutton, “Hot Monogamy” by someone whose actual name is Dr. Patricia Love (and a co-writer, with the less evocative name of Joe Robinson), should burn its way through the densest of brown paper wrappings.

In May, Dutton will bring out Lonnie Barbach’s “The Erotic Edge,” a collection of lusty stories for couples. Soon thereafter, Dutton is publishing Eva Margolies’ “Undressing the American Male,” to be followed by “The Faux Gourmet: A Single Woman’s Confessions on Food and Sex,” by Juli Huss.

At just about the same time from Random House, there is “A Natural History of Love,” by Diane Ackerman--including a section of “sexual chic,” or “perversion as fashion.”

Although sex is obviously nothing new, what distinguishes these books, Johnson said, is a “very ‘90s” focus on commitment. “These are sex books for nice, normal yuppies,” she said. “What they’re saying is you can stay with someone and still have passion.”

But in 1994, passion pledges to have a variety of implications. Baxter, a longtime observer of the book business, said he is particularly impressed with the intensity--passion, if you will--that top executives are bringing to the search for books for their work forces. Some companies even set aside on-the-job reading time, Baxter said. Often, the recommended titles focus on psychology or on family issues.

“They’re recognizing that books are one way to address the health and well-being of their employees,” Baxter said. “You’re seeing the work/family equation make its way into the bookstore.”

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Books about business will also have a new slant. Greed, for one thing, will not be venerated with quite the same wide-eyed adulation it has enjoyed for the last decade or so. Instead, books such as Hyrum W. Smith’s “The 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management” (Warner Books) will seek to combine personal growth and professional prowess.

And rather than blindly extolling the virtues of the American Dream, “The Force: A Year in the Life of a Sales Team” (Random House), by David Dorsey, will offer “an utterly convincing fly-on-the-wall account of how the American Dream manipulates the lives of seven men and women.”

It may sound sappy to say it, conceded Ellen Herrick of Warner Books, but “I think it’s a real serious trend, this whole values thing.”

The new spin to values in books is that “people are not just talking about doing good, but being good,” Herrick said. “I think people are desperately casting about for new directions.”

Counterbalancing this sense of altruism, however, is an apparently unbridled appetite for celebrity books--or what Kirshbaum calls “the book as National Enquirer special.”

More reflectively, Harold Evans, the publisher of Random House, observed that in 1994, “the translation of the popular culture in the sense that it is represented by Rush Limbaugh or Howard Stern” will be sought by ever-growing numbers of readers.

“I am always surprised by the quantities of people who want to read these books,” Evans said. “There is something being said about American culture by these types of people that I myself can’t fully fathom.”

But perhaps, Evans said, 1994 will bring a reaction against “this vulgarity, this very, very narcissistic sort of publishing.”

But conceding that he was feeling especially optimistic, Evans said: “I think that the common thread this year is books with a great deal of sympathy for mankind’s predicament in them.”