LONDON
BOOK FAIR
2016
FICTION
Agence Eliane Benisti – Highlights Fiction LBF 2016 (PDF)
Bertelsmman Fiction List – LBF 2016
A novel about the longing for immortality
DIE UNGLÜCKSELIGEN
(The Hapless Ones)
by Thea Dorn
Knaus, February 2016
Johanna Mawet is a molecular biologist involved in research into the immortality of cells in zebrafish. During a research trip to the USA she picks up a strange, ageless gentleman. The closer she gets to know him, the more abstruse she finds him. In the end, he lets her into his secret. He is the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter, born in 1776. Tough stuff for a scientist in the 21st century. In order to get to the bottom of his alleged immortality she has his DNA sequenced. When Johanna’s colleagues grow suspicious, there is only one thing for it: the strange couple has to flee – to that place always popular for trysts between the striving for scientific knowledge and dark romanticism: Germany.
Thea Dorn’s first novel, “Berlin Enlightenment”, received the Raymond Chandler Award. Her following novels were sensational successes as well, including “The Brain Queen”, for which she was awarded the German Crime Novel Prize.
For readers of David Foenkinos’ Charlotte and Alina Bronsky’s Baba Dunja’s letzte Liebe
DAS MARILLENMÄDCHEN
(The Apricot Girl)
by Beate Teresa Hanika
btb, September 2016
Elisabetta lives a secluded life in her Vienna childhood home. Ever since she was a young girl in the 1940s, she has been preserving apricot jam from the fruits of the tree in her garden. She keeps one glass from every year, just like she keeps her memories awake: Her glamourous older sisters who would sunbathe in the garden, admired by the neighbor’s boys, her mother’s beautiful singing, and her father’s gifts — little things he would extract for her from the pockets of his doctor’s coat. And then the day when everything changed, when her parents and her sisters were taken away by the SS and the girl was left behind, her only companion being the turtle her father gave her shortly before he left, and whom they mockingly named Hitler. And her sister’s voices also stayed with her, commenting everything she does.
When young Pola moves into the room Elisabetta rents out, the old woman’s routines are being challenged. Pola, a passionate dancer, struggles with her own past — her love for her soul mate Rachel and a terrible event that binds her to Elisabetta. And yet, a gentle companionship starts to form between the two women.
Told through the alternating viewpoints of Elisabetta and Pola, this is a poetic and moving, sometimes comical novel about two women and their ways of dealing with love and loss.
Beate Teresa Hanika has written much-awarded young adult novels, some of them translated into several languages. THE APRICOT GIRL is her first adult novel.
Tales about being alien and losing, of falling into traps and being free
FALLENSTELLER
(Trappers)
by Saša Stanišić
Luchterhand, May 2016
People set traps, and people get caught in traps. When they quarrel, when they run businesses and make war, when they travel and grow old and love. If the trap works, someone loses. Sometimes it is the trapper. These are stories about setting traps. About quarrels, business, war, travel, old age and, of course, love.
Saša Stanišić, born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1978, came to Germany when he was fourteen. He studied at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut in Leipzig. Stanišić has received numerous stipends and prizes, including the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. His books “Before The Festival” and “How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone” have been translated into numerous languages.
Crown 2016 London Rights Guide
A dark, sexy noir for fans of Sue Miller, Heidi Julavits, and Vendela Vida about the intensity of female relationships—whether mother to daughter or friend to friend—that lie behind the hedgerows of beautifully manicured Los Angeles.
WOMAN NO. 17
by Edan Lepucki
Hogarth, May 2017
When Lady decided to take a break from her husband, she hires a live-in nanny, so that she can finish her book—but also so that she can possibly avoid her children. S, a young artist/student, arrives on her doorstep to interview for the job and instantly connects with both her sons, but soon begins to act in a way that causes Lady to question her reason for being there. This twisty, moody, bizarre, and confidently written second novel is a riveting exploration of female friendship that will further establish Lepucki as a major voice in literary fiction.
Edan Lepucki is the New York Times bestselling author of “California”.
An ambitious, gripping, darkly funny family drama about the reckoning of three adult children with their profoundly flawed parents, set during Passover in a speculative, near-future America rife with anti-Semitism and terror, from an award winning short story writer
TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL
by David Samuel Levinson
Hogarth, April 2017
In 2022, Jewish-Americans face an increasingly unsafe landscape. A flood of Israeli refugees into the country has brought deep hostilities and latent anti-Semitism to the forefront of American life. Amid this fraught climate, the Jacobson family gathers in Los Angeles for Passover, reuniting from around the world for the first time in years. But despite the backdrop of increased intolerance and terror, their immediate problems seem to be more personal than political. The family is coming apart at the seams and the three adult children, Mo, Edith, and Jacob, find themselves in various states of crisis, the result, each claims, of a lifetime of mistreatment by their hateful, undermining father, Julian. The Jacobson offspring have begun to suspect that Julian is hastening their mother Ruth’s demise, and years of resentment reach a climax as the siblings debate whether they will go through with the real reason for their reunion: an ill-considered plot to murder their father and end his iron rule once and for all. That is, if they can put their bickering, grudges, festering relationships with their partners, and distrust of one another to the side long enough to act. And God help them if their mother finds out…
Darkly comic, disturbingly prescient, and incredibly accomplished, TELL ME HOW THIS ENDS WELL interweaves the stories of this very troubled family into a rare and compelling exploration of the state of America itself, asking profound, chillingly perceptive questions about where our world, country, and each of us could be headed.
David Samuel Levinson is an American short-story writer and novelist. He won an award for his fiction in The Atlantic Monthly and has published stories in Slushpile, Prairie Schooner, The Brooklyn Review, Post Road, and West Branch.
A twisty, compulsive new thriller featuring a deliciously devious unreliable narrator who will do anything to give her family a better life, by the New York Times bestselling author of “Mother, Mother” and “Smashed”
THE DRAMA TEACHER
by Koren Zailckas
Crown, July 2017
Gracie Mueller seems like an average person. Married, mother of two. Owns a house with her husband, Randy, in upstate New York. Life is balanced and (relatively) honest. But she has a lot to hide-she’s not even a US citizen—and when Randy’s failing career as a real estate agent makes finances tight, he leaves town for a better job, their home goes into foreclosure, and Gracie turns back to the creatively illegal lifestyle of her past to keep things afloat for her kids.
After all, how many times can a woman lose everything? An expert in fake identities, she becomes Tracey Bueller, who later becomes Mariana DeFelice. She’s an architect and designer, a musician and an actress. After a deadly stint upstate when a friend asks too many questions, she leaves town for New York City, finding her way into the best school in Manhattan for her kids, where she gets a job as the drama teacher. But as she struggles to keep her web of lies spun taut and her secrets hidden, more questions about her past are raised. She never intended to be a cheat, a liar, a thief, or a killer; she just can’t afford for anyone to know what she’s done.
Written with the style, energy, and penetrating insight that made her memoir “Smashed” a bestselling phenomenon, Koren Zailckas’ new novel confirms her growing reputation as a psychological novelist that can stand up to the best of them.
Koren Zailckas is an internationally bestselling writer, and has contributed to The Guardian, U.S. News & World Report, Glamour, Jane, and Seventeen magazine.
DeFiore 2016 London Rights Guide
A beautifully distilled love song to the innocence of girls trying to stay in childhood yet flirting with adulthood, told in a voice so successful in its emotional keenness that it is at times piercingly acute — when it’s not downright delicious
PERENNIALS
by Mandy Berman
Random House, Summer 2017
Set around a summer camp in the Berkshires in the early aughts, PERENNIALS follows the lives of Rachel and Fiona – two girls who meet at Camp Marigold as teenagers and later return as counselors -, navigating their treacherous transition from adolescence to adulthood as well as showcasing the pleasures and pains of those friends, lovers and family whose lives intersect with the girls’ along the way. PERENNIALS will make you laugh, make you shake your head in frustration as you watch Rachel and Fiona make all too familiar mistakes, make you nod knowingly. It will also break your heart.
With this debut, Columbia MFA graduate Mandy Berman takes her place alongside writers like Melissa Bank, Emma Straub, Jennifer Close, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Thisbe Nissen, and even early Joyce Carol Oates.
Let’s meet the most the most tyrannical boss since “The Devil Wears Prada”
OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
by Alison Sweeney
Hachette Books, April 2016
Alex Cleary lands a dream job doing make-up for Hillary P.–a culinary star with a million-dollar lifestyle empire and reputation for being very challenging. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance and provides a steady paycheck. But when Alex inadvertently violates the confidentiality clause of her contract, her dream opportunity turns to dust: She’s on the hook for a million bucks–unless she can squash the problem within 72 hours. With help from a Hollywood heartthrob, Alex concocts an elaborate scheme that just might get her off the hook. But everything will have to run precisely to plan, and the clock is already ticking.
Alison Sweeney is an award-winning actress, producer, director, TV host, and author of The Mommy Diet, Scared Scriptless and The Star Attraction. She makes time to give back to the community, serving as the Fitness Ambassador to City of Hope and an Ambassador to Stand Up 2 Cancer.
The winner of the 2015 New England Book Festival for fiction
KILLING MAINE
by Mike Bond
Mandevilla Press, July 2015
« Another stellar ride from Bond” – Kirkus
… cold, rugged Maine becomes a hot bed of intrigue, murder, and greed, making it difficult for the residents, who love the land and this beautiful state, to continue to live the lives that they have chosen. Pono Hawkins returns to rescue his Special Forces buddy who is wrongly accused of murdering a prominent environmentalist Ronnie Dalt. Unknown killers stalk Pono as he tries to unravel Ronnie’s death. Nothing is certain, no one can be trusted, no place is safe. There’s a million square miles of wildlands out there to hide a man’s body. And with a rap sheet that includes two jail sentences, Pono is the number one target of every cop in the state.
Called « master of the existential thriller » by BBC, « one of America’s best thriller writers » by Culture Buzz, and « one of the 21st century’s most exciting authors » by the Washington Times, Mike Bond is a best-selling novelist, war and human rights journalist, and environmental activist. He has covered guerrilla wars, death squads, and military dictatorships in Latin America and Africa, Islamic terrorism in the Middle East, and ivory poaching and other environmental battles in East Africa and Asia.
Donadio 2016 London Rights Guide
An exploration of the complexities of identity, this remarkable debut novel shows how language, race, and history manifest in everyday life
WE LOVE YOU, CHARLIE FREEMAN
by Kaitlyn Greenidge
Algonquin, March 2016
“ Terrifically auspicious” – The New York Times
Frustrated by the limitations of cross-race communication in her predominantly white town, a young African-American girl teaches herself to sign. Years later, Laurel uproots her husband and daughters from their over-educated and underpaid life in the South End of Boston. The Freemans have been hired by a private research institute to teach sign language to a chimpanzee. Told primarily from the point of view of Laurel’s elder daughter, Charlotte, the novel shifts in time from the early 1990s to the founding of the Institute in the 1930s to the present day. With language both beautiful and accessible, Greenidge examines that time in each person’s life when we realize the things we thought were normal may be anything but.
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s work has appeared in The Believer, American Short Fiction, Guernica, Kweli Journal, The Feminist Wire, Afro Pop Magazine, Green Mountains Review and other places. She is the recipient of fellowships from Lower Manhattan Community Council’s Work-Space Program; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and other prizes.
A gorgeous lean, raw, surprising debut
KID MOSES
by Mark R Thornton
Arcade, October 2015
(originally published in 2012 by Jacana Media, South Africa)
« With the excitement of the archetypal perilous adventure, Thornton’s stark, beautiful prose will hold readers in this story of a young boy’s struggle to survive in Tanzania today. . . . It’s the crisply evoked small moments in this tale of a homeless kid on the run that give the novel its remarkable power. » —Booklist, starred review
Moses is a street kid in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A survivor who longs for something outside of the grim existence he has long known: begging, stealing fruit, and steering clear of the murderous bully Prosper. On a whim, Moses and his friend Kioso hitch a ride on the back of a truck. Only to find themselves alone in a wilderness where their street savvy is of no use. Cruel strangers and poisonous snakes are just a few of challenges Moses faces before his adventure climaxes in a violent shoot-out with elephant poachers. Safari-guide Thornton uses the experience of one unfortunate but resourceful child to show the uneasy relationship between modern humanity and disappearing wilderness, and the brutal life of the displaced in contemporary southern Africa, or indeed throughout the world.
KID MOSES is Mark R Thornton’s debut novel.
Ethan Ellenberg 2016 London Rights Guide
Refugees from a cursed island must face their pasts if they are to defy their gods
SILENT HALL
by N.S. Dolkart
Angry Robots, June 2016
Five refugees from a plague-stricken island cross the continent searching for answers. Instead they find Psander, a wizard whose fortress is invisible to the gods, and who is willing to sacrifice anything – and anyone – to keep the knowledge of the wizards safe. With Psander as their patron, the refugees cross the mountains, brave the territory of their sworn enemies, confront a hostile ocean and even traverse the world of the fairies in search of magic powerful enough to save themselves – and Psander’s library – from the wrath of the gods. All they need to do is to rescue an imprisoned dragon and unleash a primordial monster upon the world. How hard could it be?
N.S. Dolkart is a graduate of Hampshire College. By day, he leads activities in a nonprofit nursing home. SILENT HALL is his first novel.
Flatiron Books 2016 London Rights Guide
Epic, propulsive, and incredibly ambitious, THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY is a story about sacrifice and motherhood and the burden of expectation; and at its center is an indelible heroine who is candid about her struggles and unapologetic in her ambition
THE RESURRECTION OF JOAN ASHBY
by Cherise Wolas
March 2017
Joan Ashby, the fictional character at the center of Cherise Wolas’s searing debut, grew up with one goal: to be a writer. No family, no distractions, all Joan needs is her writing. Her utter single-mindedness pays off: by age twenty-five she is the darling of the literary world, an international bestseller with the highest accolades to her name. Her writing is singular, dark and twisted, and Joan seems destined to fly even higher. So when she falls in love with a medical student, she makes him promise that he will never pressure her to have children; that he will let her write. But when Joan gets pregnant, the life she intended to lead spins away from her, and she finds herself in a Virginia suburb, raising two boys. She has made her peace with this —or at least that’s what she tells herself as she steals moments to write between school drop-offs and household chores. But she can never be ordinary, and her precocious young sons are raised with the burden of knowing that their mother is a once-in-a-generation talent. Two decades later, Joan’s sons are grown and she has finally completed her masterpiece, the novel she was always meant to write. But just as she is poised to reclaim the spotlight, an almost Shakespearean betrayal threatens to undo everything she has worked for.
Cherise Wolas is a writer, editor, lawyer, and film producer.
The Friedrich Agency 2016 London Rights Guide
A fresh debut novel about a lost, fierce young woman who finds her way to Alaska and discovers purpose through the hard work of fishing, as far as the icy Bering Sea
THE ALASKAN LAUNDRY
by Brendan Jones
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, April 2016
Tara Marconi has made her way to “The Rock,” a remote island in Alaska governed by the seasons and the demands of the world of commercial fishing. She hasn’t felt at home in a long while — her mother’s death left her unmoored and created a seemingly insurmountable rift between her and her father. But in the majestic, mysterious, and tough boundary-lands of Alaska she begins to work her way up the fishing ladder—from hatchery assistant all the way to King crabber. She learned discipline from years as a young boxer in Philly, but here she learns anew what it means to work, to connect, and—in buying and fixing up an old tugboat—how to make a home she knows is her own.
Brendan Jones lives on a tugboat in Alaska and works in commercial fishing. A Stegner Fellow, he received his B.A. and M.A. from Oxford University, where he boxed for the Blues team. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Ploughshares, Popular Woodworking, The Huffington Post, and on NPR.
From The New York Times and USA Today Bestselling author of “Apologize, Apologize” comes another rollicking, summertime family saga
THE MIRACLE ON MONHEGAN ISLAND
by Elizabeth Kelly
Liveright, May 2016
When Spark—the rakish prodigal son—returns unannounced to his family home on Maine’s Monhegan Island, his arrival launches one unforgettable summer. During his absence, his gentle brother and shrewd father have been caring for Spark’s son, Hally. A temperamental adolescent emboldened by tales of his father’s mischief, Hally is careening through an identity crisis when he stuns his family by claiming to have had a spiritual vision. Though Spark is consistently doubtful, his father pounces on the chance to revitalize their languishing church. In the frenzy that follows, Hally is shoved into the spotlight and this fragile family of fathers and sons is ushed to the brink. Narrated in larger-than-life, crackling prose by the charismatic family dog, THE MIRACLE ON MONHEGAN ISLAND is another uproarious and outrageous must-read summer blockbuster from Elizabeth Kelly.
Elizabeth Kelly, whose style has drawn many comparisons to John Irving, is the bestselling author of two other novels, “Apologize, Apologize!” and “The Last Summer of the Camperdowns” (finalist for the New England Society Book Award).
From the author of the unforgettable “The Girls from Corona del Mar” comes a daring and moving portrait of an unconventional father-daughter relationship
DEAR FANG, WITH LOVE
by Rufi Thorpe
Knopf, May 2016
Lucas and his girlfriend were in boarding school when they decided to have a baby. Seventeen years later, after a decade of absence, Lucas is newly involved in his daughter Vera’s life. But after Vera suffers a terrifying psychotic break at a party, Lucas takes her to Lithuania, his grandmother’s homeland, for the summer. Here, in the city of Vilnius, Lucas hopes to save Vera from the sorrow of her diagnosis. As he uncovers a secret about his grandmother, a Home Army rebel who escaped Stutthof, Vera searches for answers of her own. Why did Lucas abandon her as a baby? What really happened the night of her breakdown? And who can she trust with the truth? Skillfully weaving family mythology and Lithuanian history with a story of mental illness, inheritance, young love, and adventure, Rufi Thorpe has written a breathtakingly intelligent, emotionally enthralling book.
Rufi Thorpe’s first novel was longlisted for the 2014 International Dylan Thomas Prize and for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize.
Right sold: UK/ANZ (Corsair); Sonzogno (Italy)
The NEW 5th book in John Verdon’s Detective Gurney Suspense Series, bestseller in 12 countries
WOLF LAKE
by John Verdon
Counterpoint, July 2016
“It’s always a pleasure to watch a keen mind absorbed in a difficult puzzle, which is how Dave Gurney distinguishes himself in John Verdon’s tricky whodunits.”—The New York Times
Could a nightmare be used as a murder weapon? That’s the provocative question confronting Detective Dave Gurney in the thrilling new installment in this series of international bestsellers. The former NYPD star homicide detective is called upon to solve a baffling puzzle: Four people who live in different parts of the country and who seem to have little in common, report having had the same dream—a terrifying nightmare involving a bloody dagger. All four victims are subsequently found with their wrists cut—apparent suicides—and the weapon used in each case matches the weapon from the dream…
John Verdon is the author of the Dave Gurney series of thrillers, all international bestsellers published in more than two dozen languages.
Rights sold: Spain (Roca); Turkey (Koridor); Israel (Keter); Finland (Gummerus); Greece (Dioptra)
Gernert 2016 London Rights Guide
In the company of “Station Eleven” and “California”, MARROW ISLAND uses two tense natural disasters to ask tough questions about our choices—large and small
MARROW ISLAND
by Alexis M. Smith
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2016
Twenty years ago Lucie Bowen left Marrow Island; along with her mother, she fled the aftermath of an earthquake that compromised the local refinery, killing her father and ravaging the island’s environment. Now, Lucie’s childhood friend Kate is living within a mysterious group called Marrow Colony—a community that claims to be “ministering to the Earth.” Despite remarkable changes to the land at the colony’s homestead, Lucie believes there’s more to Marrow Colony and its charismatic leader than its members want her to know and as she investigates, she must decide what price to pay for the truth.
Alexis M. Smith attended Mount Holyoke College, Portland State University, and Goddard College. Her debut novel, “Glaciers”, was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Award and a selection for World Book Night 2013.
GROVE 2016 London Rights Guide
The beautiful and poignant story of one family weathering the most turbulent years of Burma’s history, from the British Empire to the dictatorship of the 1960s
MISS BURMA
by Charmaine Craig
Spring 2017
Benny is a Jewish businessman, part of India’s Jewish diaspora, who after being educated in Calcutta settles in Burma. One day, while working at Rangoon’s seaport, he is transfixed by a woman with shining hair hanging down to her ankles. This is Khin, a woman who belongs to a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. The two fall in love at first sight. As World War II comes to Southeast Asia, Benny and Khin are forced to go into hiding with Khin’s Karen countrymen, who are mounting a strong resistance to the Japanese occupation. After the war, Aung San and the Burman nationalists take over the country, and Benny and Khin’s eldest child, Louisa, comes of age during the dictatorship. She possesses the coldness of someone who has known the true hardship of war, and a beauty and grace that seems almost otherworldly. That beauty will make Louisa Burma’s first beauty queen and a well-known actress, but also attract the attention of men including Burma’s dictator, Ne Win. Louisa has a narrow path to walk to avoid danger and fulfill the legacy of her family.
Charmaine Craig is a faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing at UC Riverside, and the descendant of significant figures in Burma’s modern history. Her first novel, “The Good Men”, was a national bestseller translated into six languages.
A novel set in the mid-’90s on a college campus during the era of identity politics and the birth of third-wave feminism in which two houses—a popular fraternity and a group of radical feminists—go to war
THE RED WORD
by Sarah Henstra
Black Cat, Fall 2016
THE RED WORD is a campus novel like no other. When Karen arrives at university, she quickly enters the swim of social life, partying with new friends—particularly at a certain fraternity house. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. She learns the fraternity is notorious, with several names featured on a list of date rapists compiled anonymously by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, she is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen’s social and intellectual lives grow ever more conflicted, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture, and the war between the houses will leave much greater collateral damage in its wake. THE RED WORD captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics, and the headlong rush of youth towards new friends and lovers, life-altering new ideas, new ideologies. With strains of The Marriage Plot, and reminiscent of the work of Alison Lurie and Tom Wolfe, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.
Sarah Henstra is a professor of English at Ryerson University and THE RED WORD is her first work of adult fiction.
A gripping novel about an Ecstasy-smuggling ring, where power is won through deceit, and millions of dollars—not to mention dozens of lives—are at stake
EVERY MAN A MENACE
by Patrick Hoffman
Atlantic Monthly Press, September 2016
San Francisco is about to receive the biggest delivery of MDMA to hit the West Coast in years. Raymond Gaspar, just out of prison, is sent to the city by his criminal boss—still locked up on the inside—to check in on the increasingly erratic dealer who is expected to handle the distribution. In Miami, meanwhile, the man responsible for shipping the drugs from Southeast Asia to the Bay Area has just met the girl of his dreams—but the girl can’t seem to keep her story straight. And thousands of miles away, in Cambodia, a young man named Sang Munny is forced to accompany his meth-addled boss on a hellish trip into the jungle in order to procure the raw ingredients for the next shipment. They have bills to pay, and a seemingly unending demand to meet. All of these men and women are struggling to stay ahead in a system that threatens to swallow them whole: an international drug trafficking network that offers them great rewards at even greater risk.
Patrick Hoffman burst onto the crime fiction scene with The White Van, a captivating thriller set in San Francisco that put Hoffman on the map as a writer to watch. The White Van was named a Best Book of 2014 by the Wall Street Journal and is a finalist for the 2015 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award.
From the acclaimed Hollywood writer/director and author of “The Player” and “The Return of the Player”, Michael Tolkin, comes a darkly comic thriller set in a near-future Hollywood that has been devastated by a memory-destroying virus from North Korea
NK3
by Michael Tolkin
Grove Press, February 2017
In the wake of the virus, called NK3, dependence on computers has left society helpless because no one can remember their passwords. Even personal names have been forgotten, replaced by monikers that hint at the past: “AutoZone,” “Frank Sinatra,” “Go Bruins.” Within the sixty-foot-high fence that surrounds the Hollywood hills a new aristocracy rules—the Verified, whose power is memory itself. The Verified keep control over the Drifters, Shamblers, and Bottle Bangers with a history invented by the Mythology Committee. But when a few members of the Verified keep a change in their reality secret even from the rest of their privileged cohort, and a pop superstar from the pre-NK3world is pulled from the shambling massesto be groomed for a post-disaster comeback, the power balance threatens to shift. Meanwhile, a Drifter named Hopper is compelled by his Silent Voice—a mysterious fragment of memory some survivors carry on from the state-imposed Rehab program—to look for a wife whose name and face he doesn’t know. To find her, he’ll have to fight his way through a melee of tyrants, prophets, and rebels as they struggle for power and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.
Michael Tolkin is an award-winning writer, director, and producer. For the film adaptation of “The Player”, Tolkin won the Writers Guild Award, the British Academy Award, the PEN Center USA West Literary Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best crime screenplay, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Most recently, he has been a consulting producer and writer for the Showtime series Ray Donovan.
For the Harpercollins catalogue LBF 2016, please use our contact form
Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel “Baker Towers”, in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart—a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families
HEAT AND LIGHT
by Jennifer Haigh
Ecco, May 2016
Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. HEAT AND LIGHT is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.
Jennifer Haigh is the author of four critically acclaimed novels: “Faith”, “The Condition”, “Baker Towers”, and “Mrs. Kimble”. Her books have won both the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction and the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for work by a New England writer.
The acclaimed bestselling author weaves an ingenious, darkly humorous, and brilliantly observant story that follows the exploits and intrigue of a constellation of characters affiliated with an off-off-off-off Broadway children’s musical
MISTER MONKEY
by Francine Prose
Harper, October 2016
Mister Monkey—a screwball children’s musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee—is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp’s lawyer, knows the production is dreadful, and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She’s settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part—until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer . . . and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the twelve-year-old who plays the title role. With her trademark wit and verve, Prose touches on everything from the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin to the absurdity of child-raising in contemporary Brooklyn, and eventually delves into humanity’s most profound mysteries: art, ambition, childhood, aging, and love.
Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent book is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932”.
In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda, a powerful debut from a talented new voice, THE COLOR OF OUR SKY is the sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night
THE COLOUR OF OUR SKY
by Amita Trasi
William Morrow Paperbacks, March 2017
In an attempt to escape their fate, Muktais sent to be a house girl for an upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an entirely different world-one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship that becomes a sisterhood. But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara’s family home and disappears. Shortly there after, Tara and her father move to America. A new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow responsible for Mukta’s abduction. Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to find Mukta. Asher search takes her to into the brutal underground world of human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own family that might explain what happened to Mukta-and why she came to live with Tara’s family in the first place. Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern metropol is of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship-a story of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.
THE COLOUR OF OUR SKY is Amita Trasi’s debut.
Rights sold to: Turkish/Marti
A debut novel and dual narrative about the lives of two women who have both owned a painting by Chaim Soutine at different points in history. Two different families, two very different devastations
THE ART OF LOSING
by Ellen Umansky
William Morrow, February 2017
Rose, ripped from her family as a young girl, finds herself in London in the grey years of deprivation following World War II. Everything lost, she focuses on finding the objects she knows were looted from her parents’ home in Vienna, specifically the painting that her mother had cherished. Many years later, the painting finds its way to America, and for Lizzie, the portrait comes to symbolize losing her mother and attempting to start life over. In present-day Los Angeles, the two women—one young, one now old– meet and an unexpected friendship blooms, even as long-held secrets threaten them both. With impeccable prose, a strong sense of place, and unforgettable characters, the two stories are woven together brilliantly, with surprises along the way. THE ART OF LOSING is a deep examination of the bonds, desires, and losses that make up each of us. The novel features the artwork of the Jewish artist Chaim Soutine who died in France during World War II while in hiding from the Nazis. While this is fiction, the details in the novel about the artist’s life and paintings are based on historical fact.
Ellen Umansky has published fiction and nonfiction in a variety of venues, including The New York Times, The Paris Review and Vanity Fair, and the short-story anthologies “Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From The Edge and Sleepaway”.
The lives of four teenagers are capsized by a shocking school shooting and its aftermath in this powerful debut novel, a coming-of-age story with the haunting power of “Station Eleven” and the bittersweet poignancy of “Everything I Never Told You”
OUR HEARTS WILL BURN US DOWN
by Anne Valente
William Morrow, October 2016
As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are eager to capture all the memorable moments of their junior year at Lewis and Clark High School—the plays and football games, dances and fund-drives, teachers and classes that are the epicenter of their teenage lives. But how do you document a horrific tragedy—a deadly school shooting by a classmate? Struggling to comprehend this cataclysmic event—and propelled by a sense of responsibility to the town, their parents, and their school—these four « lucky » survivors vow to honor the memories of those lost, and also, the memories forgotten in the shadow of violence. But the shooting is only the first inexplicable trauma to rock their small suburban St. Louis town. A series of mysterious house fires have hit the families of the victims one by one, pushing the grieving town to the edge.Nick, the son of the lead detective investigating the events, plunges into the case on his own, scouring the Internet to uncover what could cause a fire with no evident starting point. As their friend pulls farther away, Matt and Christina battle to save damaged relationships, while Zola fights to keep herself together.
Anne Valente‘s first short story collection, “By Light We Know Our Names”, won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize and released in September2014. Her fiction appears in One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Ninth Letter and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among others.
A suspenseful, sexy novel that will keep you guessing
THE CLAIRVOYANTS
by Karen Brown
March 2017
THE CLAIRVOYANTS is the story of two sisters, Martha and Del. Growing up, Martha feels responsible for her troubled younger sister, Del. Del’s reckless behavior and disregard for herself and others worsens in high school, particularly after the death of a classmate, and eventually Martha is asked to help her parents carry out their decision to have Del committed to Ashley Manor. After one botched attempt at a visit, Martha has communicated with Del only via letters for years, and has meanwhile struggled to make her way through the world. Now, Martha has landed in a rented apartment in a Victorian house near the university where she’s just started her first year. Away from her family for the first time, she attempts to build a new life, even as she is haunted by visions of the dead that may or may not be real…
Karen Brown is the author of “Little Sinners and Other Stories”, which was named a Best Book of 2012 by Publishers Weekly, and “Pins and Needles: Stories”, which was the recipient of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction. Her first novel, “The Longings of Wayward Girls”, was published in 2013 by Washington Square Press to rave reviews. Her work has been featured in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of South Florida.
This is the story of the working class, marginalized has-beens struggling to cope with the events of the past decade. A book infused with a wonderful blend of humor and pathos
WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR
by Patrick Dacey
February 2016
“Patrick Dacey is one of my favorite young American writers. His work is fast, poetic, edgy, and full of tremendous heart. » – George Saunders
The stories of WE’VE ALREADY GONE THIS FAR all take place in the fictional Northeast town of Wequaquet, a town that lives in the shadow of militarised America, where apathy vies with a vague perennial disquiet, and yet where life’s strange intensity and occasional magic is still felt. The stories are the lives of neighbours and friends: those who’ve spent their whole lives in Wequaquet and can’t wait to leave; those who’ve been gone a long time and find themselves pulled back; those who live on the margins and those who live in the eye of the storm. This is the small-town America where has-been football coaches get drunk on the porch and shoot bunnies and bored housewives get bad cosmetic surgery, and where the demons of modernity manifest as terrorists and/or grizzly bears.
Patrick Dacey has taught English at several universities in the U.S. and Mexico, and has worked as a reporter, landscaper, door-to-door salesman, and most recently on the overnight staff at a homeless shelter and detox center. His stories have been featured in Zoetrope All-Story, Guernica, Bombmagazine, and Salt Hill among other publications.
Hoope 2016 London Rights Guide
A modern Moroccan tale of power, love, and loss
A BEAUTIFUL WHITE CAT WALKS WITH ME
by Youssef Fadel
October 2016
“An astonishing novel.”—Le Monde Diplomatique
Hassan makes a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through his satirical sketches critical of Morocco’s rulers. Yet when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost.
Could his estranged father, close to power as the king’s private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal from the city? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again?
With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco.
Youssef Fadel is a well-respected, prize-winning author. A BEAUTIFUL WHITE CAT WALKS WITH ME is the first part of his modern Morocco series.
Abdelilah Hamdouchi
Born in Meknès, Morocco , Abdelilah Hamdouchi is one of the first writers of police fiction in Arabic and a prolific, award-winning screenwriter of police thrillers.
The first Arabic detective novel to be translated into English
THE FINAL BET
Paberback in September 2016 (originally published in 2008)
Casablanca. Othman, a handsome young Moroccan man, returns home to discover his elderly French wife, Sofia, brutally murdered in their bedroom. Highly educated but chronically unemployed, Othman had been in desperate straits before meeting Sofia, who pampered him with fancy cars, expensive clothes, and access to her mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood in Casablanca. But living with a woman more than forty years his senior was too much for Othman—before his wife’s murder he sought relief in a steamy affair with an attractive young aerobics instructor, Naeema. The Moroccan police quickly zero in on Othman as the prime suspect in his wife’s murder. But is he guilty? Did he kill his wife for the money and his lover? Or is he an innocent man, framed by circumstance—and an overzealous and brutal police force?
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« I want that gun, even if it’s in a fish’s stomach. »
WHITEFLY
February 2016
“The plotting is tight and watching the story’s resolution unfold is a delight… As a guilty-pleasure read, it is a winner.” —The National
“Abdelilah Hamdouchi seems to have found the formula for the emergence of the Moroccan detective novel.”—Libération Kaleidoscope
When a fourth corpse in three days washes up in Tangier with a bullet in the chest, Detective Laafrit knows this isn’t just another illegal immigrant who didn’t make it to the Spanish coast. The traffickers. The drug dealers. The smugglers. They know what it takes to get a gun into Morocco, and so does Laafrit. As his team hunts for the gun, Laafrit follows a hunch and reveals an international conspiracy to unlock the case. A fast-paced crime thriller from the Arab west.
A horror-filled obituary on Egypt’s failed revolution
OTARED
by Mohammad Rabie
September 2016
2025: fourteen years after the failed revolution, Egypt is invaded once more. As traumatized Egyptians eke out a feral existence in Cairo’s dusty downtown, former cop Ahmed Otared joins a group of fellow officers seeking Egypt’s liberation through the barrel of a gun.
As Cairo becomes a foul cauldron of drugs, sex, and senseless violence, Otared finally understands his country’s fate.In this unflinching and grisly novel, Mohammad Rabie envisages a grim future for Egypt, where death is the only certainty.
Born in 1978, Mohammad Rabie is the author of three acclaimed novels. His first novel, “Amber’s Planet”, won first prize in the Emerging Writers category of the Sawiris Cultural Award in 2012.
For the JABberwocky catalogue LBF 2016, please use our contact form
A fast-paced and exciting space opera trilogy
THE LIGHTSHIP CHRONICLES
by Dave Bara
STARBOUND (#2)
Daw, January 2016
The Lightship H.M.S. Impulse is gone, sacrificed in a battle against First Empire ships. And though the fragile galactic alliance has survived the unexpected invasion, the Union forces might not prove victorious against a full onslaught by this legendary enemy. For Peter Cochrane, serving as an officer aboard his world’s flagship, H.M.S. Starbound is a dream come true. Tasked with investigating a mysterious space station in a rediscovered star system, Peter and Starbound face a surprise attack by unknown forces and suffer terrible losses. But there is no time to grieve or even regroup as Peter is thrust into a new crisis, a potential civil war on the Union world of Carinthia…
Rights sold: Germany (Heyne), Japan (Hayakawa, United Kingdom (Del Rey)
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IMPULSE (#1)
Daw, February 2015
Lieutenant Peter Cochrane of the Quantar Royal Navy believes he has his future clearly mapped out. It begins with his new assignment as an officer on Her Majesty’s Spaceship Starbound, a Lightship bound for deep space voyages of exploration. But everything changes when Peter is : in a distant solar system, a mysterious and unprovoked attack upon Lightship Impulse resulted in the deaths of Peter’s former girlfriend and many of her shipmates. Now Peter’s plans are torn asunder as he is transferred to a Unified Space Navy ship under foreign command, en route to an unexpected destination, and surrounded almost entirely by strangers. To top it off, his superiors have given him secret orders that might force him to become a mutineer…
Dave Bara’s writing is influenced by Herbert and Asimov, among many others.
The start of an enchanting, epic, debut fantasy series perfect for fans of Tamora Pierce or Mistborn
MYSTIC
(The Mystic Trilogy #1)
by Jason Denzel
Tor Books, November 2015
Restless teenager Pomella breaks both law and tradition by leaving her village to try and become the apprentice to a reclusive Mystic. When she arrives at the Mystic’s forest dwelling, she lies about her caste for self-preservation and undergoes several trials against noble candidates to prove her worthiness. During these trials, Pomella becomes aware of a conspiracy to kill both her and her would-be master. Over the course of the story, she has to navigate a deadly world of intolerance and betrayal, learning to grapple both with her magic and with issues of class.
Next book in the series: MYSTIC DRAGON (#2) and MYSTIC SKIES (#3).
Jason Denzel is the founder of Dragonmount.
A gorgeous fantasy in the spirit of “Pan’s Labyrinth” and John Connolly’s “The Book of Lost Things”
A GREEN AND ANCIENT LIGHT
by Frederic S. Durbin
Saga Press, June 2016
Set in a world similar to our own, during a war that parallels World War II, A Green and Ancient Light is the stunning story of a boy who is sent to stay with his grandmother for the summer in a serene fishing village. Their tranquility is shattered by the crash of a bullet-riddled enemy plane, the arrival of grandmother’s friend Mr. Girandole—a man who knows the true story of Cinderella’s slipper—and the discovery of a riddle in the sacred grove of ruins behind grandmother’s house. In a sumptuous idyllic setting and overshadowed by the threat of war, four unlikely allies learn the values of courage and sacrifice.
Frederic S. Durbin is a writer and novelist of fantasy and horror. His first novel, “Dragonfly”, was published by Arkham House in 1999. It was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award for Best First Novel.
A cross between Susanna Clarke and Naomi Novik
The NOCTIS MAGICAE Trilogy
by Sylvia Izzo Hunter
LADY OF MAGICK (#2)
Ace, September 2015
In her second year of studies at Merlin College, Oxford, Sophie Marshall is feeling alienated among fellow students who fail to welcome a woman to their ranks. So when her husband, Gray, is invited north as a visiting lecturer at the University in Din Edin, they leap at the chance. There, Sophie’s hunger for magical knowledge can finally be nourished. But soon, Sophie must put her newly learned skills to the test. Sophie returns home one day to find a note from Gray—he’s been summoned urgently to London. But when he doesn’t return, and none of her spells can find a trace of him, she realizes something sinister has befallen him. With the help of her sister, Joanna, she delves into Gray’s disappearance, and soon finds herself in a web of magick and intrigue that threatens not just Gray, but the entire kingdom.
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THE MIDNIGHT QUEEN (#1)
Ace, September 2014
“Izzo Hunter pulls from a multitude of mystical tales and myths to create her own magical version of Britain that is both innovative and intriguing” – RT Book Reviews
In the hallowed halls of Oxford’s Merlin College, the most talented—and highest born—sons of the Kingdom of Britain are taught the intricacies of magickal theory. But what dazzles can also destroy, as Gray Marshall is about to discover…
Sylvia Izzo Hunter is the author of the Noctis Magicae novels. When not writing, she works in scholarly journal publishing.
Next title in this series: SEASON OF SPELL #3 (Fall 2016)
In an oasis city with magic air and shapeshifters, a drifting conman finds himself in the middle of a worldwide conspiracy that may uncover his deadly secret
STEAL THE SKY
(The Scorched Continent #1)
by Megan O’Keefe
Angry Robot, January 2016
Detan Honding, a wanted conman of noble birth and ignoble tongue, has found himself in the oasis city of Aransa. He and his trusted companion Tibs may have pulled off one too many cons against the city’s elite and need to make a quick escape. They set their sights on their biggest heist yet – the gorgeous airship of the exiled commodore Thratia. But in the middle of his scheme, a face changer known as a doppel starts murdering key members of Aransa’s government. The sudden paranoia makes Detan’s plans of stealing Thratia’s ship that much harder. And with this sudden power vacuum, Thratia can solidify her power and wreak havoc against the Empire. But the doppel isn’t working for Thratia and has her own intentions. Did Detan accidentally walk into a revolution and a crusade? He has to be careful – there’s a reason most people think he’s dead. And if his dangerous secret gets revealed, he has a lot more to worry about than a stolen airship.
Megan O’Keefe is one of the rising stars of SFF and won last year’s Writers of the Future contest.
A knife-edge, noir-shaded urban fantasy of crime after death
The BONE STREET RUMBA Series
by Daniel José Older
MIDNIGHT TAXI TANGO (#2)
Roc, January 2016
Carlos Delacruz straddles the line between the living and the not-so alive. As an agent for the Council of the Dead, he eliminates New York’s ghostlier problems. This time it’s a string of gruesome paranormal accidents in Brooklyn’s Von King Park that has already taken the lives of several locals—and is bound to take more. The incidents in the park have put Kia on edge. When she first met Carlos, he was the weird guy who came to Baba Eddie’s botánica, where she worked. But the closer they’ve gotten, the more she’s seeing the world from Carlos’s point of view. In fact, she’s starting to see ghosts. And the situation is far more sinister than that—because whatever is bringing out the dead, it’s only just getting started.
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HALF-RESURRECTION BLUES (#1)
January 2015
Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death. One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NYCOD’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead…
Daniel José Older is also the author of the upcoming Young Adult novel “Shadowshaper”.
Next title in the series: BATTLE HILL BOLERO #3
An action-packed Sci-Fi adventure, it’s the marriage of Harry Harrison and Hunter Thompson. A rum-soaked gonzo noir with all the sex, violence, and union labor relations you can handle
WINDSWEPT (#1)
by Adam Rakunas
Angry Robot, September 2015
Labor organizer Padma Mehta is on the edge of space and the edge of burnout. All she wants is to buy out a little rum distillery and retire, but she’s supposed to recruit 500 people to the Union before she can. She’s only thirty-three short. So when a small-time con artist tells her about forty people ready to tumble down the space elevator to break free from her old bosses, she checks it out — against her better judgment. It turns out, of course, it was all lies.
As Padma should know by now, there are no easy shortcuts on her planet. And suddenly retirement seems farther away than ever: she’s just stumbled into a secret corporate mission to stop a plant disease that could wipe out all the industrial sugarcane in Occupied Space. If she ever wants to have another drink of her favorite rum, she’s going to have to fight her way through the city’s warehouses, sewage plants, and up the elevator itself to stop this new plague.
WINDSWEPT is Adam Rakunas’s debut novel.
Next title in this series: LIKE A BOSS #2, forthcoming in 2016
Out of sight, out of mind
UNFORGETTABLE
by Eric James Stone
Baen Books, January 2016
Due to a fluke of quantum mechanics, no one can remember Nat Morgan for more than a minute after he’s gone. It’s a useful ability for his career as a CIA agent, even if he has to keep reminding his boss that he exists. Nat’s attempt to steal a quantum chip prototype is thwarted when a former FSB agent, Yelena Semyonova, attempts to steal the same technology for the Russion mob. Along with a brilliant Iranian physicist who wants to defect, Nat and Yelena must work together to stop a ruthless billionaire from finishing a quantum supercomputer that will literally control the fate of the world.
A Nebula Award winner and Hugo Award nominee, Eric James Stone has had over fifty stories published in venues such as Year’s Best SF 15, Analog, Nature, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show.
Johnson and Alcock 2016 London Rights Guide
A noir thriller set in the glamorous world of 1930s Hollywood
THE PICTURES
by Guy Bolton
Oneworld (UK), Spring 2017
Detective Craine has spent his life working as a ‘fixer’ for the film studios – whitewashing the misdemeanors and scandals that studio stars get caught up in. A few months after the tragic death of his wife, and just as Craine is trying to turn his back on this kind of work, he gets called in one last time: MGM want him to deal with the suicide of the producer of The Wizard of Oz. Craine is tasked with making sure his death passes without scandal or scrutiny from the press, and that his widow, the beautiful starlet Gale Goodwin, comes through with her reputation unscathed. It should be a straightforward case, but when connections are made between it and a brutal murder across town Craine must decide whether to defy orders, and to redeem a career of concealment by going in search of the ugly truth. The world of THE PICTURES is brilliantly authentic and immersive, and this will be the first in a new series around the character of Craine.
Guy Bolton is 30 years old, works in drama at the BBC and is also a screenwriter with a number of optioned screenplays.
The new crime thriller from international bestselling author Felix Francis
TRIPLE CROWN
A Dick Francis Novel
by Felix Francis
Simon & Schuster (UK) / G.P. Putnam’s Sons (USA), MS available September 2016
Top undercover investigator at the British Horseracing Authority (BHA), Jeff has been seconded to the US Federal Anti-Corruption in Sports Agency (FACSA) where he has been asked to find a mole in their organization, an informant who is passing on confidential information to those under suspicion in American racing. Jeff attends the Kentucky Derby with the FACSA team, accompanying the Special Agents on a raid to a horse trainer’s barn at Churchill Downs. Things do not go well and a trainer ends up dead. Then, on the morning of the Derby itself, three of the most favored horses in the field fall sick in what Jeff considers are suspicious circumstances. Jeff goes in search of answers, taking on the undercover role of a groom on the backstretch at Belmont Park racetrack in New York. But he discovers far more than he was bargaining for, finding himself as the meat in the sandwich between FACSA and corrupt individuals who will stop at nothing, including murder, to capture the most elusive prize in world sport: the Triple Crown.
Felix Francis assisted with the research and writing of many of the Dick Francis novels and is the author of “Gamble”, “Bloodline”, “Refusal”, and “Damage”.
A clever, funny and poignant novel about mid-life love and identity in this comic cross between “You’ve Got Mail” and “Shirley Valentine”
WOULD LIKE TO MEET
by Polly James
Avon, June 2016
Could the worst thing that’s ever happened to Hannah Pinkman also turn out to be one of the best?
She and her husband Dan have reached the end of the line. Bored with the same gripes, the same old arguments – in fact, bored with everything – they split up after a trivial row turns into something much more serious. Now Hannah has to make a new life for herself, but that’s not easy. She’s been so busy being a wife and mum that she’s let all her other interests slip away, along with her friends. And when Hannah is persuaded to join a dating site, her ‘best match’ is the very last person she expects it to be…
Polly James lives in East Anglia, where she works as a writer and editor. Her blog, « Mid-Wife Crisis » was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. Polly’s first novel, « Diary of an Unsmug Married » is based on the blog.
A novel full of warmth, compassion and humour about the power of story-telling and friendship across the generations
EROTIC STORIES FOR PUNJABI WIDOWS
by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Harpercollins (UK) / Morrow (USA), Spring 2017
Nikki is a forward-thinking, opinionated young woman who’s dropped out of university and is wondering what to do with her life. When an opportunity arises to teach creative writing to some elderly women at a Sikh temple she jumps at it. She hopes to inspire the women with her progressive ideas but she’s been seriously misled – almost all of the women who have signed up for her class are illiterate and will need to first learn to read and write. Despite the shaky start and limitations of what Nikki can teach they all persist with meeting and talking. Very soon the students, almost all widows who feel marginalised and invisible in their community, tell Nikki that they would like to start creating their own stories. Surprising stories about passionate love affairs and other racy fantasies! The women are empowered by their illicit story-telling and growing friendships, but there is a serious element of danger in what they do. The lessons take place in the grounds of a temple unofficially policed by a group of conservative bullying men called the Brothers…
Balli Kaur Jaswal was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia and the Philippines. She studied Creative Writing at Hollins University in the US and was awarded the David TK Wong Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. Her first novel “Inheritance” was published by Sleepers Publishing in Australia in 2013 and won the Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelist award.
KTLiterary-London2016 Rights List
A team of superhuman covert operatives emerges from the ashes of World War II in a Cold War-era paranormal espionage thriller from acclaimed genre-bender Michael J. Martinez
INCEPTION
The Majestic 12 Series #1
by Michael J. Martinez
Skyhorse, September 2016
It is a new world, stunned by the horrors that linger in the aftermath of total war. The United States and Soviet Union are squaring off in a different kind of conflict, one that’s fought in the shadows, where there are whispers of strange and mysterious developments. . . Normal people across the United States have inexplicably gained paranormal abilities. A factory worker can heal the sick and injured. A schoolteacher bends emotions to her will. A car salesman alters matter with a simple touch. A former soldier speaks to the dying and gains their memories as they pass on. They are the Variants, controlled by a secret government program called MAJESTIC-12 to open a new front in the Cold War. From the deserts of Nevada to the palaces of Istanbul, the halls of power in Washington to the dark, oppressive streets of Prague, the Variants are thrown into a deadly game of shifting alliances…
Michael Martinez spent nearly 20 years as a professional writer and journalist, including stints at The Associated Press and ABCNEWS.com.
Levine Greenberg 2016 London Rights Guide
For fans of Jojo Moyes and Jonathan Tropper, an unforgettable debut about a young woman’s choice between the future she’s always imagined and the people she’s come to love
ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
by Caroline Angell
Holt Trade Paperback, July 2016
Charlotte, a gifted and superbly trained young musician, has been blindsided by a shocking betrayal in her promising career when she takes a babysitting job with the McLeans, a glamorous Upper East Side Manhattan family. At first, the nanny gig is just a way of tiding herself over until she has licked her wounds and figured out her next move as a composer in New York. But, as it turns out, Charlotte is naturally good with children and becomes as deeply fond of the two little boys as they are of her. When an unthinkable tragedy leaves the McLeans bereft, Charlotte is not the only one who realizes that she’s the key to holding little George and Matty’s world together. Suddenly, in addition to life’s usual puzzles, such as sorting out which suitor is her best match, she finds herself with an impossible choice between her life-long dreams and the torn-apart family she’s come to love.
Caroline Angell has a B. A. in musical theater from American University. As a playwright and director, she has had her work performed at regional theaters in New York City and in the Washington, D.C., area. ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD is her first novel.
In this brand-new summer read by the USA Today bestselling author of The House on Mermaid Point, three women join forces to bring a historic seaside hotel back to life…
SUNSHINE BEACH
by Wendy Wax
Berkley Books, June 2016
After losing their life savings in a Ponzi scheme, Maddie, Avery, and Nikki have banded together to make the most of what they have left, using their determination, ingenuity, guts, and a large dose of elbow grease. It’s Maddie’s daughter Kyra who stumbles across a once glorious beachfront hotel that has fallen into disrepair. The opportunity to renovate this seaside jewel is too good to pass up—especially when they come up with the idea of shooting their own independent television show about the restoration. What could possibly go wrong? Everything. With the cameras rolling, Maddie’s second-chance romance with her all-too-famous new boyfriend gets complicated, Avery struggles with grief over the loss of her mother, and Nikki’s reluctance to commit to the man who loves her could leave her to face the biggest challenge of her life. Even the hotel seems to be against them, when their renovation uncovers a decades-old unsolved murder which just might bring their lives tumbling down all over again…
Wendy Wax, a former broadcaster, is the author of twelve novels.
lbla
lorella belli literary agency
She’s fearless. Respected. Unstoppable. Detective Erika Foster will catch a killer, whatever it takes
THE GIRL IN THE ICE
DCI Erika Foster #1
by Robert Bryndza
Bookouture, February 2016
Her eyes are wide open. Her lips parted as if to speak. Her dead body frozen in the ice…She is not the only one. When a young boy discovers the body of a woman beneath a thick sheet of ice in a South London park, Detective Erika Foster is called in to lead the murder investigation. The victim, a beautiful young socialite, appeared to have the perfect life. Yet when Erika begins to dig deeper, she starts to connect the dots between the murder and the killings of three prostitutes, all found strangled, hands bound and dumped in water around London. What dark secrets is the girl in the ice hiding? As Erika inches closer to uncovering the truth, the killer is closing in on Erika.
The last investigation Erika led went badly wrong… resulting in the death of her husband. With her career hanging by a thread, Erika must now battle her own personal demons as well as a killer more deadly than any she’s faced before. But will she get to him before he strikes again?
Originally from the UK, Robert Bryndza lives in Slovakia. His debut novel, “The Not So Secret Emails Of Coco Pinchard” became an Amazon bestseller, and has grown to a bestselling series of five books
Part domestic thriller, part gripping romance, for anyone who loved THE NOTEBOOK, THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY and for fans of Dorothy Koomson, Nicholas Sparks, Lucie Whitehouse, Rosie Thomas and Liane Moriarty
SECOND THOUGHTS
by Carol Mason
Amazon Publishing, Autumn 2016
Beautifully written, this suspenseful, mysterious novel is a collision of parallel life stories, heart-wrenching choices, and the healing power of art and love.
Carol Mason is the author of THE SECRET OF MARRIED WOMEN.
For fans of Jay Crownover, Abbi Glines, Jamie McGuire and Colleen Hoover
FIGHTING TO BE FREE
by Kirsty Moseley
Grand Central Publishing, March 2016
Jamie Cole has had a hard life and has just been let out of jail for murder. Before he went to jail Jamie ran with the local gang, upon his release he’s determined to go straight but will the leader let him? One more job is what he’s promised but this one job seems to be leading to two, then three and he’s not sure he’ll ever escape his old life. He meets Ellie one night at a club, she’s just broke up with her long term boyfriend and isn’t looking for anything serious which suits them both. Jamie finds himself drawn to her and now he has another reason to change, she knows nothing about his past and he wants to keep it that way. FIGHTING TO BE FREE has been first published on Wattpad with over 5.7 million reads.
Kirsty Moseley is one of the most successful British indie authors, with over 720,000 copies sold.
The Martell Agency – 2016 London Rights Guide
The heart-pounding follow-up to the electrifying THE POISON ARTIST (#1) shows what happens when our deepest secrets are unburied
THE DARK ROOM (#2)
by Jonathan Moore
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, January 2017
Gavin Cain, an SFPD homicide inspector, is in the middle of an exhumation when his phone rings. San Francisco’s mayor is being blackmailed and has ordered Cain back to the city; a helicopter is on its way. The casket, and Cain’s cold-case investigation, must wait. At City Hall, the mayor shows Cain four photographs he’s received: the first, an unforgettable blonde; the second, pills and handcuffs on a nightstand; the third, the woman drinking from a flask; and last, the woman naked, unconscious, and shackled to a bed. The accompanying letter is straightforward: worse revelations are on the way unless the mayor takes his own life first. An intricately plotted, deeply affecting thriller that keeps readers guessing until the final pages, THE DARK ROOM tracks Cain as he hunts for the blackmailer, pitching him into the web of destruction and devotion the mayor casts in his shadow.
Jonathan Moore is an attorney with the Honolulu firm of Kobayashi, Sugita & Goda.
THE DARKROOM is the second book of an interconnected series. THE NIGHT MARKET (#3) will publish in January 2018.
For the Mendel Media catalogue LBF 2016, please use our contact form
Joanna Blalock née Middleton, the world’s first female forensic detective—along with her companion, a pathologist called Dr. John Watson, Jr.—delves into a murder and cover-up which involves the highest level of British aristocracy
THE DAUGHTER OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
by Leonard Goldberg
Thomas Dunne, March 2017
Joanna is the product of a one-time assignation between the now-dead Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, the only woman (or person) ever to outwit Sherlock. Joanna’s lineage is a secret because she was given up for adoption at birth, just after her natural mother’s death. She was raised as Joanna Middleton, the adopted daughter of a childless physician and his wife. But Joanna obviously inherited her biological father’s and mother’s deductive genius. She marries Dr. John Blalock, a respected surgeon from an aristocratic family. But John dies during a cholera epidemic and Joanna is left to raise their son, Johnnie, in a world of wealth and privilege. While on a stroll, she and her son witness Charles Harrelston plunge to his death under suspicious circumstances. Joanna and her son are visited by the now-elderly Dr. John Watson, the old colleague of Sherlock Holmes, and his son Dr. John Watson, Jr. They have been asked by the Harrelston family to investigate the apparent suicide…
Leonard Goldberg is the USA Today and internationally bestselling author of, among other works of fiction, the Joanna Blalock series of medical thrillers. His novels, acclaimed by critics as well as by fellow authors, have been translated into a dozen languages and sold more than a million copies worldwide.
Park Literary 2016 London Rights Guide
A story about family, friendship, and the courage to follow your own heart—wherever that may
FIRST COMES LOVE
by Emily Giffin
Ballantine, June 2016
Growing up, sisters Josie and Meredith Garland shared a loving, if sometimes contentious relationship. Josie was impulsive, spirited, and outgoing; Meredith hardworking, thoughtful, and reserved. When tragedy strikes their family, their different responses to the event splinter their delicate bond. Fifteen years later, Josie and Meredith are in their late thirties, following very different paths. Josie is single—and this close to swearing off dating for good. What she wants more than the right guy, however, is to become a mother. On the outside, Meredith is the model daughter with the perfect life. Yet lately, Meredith feels dissatisfied and restless, secretly wondering if she chose the life that was expected of her rather than the one she truly desired. As the anniversary of their tragedy looms and painful secrets from the past begin to surface, Josie and Meredith must not only confront the issues that divide them, but also come to terms with their own choices…
Emily Giffin is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Something Borrowed, Where We Belong, and The One & Only
In this irresistible novel, a freak accident allows a wife and moth to explore the alluring alternative of the Road Not Taken
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
by Leigh Himes
Hachette Books, May 2016
« An enchanting novel about the choices we make in life and love-by turns hilarious, poignant, and nostalgic. Himes’s novel will make you revisit all the « what ifs » you’ve ever contemplated, from fleeting encounters to almost-weddings . . . a lively debut that will strike a chord in anyone with a romantic past. » ― Nicholas Sparks
Abbey Lahey is a married, harried working mother of two, struggling to make ends meet in a blue-collar suburb of Philadelphia. When a freak tumble down a Nordstrom escalator lands her in an alternate reality, Abbey finds herself happily married to the one that got away—a dashing Philly blueblood she met briefly years earlier—and living a Cinderella life of privilege and luxury.
It’s everything Abbey ever dreamed of. Or is it? At first dazzled by the clothes, the penthouse, the nannies, and the glittering social functions, Abbey begins noticing troubling flaws in her new fourteen-carat life… and wonders what happened to the people she left behind. Torn between two vastly different realities, Abbey takes increasingly dramatic steps to reclaim herself—whoever that may be.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY is Leigh Himes’s debut novel.
Rights sold: Dutch (Harpercollins Netherlands), German (Blanvalet), Slovak (Fortuna Libri) and Spanish (Maeva)
A darkly comic urban fantasy of ancient horrors in suburban cities
UN UNACCTRACTIVE VAMPIRE
by Jim McDoniel
Inkshares, March 2016
After three centuries trapped underground, Yulric Bile—the Curséd One, the Devil’s Apprentice, the Thousand Year Old Vampyr—has risen only to find that no one in this time believes he is a vampire. Werewolf, they call him. Zombie. Mummy. Lich. Vampires, he discovers, have become very pretty, very weak, and most disturbing of all, very good. He resolves to correct this disgusting turn of events, or at the very least, murder the person responsible. Aided by a vampire wannabe, the eight-year-old reincarnation of his greatest foe, and a host of ancient horrors as far from sexy as it is possible to be, Yulric journeys from lost subterranean cities to pink suburban houses, battling undead TV stars and his fear of cars, for the right to determine, once and for all, what it truly means to be a vampire.
Jim McDoniel has spent several years writing about mad science and molepeople for the award-winning, sci-fi audio drama “Our Fair City”. He was also a winner of the Midnight Audio Theatre’s 2014 Scriptwriting Competition and his piece « Last Transmission » will be produced and broadcast on Columbus NPR later this year.
A satirical and unsavory tale, revealing the savagery beneath the shiny veneer of Silicon Valley. A darker, drug-fueled parallel to Dave Eggers’ THE CIRCLE, Filip Syta’s debut novel offers a raw glimpse into the dangerous evolution of the tech world
THE SHOW
by Filip Syta
Inkshare, January 2016
Think of the greatest tech company in the world. Imagine getting a job there. Picture the perks: free gourmet food, free booze, a gym, a swimming pool, and a holiday bonus . . . every month. Brilliant coworkers. No dress code. Great parties. More money. Everyone’s admiration.
Vic is just like any other Harvard grad out there, except that he just scored a job at tech empire SHOW. But in the hunt for success and happiness, he falls into a shady world of sex, drugs, and swindle. The young tech elites are just as greedy as Wall Street bankers, but all the more cunning and cool.
Filip Syta is a former Google employee who chose to leave the tech world behind to satisfy his constant urge to write and to pursue his ambition of becoming a novelist. He was born and raised in Stockholm, Sweden.
Aaron Priest Agency 2016 London Rights Guide
Decker returns in a spectacular new thriller…
THE LAST MILE
(Amos Decker series #2)
by David Baldacci
Grand Central Publishing, April 2016
Convicted murderer Melvin Mars is counting down the last hours before his execution—for the violent killing of his parents twenty years earlier—when he’s granted an unexpected reprieve. Another man has confessed to the crime. Amos Decker, newly hired on an FBI special task force, takes an interest in Mars’ case after discovering the striking similarities to his own life: Both men were talented football players with promising careers cut short by tragedy. Both men’s families were brutally murdered. And in both cases, another suspect came forward, years after the killing, to confess to the crime. A suspect who may or may not have been telling the truth. The confession has the potential to make Melvin Mars—guilty or not—a free man. Who wants Mars out of prison? And why now?
David Baldacci has published 27 novels, all of which have been national and international bestsellers; several have been adapted for film and television. His novels have been translated into more than 45 languages and sold in more than 80 countries; over 110 million copies are in print worldwide.
This is a powerful and provocative novel, beautifully written by the inimitable Philip Caputo
DELIVER US FROM EVIL
by Philip Caputo
Henry Holt, 2017
DELIVER US FROM EVIL is about Father Timothy Riordan, a white priest in a Mexican border town who is caught between drug cartels, an untrustworthy military, corrupt law enforcement and his faith. The little town of San Patricio is plagued by violence and gang warfare. To aid the authorities in their apprehension of the criminals, they ask the unthinkable of Father Riordan: “tell us what you hear in Confession.” Riordan struggles between his allegiance to God and Church, and the parishioners whom he loves and who trust him. But isn’t the only way outof this tragedy to reveal the truth? In order to restore peace and community, he must decide which is the lesser evil: to sacrifice his commitment to his vocation in an attempt to save his people, or to remain “the good priest” in the face of chaos and desperation.
Novelist and journalist Philip Caputo has written 15 books. His acclaimed memoir of Vietnam, “A Rumor of War”, has been published in 15 languages, has sold two million copies, and is widely regarded as a classic in the literature of war. Caputo has won 10 journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.
St. Martin’s Press 2016 London Rights Guide
A big-hearted, ambitious story about love, violence, PTSD, and criminal conspiracy
THE STANDARD GRAND
by Jay Baron Nicorvo
Saint Martin’s Press, April 2017
When an Army trucker goes AWOL before her third deployment, she ends up in New York City, homeless and trying to figure out her next move. There she meets a Vietnam vet and widower who inherited a tumbledown resort in the Catskill Mountains, which he has converted into a halfway house for homeless veterans. The resort, the Standard, and its two thousand acres over the Marcellus Formation, is coveted by a Houston-based multinational company. They say they are looking to turn it into a golf course, but the truth only a corporate executive knows. Following a diverse cast of characters—a female veteran, a lesbian landman, a mercenary security contractor keeping secrets and seeking answers, and a conspiratorial gang of combat vets fighting to get peaceably by—The Standard Grand spans one epic year and is punctuated by three violent acts—a mauling, a shooting, and a mysterious death decades in the past. Over the course of the novel, the characters—soldiers and civilians alike—struggle to discover that what matters most is not that they’ve caused no harm, but how they make amends for the harm they’ve caused.
THE STANDARD GRAND is Jay Baron Nicorvo’s debut novel.
The seventh book in the New York Times bestselling Walking Dead series
SEARCH AND DESTROY
Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead #7
by Jay Bonansinga
Thomas Dunne Books, October 2016
Out of the ashes of a devastated Woodbury, Georgia, two opposing camps of ragtag survivors develop – each one on a collision course with the other. Underground, in the labyrinth of ancient tunnels and mine shafts, Lilly Caul and her motley crew of senior citizens, misfits, and children struggle to build a new life. But a secret ambition still burns in Lilly’s heart and soul. She wants her beloved town of Woodbury back from the plague of walkers, and now the only thing that stands in her way currently roams the wasted backwaters of Georgia… The final confrontation between two human factions unleashes an unthinkable weapon – forged from the monstrous hordes of undead, perfected by a madman, and soaked in the blood of innocents.
Robert Kirkman is best known for his work on “The Walking Dead” and “Invincible” for Image Comics, as well as “Ultimate X-Men” and “Marvel Zombies” for Marvel Comics. He is one of the five partners of Image Comics and is an executive producer and writer on “The Walking Dead” television show.
Jay Bonansinga is a critically acclaimed horror novelist whose works include “Perfect Victim”, “Shattered”, “Twisted”, and “Frozen”. His debut novel, “The Black Mariah”, was a finalist for a Bram Stoker award.
For readers of Cormac McCarthy
THE RIVER OF KINGS
by Taylor Brown
Saint Martin’s Press, March 2017
Flowing 137 miles from central Georgia to the coast, the Altamaha River is more than a body of water: it’s an ancient place, still in its natural state, home to hundreds of rare plant and animal species and bearing traces of both native tribes and the recently-discovered remnants of the oldest European settlement in North America. In THE RIVER OF KINGS, award-winning author Taylor Brown artfully weaves three narrative strands—the story of two brothers, Hunter and Lawson Loggins, as they set off to kayak the length of the river, bearing their father’s ashes toward the sea; the story of their father, Hiram, an enigmatic fisherman who loved the river, and whose death remains a mystery that his sons hope to resolve; and the dramatic buried history of the river’s earliest people, a 1564 French settlement at the river’s mouth, which began as a search for riches and ended in a bloody confrontation with both Spanish soldiers and native tribes.
This brilliantly realized second novel fulfills the promise of Taylor Brown’s widely praised debut, “Fallen Land”, which was a SIBA bestseller, an Indie Next pick, and an Amazon Best Book of the Month.
The unputdownable new novel of James Church
THE GENTLEMAN FROM JAPAN
An Inspector O Novel
by James Church
Mnotaur Books, December 2016
In THE GENTLEMAN FROM JAPAN, Inspector O is called in to help intercept a machine that is key to making nuclear weapons, which looks as though it is bound for North Korea. As usual, James Church pulls back the curtain on the hidden world of North Korea in a way that no one else can. An unputownable novel.
James Church (pseudonym) is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia. He has wandered through Korea for years. No matter what hat he wore, Church says, he ran across Inspector O many times. James Church’s Inspector O novels have been hailed as “crackling good” (The Washington Post) and “tremendously clever” (Tampa Tribune), while Church himself has been embraced by critics as “the equal of le Carré” (Publishers Weekly, starred).
A remarkable debut that will haunt you and hold you captive
THE NEXT
by Stephanie Gangi
Saint Martin’s Press, October 2016
Is there a right way to die? If so, Joanna DeAngelis has it all wrong. She’s consumed by betrayal, spending her numbered days cyberstalking Ned McGowan, much younger ex, and watching him thrive in the spotlight with someone new, while she wastes away. She’s every woman scorned, fantastizing about revenge … except she’s out of time. Joanna falls from her life, from the love of daughters and devoted dog, into an otherwordly landscape, a bleak infinity she can’t escape until she rises up and returns and sets it right – makes Ned pay – so she can truly move on. From the other side into right this minute, Jo embarks on a sexy, spiritual odyssey. As she travels beyond memory, beyond desire, she is transformed into a fierce female force of life, determined to know how to die, happily ever after.
THE NEXT is Stephanie Gangi’s first novel.
The first in Tetsuya Honda’s bestselling Reiko Himekawa series, now numbering five novels
THE SILENT DEAD
by Tetsuya Honda
Mnotaur Books, May 2016
At age twenty-nine, Reiko Himekawa of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police’s Homicide Division is young to have been made lieutenant, particularly because she lacks any kind of political or family connections. Despite barriers created by age, gender, and lack of connections, she is mentally tough, oblivious to danger, and has an impressive ability to solve crimes. Reiko makes a discovery that leads the police to uncover eleven other bodies, all wrapped in the same sort of plastic. Few of the bodies are identifiable, but the ones that are have no connection to each other. The only possible clue is a long shot lead to a website spoken only in whispers on the Internet, something on the dark web known as « Strawberry Night. » But while she is hunting the killer, the killer is hunting her… and she may very well have been marked as the next victim.
Tetsuya Honda is one of Japan’s best-selling authors with the ongoing crime series featuring Reiko Himekawa, a Homicide Detective with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police. The series has sold roughly 4 million copies in Japan, and is the basis for two TV mini-series, a TV special, and a major theatrical motion picture.
Marshall Grade is back and deadlier than ever as enemies from his past converge to enact a bloody plan of vengeance
AMERICAN BLOOD #2
by Ben Sanders
Minotaur Books, January 2017
Ex-undercover cop Marshall Grade is hiding out in New York City when he learns that federal agent Lucas Cohen has survived a kidnapping. Cohen was Marshall’s ticket into witness protection, and his captors had a simple question: where’s Marshall now? Marshall’s undercover work gave him a long list of enemies, and the enemy in this case is a corrupt businessman named Dexter Vine. Vine’s almost broke, in debt to people even worse than himself, and he wants to settle old scores while he has time. He’s hired Ludo Coltrane—a nonchalant psychopath and part-time bar manager—to find Marshall at any cost. Ludo’s no stranger to killing, but his associate, the cash-strapped ex-con Perry Rhodes, may prove more of a liability than an asset. The question is: what has Marshall done to make Dexter want him dead? And are the contacts from his old life – ex-colleague Lana, and the heroin dealer Henry Lee – prepared help him, or will they just sell him out?
Ben Sanders is the author of three previous New Zealand Fiction Bestsellers. Sanders’s first three novels were written while he was studying at university; he graduated in 2012 with a Bachelor of Engineering, and now writes full-time. AMERICAN BLOOD, his highly-anticipated American debut, published in November 2015.
Sourcebooks 2016 London Rights Guide
A literary page-turner about a beloved college professor accused of murdering his entire family, and one small-town cop’s dangerous search for answers
TWO DAYS GONE
by Randall Silvis
Sourcebooks Landmark, January 2017
Thomas Huston, a beloved professor and bestselling author, is something of a local hero in the small Pennsylvania college town where he lives and teaches. So when Huston’s wife and children are found brutally murdered in their home, the community reacts with shock and anger. Huston has also mysteriously disappeared, and suddenly, the town celebrity is suspect number one. Sergeant Ryan DeMarco has secrets of his own, but he can’t believe that a man he admired, a man he had considered a friend, could be capable of such a crime. Hoping to glean clues about Huston’s mind-set, DeMarco delves into the professor’s notes on his novel-in progress. Soon, DeMarco doesn’t know who to trust—and the more he uncovers about Huston’s secret life, the more treacherous his search becomes. Perfect for fans of Tana French, TWO DAYS GONE is a gripping literary suspense that will break your heart as much as it will haunt your dreams.
Randall Silvis is the internationally acclaimed author of over a dozen novels, one story collection, and one book of narrative nonfiction. Hisnumerous essays, articles, poems and short stories have appeared in numerous online and print magazines. His work has been translated into 10 languages.
Sterling Lord 2016 London Rights Guide
An enthralling confession of a woman who contends with the outside world’s assumptions of who she should be
ALL GROWN UP
by Jami Attenberg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Spring 2017
Andrea is a single, childless 39-year-old woman who tries to navigate family, sexuality, friendships and her career as a failed artist, but battles with thoughts and desires that few people would want to admit to. Told through a series of inventively linked vignettes, in a language that shimmers with rage and intimacy, All Grown Up delves into the psyche of a flawed but mesmerizing character, all while scrutinizing the present-day struggles that she inhabits. All Grown Upis powerfully intelligent, wickedly funny, and brave. There is such great emotional velocity on the pages that you will recognize yourself in Andrea’s thoughts and actions whether you want to admit it or not.
Jami Attenberg is the author of the story collection, “Instant Love”, and four novels: “The Kept Man”, “The Melting Season”, “The Middlesteins”, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book prize for Fiction, and “Saint Mazie”.
What happens when five young people, marginalized from society and all living with the consequences of their families’ decisions, form their own version of a family?
THE LIVELY SKELETONS OF EVERY SEASON
by Ishmael Beah
Riverhead, 2017
Elimane, the elder at age 20, is the first to find refuge in the abandoned airplane that serves as the group’s home on the outskirts of a small African town; the youngest member, Namsa, is only 11. They share the responsibilities of finding food, keeping watch, and leading daily excursions between the five of them. An old, handwritten book is their sole treasure in the world, but when they realize the value of this text, the group undertakes a dangerous journey to reap what benefits they can. Grappling with deception, separation, young love, and cultural pressures, the group must find a way to save their manuscript—and themselves—from the crooked world outside of their little family. A story that questions the meaning of freedom, youth, family, and the stories we tell ourselves to soldier on.
Ishmael Beah is the New York Times bestselling author of “A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” and “Radiance of Tomorrow, A Novel”. His memoir has been published in over 40 languages.
“Ben Dolnick is a writer of incredible sensitivity.” —Jonathan Safran Foer
THE BOOK OF YOUR LIFE
by Ben Dolnick
Pantheon, Spring 2017
A young couple leaves New York City to move upstate, where they become caretakers of an old, historic house. The house has a fascinating and quirky history, and the couple enjoys adapting to their new small-town country life. But soon the wife begins to exhibit signs of madness, and she believes it is the house—haunted by some spirit unknown—that is driving her insane. However, she has had mental issues before. Was her fragile mental state exacerbated by the move, or is their beautiful new home really haunted?
Ben Dolnick is the author of three novels: “Zoology”, “You Know Who You Are”, and “At the Bottom of Everything”. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and on NPR.
“A first class writer” – The New York Times
THE USES OF THE PAST
by Mary Gordon
Pantheon, Spring 2017
At age 92, Marian has lived a long, full life—a life that she has kept mostly to herself. Even her granddaughter Amelia—her favorite person in the world—hasn’t heard the details. Marian doesn’t believe in dwelling on the past, but when Amelia realizes that their time together is short, she convinces Marian to tell her story, one that begins in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. Amelia learns of her grandmother’s strict upbringing, her eventual rebellion, her romances, her struggles during and after the war, and her battle to always keep moving forward. As Marian’s past unfolds, both women come to better understand the meaning of faith and the importance of their love for each other.
Mary Gordon is an American writer whose work runs the gamut from novels and short stories to essays, memoir, and biography. Her work, which has also appeared extensively in Harper’s, More Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and others, is considered a significant contribution to Irish American literature. Gordon has been awarded the O. Henry prize and the Story prize. In 2008, Governor Elliot Spitzer named Mary Gordon the official New York State author.
A uniquely gifted storyteller
HARD LIGHT
A Cass Neary Novel #3
by Elizabeth Hand
Saint Martin’s Press/Minotaur, April 2016
“A must for fans of Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy and Robert Galbraith’s “Cormoran Strike” novels.” — Kirkus Reviews
When punk photographer Cass’s long-lost lover Quinn O’Boyle fails to show up to their London rendezvous point, Cass meets the eccentric couple Mallo and Morven Dunfries. When Mallo catches Cass rifling through his medicine cabinet in search of drugs, he threatens to turn her in to the authorities, and then puts her to work as a runner for his illegal goods. Cass makes a delivery to Poppy Teasel, a famous singer from long ago. Cass leaves Poppy’s flat but returns a short time later to find the place ransacked and Poppy dead. Fearful she’ll become the next victim, Cass goes on the run.
Elizabeth Hand’s fiction has received the Nebula, World Fantasy, Mythopeoic, Tiptree, and International Horror Guild awards, and her novels have been chosen as New York Times and Washington Post notable Books.
Rights sold : Finland (Like) and Sweden (Skugge & Co.)
Hansen’s new novelization chronicles in gritty tones the life of a man—part outlaw, part hero—who captured the fears and imagination of nineteenth-century America
THE KID
by Ron Hansen
Scribner, November 2016
Born to a pair of Irish laborers in the slums of New York, blond-haired and blue-eyed William Henry McCarty loses his father to the Civil War and is whisked away by his independent mother to the lawless reaches of the American frontier. The boy searches for a father figure, cycling through a succession of deadbeats and scoundrels who help him discover a natural talent for crime that only grows with the death of his mother. Young William Henry graduates from pilfered panties to gruesome murder at the age of seventeen, and sets himself upon a path of violence and rage that will enshrine his disconcertingly sprightly figure in the legends of the American Old West under a single name: Billy the Kid.
Ron Hansen is a critically acclaimed American novelist, essayist, and professor. His novel “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was nominated for the pen/Faulkner award, and his novel “Atticus” was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner.
A prismatic novel that follows a collection of seemingly unrelated characters as they react to the intersections of murder and victimhood, innocence and blame into which life has randomly placed them
THE OAK SLAYER ANTHOLOGY
by Baird Harper
Scribner, Spring 2017
Wyatt Calder, desperate to escape his alcoholic wife for even an hour, causes a fatal car crash. He spends four years and one day in prison. The difference that one day makes—for Wyatt’s devoted family and the man intent on revenge—resonates through the small town of Wicklow, Illinois, filled with characters haunted by the past and their inability to control the present. This mesmerizing, character-driven debut novel begins each chapter from a new perspective, building a spider web of human frailty and resilience. With infectiously grim humor and wry insight, THE OAK SLAYER ANTHOLOGY asks the reader to think deeply about the long arc of tragedy, how it begins, where it peaks, and why it ends.
Baird Harper’s fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, Tin House, Prairie Schooner, Story Quarterly, the Chicago Tribune, Mid-American Review, Another Chicago Magazine, CutBank, Carve, and Printers Row Journal. He was the winner of the 2014 Raymond Carver short story contest.
From the New York Times bestselling author of “The Dogs of Babel”, a taut, emotionally wrenching story of how a seemingly “normal” family could become desperate enough to leave everything behind and move to a “family camp” in New Hampshire–a life-changing experience that alters them forever
HARMONY
by Carolyn Parkhurst
Viking/Pamela Dorman Books, August 2016
Carolyn Parkhurst is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels “The Dogs of Babel”, “Lost and Found”, and “The Nobodies Album”, as well as the children’s book “Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly”, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino.
Classic, epic science fiction and engaging character-driven storytelling, which will appeal to devotees of the genre as well as fans of current major motion pictures such as Gravity and Interstellar.
ARKWRIGHT
by Allen Steele
TOR Books, March 2016
“Arkwright is both a love letter to the science fiction field and a terrific cutting-edge hard SF novel.” —Robert J. Sawyer
In the vein of classic authors such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, Nathan Arkwright is a seminal author of the twentieth century. At the end of his life he becomes reclusive and cantankerous, refusing to appear before or interact with his legion of fans. Little does anyone know, Nathan is putting into motion his true, timeless legacy. Convinced that humanity cannot survive on Earth, his Arkwright Foundation dedicates itself to creating a colony on an Earth-like planet several light years distant. Fueled by Nathan’s legacy, generations of Arkwrights are drawn together, and pulled apart, by the enormity of the task and weight of their name.
Allen Steele is a science fiction writer with nineteen novels and six collections of short fiction to his credit. His works have been translated worldwide and have received the Hugo, Locus, and Seiun awards, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Sturgeon, and Sidewise Awards.
Text Publishing London Rights Guide 2016
Natalie King is back: back from a stay on the psych ward
DANGEROUS TO KNOW
by Anne Buist
April 2016
Natalie’s reluctance to live a quiet life has contributed to a severe depressive episode, and now it’s time for a retreat to the country. A borrowed house on the Great Ocean Road; a low-key research job at a provincial university nearby. But Natalie and trouble have a strange mutual fascination. Her charismatic new boss Frank is friendly, even attractive. But it turns out his pregnant wife is an old enemy of Natalie’s. And when Frank’s tragic personal history is revealed—then reprised in the most shocking way—Natalie finds herself drawn deep into a mystery. And even deeper into danger.
Anne Buist is the Chair of Women’s Mental Health at the University of Melbourne. She has over twenty-five years’ clinical and research experience in perinatal psychiatry, and works with protective services and the legal system in cases of abuse, kidnapping, infanticide and murder. Professor Buist is married to novelist Graeme Simsion and has two children. Her novels featuring forensic psychiatrist Natalie King are “Medea’s Curse” and “Dangerous to Know”.
A brilliant, heartbreaking, hilarious novel
OUR TINY, USELESS HEARTS
by Toni Jordan
May 2016
This is a comedy about love and marriage. Specifically, the marriages of Caroline and Henry, and Lesley and Craig, and Janice and Alec. Except that Henry’s not going to be with Caroline for much longer now Martha’s on the scene, and to be truthful Lesley and Craig have a few trust issues that may not prove 100% resolvable. And Janice divorced Alec two years ago, although that didn’t have anything to do with falling out of love with him—quite the reverse actually—so it’s awkward when he turns up unexpectedly and finds Janice and Craig naked in Caroline’s bedroom. But all relationships have their ups and downs, don’t they?
Toni Jordan is the author of four novels. The international bestseller “Addition” was longlisted for the Miles Franklin award in 2009, and has been published in sixteen countries. “Fall Girl” was published internationally and has been optioned for film, and “Nine Days” was awarded Best Fiction at the 2012 Indie Awards, was shortlisted for the ABIA Best General Fiction award and was named in Kirkus Review’s top 10 Historical Novels of 2013. Toni has been widely published in newspapers and magazines.
United Talent 2016 London Rights Guide
An extremely pacey debut comparable to “Rear Window” and “The Kind Worth Killing”. Full of twists and turns, this clever psychological thriller will keep the reader constantly guessing about the heroine
THE WATCHER
by Ross Armstrong
Harlequin UK, January 2017
Lily Gullick lives with her husband Aiden in a new-build flat, opposite an estate which has been marked for demolition. A keen birdwatcher, she can’t help spying on her neighbours, intrigued by the social divide in her local area as it becomes increasingly gentrified. After befriending a vocal critic of the new apartment blocks, Jean, she is shocked when Jean is found dead. Everything points to natural causes, but Jean was convinced that someone wanted to silence her, and Lily decides it’s up to her to unravel mystery. The police label her a timewaster, but when a young student on the estate goes missing, Lily knows that she has to act. But her interference is not going unnoticed, and as she starts to get close to the truth, her own life comes under threat. THE WATCHER is told in the form of a birdwatching journal, narrated to Lily’s estranged father, whose calls and text messages she is constantly avoiding, for reasons which slowly become clear. As the narrative progresses and Lily grows increasingly isolated from everyone around her, we start to suspect that things aren’t quite as they seem. Is Lily a vigilante hero, or a troubled young woman chasing after a phantom?
Ross Armstrong is an actor, based in London. He recently appeared in the new series of Jonathan Creek, “Foyles War” and WPC56 amongst other things. He has also just finished performing a new play about Oppenheimer for the RSC in the West End.
Rights sold: Germany (Fischer), Italy (Rizzoli) and Spain (Duomo Ediciones).
You have 6 seconds to view this suicide note, and 24 hours to save the girl’s life…
ARE YOU AWAKE?
by Angela Clarke
HarperCollins UK, October 2016
Sixteen-year-old Essex schoolgirl Chloe Miller sends a suicide note via a Snapchat photo that friends and family can view for six seconds before it disappears. A search party is raised, but her body is discovered 24 hours later. Newly promoted, Nasreen Cudmore realises Chloe’s suicide note is an acrostic that spells APOLLYON. With Apollyon, also known as the Hashtag Murderer, safely behind bars can there really be a link between this supposed suicide and the serial killer? When Nasreen’s new boss, the attractive DCI Burgone, receives a Snapchat suicide note from Lottie, his university undergraduate sister, they reinvestigate the case with new urgency. With time ticking and no apparent leads, Nasreen goes to the one person she thinks could help: Freddie Venton. Freddie, mired in depression and still suffering from shock, struggles to get dressed let alone help her old school friend, but with a young woman’s life at stake she forces herself back into the fray. Working together Freddie and Nasreen uncover a perverse online subgroup,whose users compete to solicit naked photos of girls selected at random. As they chip away at the group, they uncover angry teens, thwarted exhusband, and illegal hackers, with every thread leading back to Revenge Porn supersite, and it’s shadowy owner Alex Black. Just how far would the secretive Svengali of Are You Awake? go to cause hurt and destruction? And will Freddie and Nasreen find him in time to save Lottie?
Angela Clarke is the author of FOLLOW ME, the first in this crime series and an Amazon Kindle to 20 bestseller for over six weeks.
Pulse-pounding and moving in equal measure
THE FEED
by Nick Clark Windo
Headline, January 2018
In the future society no longer needs iPads, tablets, or iPhones to access the web – THE FEED is omnipresent, downloaded directly into our brains. Every interaction, every emotion, every image can be shared with anyone you want: colleagues, lovers, even the whole world. A few resistors refuse to get it, instinctively distrusting what it can do, but its proponents point out that you can switch it off if you need to do so. But you won’t switch it off. No one does. Tom has his reasons for hating The Feed. His dad invented it. But his wife Kate feels differently. She’s expecting a baby, and she can monitor and track every aspect of the pregnancy through the feed, like having a doctor by her side 24/7 but better. When The Feed goes down, suddenly, and without warning, the world crumbles fast. Six years after the assassination of their President, technology no longer exists. The feed is gone, and with it a huge chunk of the transient knowledge which people downloaded, never to remember again. More troubling even than the global collapse is that something – someone? – seems to still be able to access people’s minds: you go to sleep as yourself, and wake up as someone completely different, with a whole other personality inside your head. When Tom and Kate’s six-year-old daughter goes missing, they set out to find her. But who can they trust, when even your own mind isn’t safe? And who, or what, is taking over people’s minds – and what do they want with Tom?
Nick Clark Windo has been working as a communications coach for a variety of individuals and companies, while also producing films. He runs an independent script-development fund and recently graduated from the Faber Academy’s ‘Write a Novel’ programme.
Wakefield Press 2016 London Rights Guide
He didn’t look like he could jump a bull, but she knew he could. It was all in the hands, he’d often explain. The will. The bloody mindedness
THE HANDS
An Australian Pastoral
by Stephen Orr
July 2015
“Orr is a no-nonsense, vivid storyteller. He punches out exchanges between his characters in a pragmatic way that transmits jealousy and heartbreak without sentiment.” – Australian
On a cattle station that stretches beyond the horizon, seven people are trapped by their history and the need to make a living. Trevor Wilkie, the good father, holds it all together, promising his sons a future he no longer believes in himself. The boys, free to roam the world’s biggest backyard, have nowhere to go.
Trevor’s father, Murray, is the keeper of stories and the holder of the deed. Murray has no intention of giving up what his forefathers created. But the drought is winning. The cattle are ribs. The bills keep coming. And one day, on the way to town, an accident changes everything.
Stephen Orr is the author of five previous novels. He contributes essays and features to several publications. A fascination with the dynamics of families and small communities pervades his fiction and non-fiction.
« Fast-paced, well-plotted, and distinctively Australian in its style and preoccupations, Ecstasy Lake is seriously good fun to read” – ANZ Litlovers
ECSTASY LAKE
A Steve West Novel
by Alastair Sarre
February 2016
Hidden in the outback, somewhere near Ecstasy Lake, is a massive gold deposit worth billions of dollars. Steve West, mining engineer and ex-AFL footballer, is the third person to know about it. The second is his good mate Tasso – loud, brilliant, filthy rich and just possibly mad. The first has just been brutally murdered. A goldmine like this is just the thing to turn a man’s fortunes around. It might even change the fortunes of the state. All Steve and Tasso need do is play their cards right, which means keeping their discovery a secret, staying out of gang wars, and trying not to get killed. Easier said than done…
Alastair Sarre studied forestry at the Australian National University and worked for a mining company in Western Australia before obtaining a writing diploma and embarking on a career as an editor and write. ECSTASY LAKE is his second novel.
Wolf Literary 2016 London Rights Guide
A darkly comic exploration
UNTITLED
by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Fall 2017
The novel follows an oddball heroine named Zebra on an irresistible literary quest to Catalonia to mine the scattershot wisdom of the great writers and break free from her past—even as she may be derailed by the mysteries of love. Zebra embarks on a literary rabbit hole akin to Ben Lerner’s Adam Gordon in “Leaving the Atocha Station”,but with the suspicious, obsessive churning of Rivka Galchen’s “Atmospheric Disturbances”. Throughout, the author’s hand over the story is tightly controlled even as Zebra’s own reality cracks.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of “Fra Keeler” (Dorothy, A Publishing Project). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Reader, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Denver Quarterly, Words without Borders, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Writers’ Award, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Catalonia, Spain. She has lived in Italy, Spain, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and the U.S.A..
Writers House London 2016 Rights Guide
A novel that brilliantly illuminates the sweep of history through a personal lens like the blockbusters “All the Light We Cannot See, “The Kite Runner”, “Orphan Train”, and “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah
MY LAST LAMENT
by James Brown
Berkley, March 2017
In an isolated village in Greece during the German Occupation, a fourteen-year-old girl named Aliki has just witnessed her father’s execution for the crime of hoarding a few squash. In a time of secrecy and hunger, Aliki is taken in by a neighbor and her disturbed son, Takis. They’re later joined by a Jewish refugee from Athens, the young Stelios who teaches them the ancient craft of shadow puppetry in which shadows on the screen tell stories that are sometimes comic, sometimes tragic. “They’re like life,” Aliki says, “but with the dull parts left out.” In the years after the Occupation and the bitter civil war which followed it, Aliki, Stelios and Takis become traveling players using shadow theatre as a means of existence and a kind of frame for their own evolving love and rivalries in a land tearing itself apart as it’s still doing today.
James William Brown is the author of “Blood Dance”, a novel exploring life in a remote Greek village between the wars, published in 1993 by Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich. His stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Fiction International, Epoch, Carve, and The Dublin Magazine. His non-fiction has appeared in The Nation, Bookpage, The Athens News, New Greece, To Thendro and elsewhere.
In Peter Golden’s new novel, THE CANDY STORE, we are taken from South Orange, to Otvali, Russia, to the beaches of southern France
THE CANDY STORE
by Peter Golden
Atria, Spring 2018 (tentative; ms due Spring 2017)
In the late 1950’s of South Orange, New Jersey, Michael Daniels—or Misha Danielov, as he’s referred to by his 1st generation Russian-Jewish grandmother—becomes the accidental host of a DIY radio show that he starts in the storage room of his grandmother’s candy store. Not only does he become a hit in town with his DJ personality, “The Mad Russian,” running satirical Nikita Khrushchev gags, but half a world away, it picks up listeners in a small Soviet city that’s in the midst of Khrushchev’s Thaw. There, rock and roll is leaking in through bootlegged airwaves, Beatlemania is about to hit, and the fictional Yulianna Kosoy—a war orphan in her mid-twenties with a pageboy haircut—is smuggling American goods into the Third World. With her kontrabandalike Levi’s jeans and samizdat copies of Howl, she’s changing the social and cultural landscape of the USSR with her boss, Der Schmuggler.Just as Misha’s radio show is taking off, his grandmother, Emma, is shot and murdered in the candy store. Why anyone would commit such an atrocity against such a warm, maternal woman is anyone’s guess. But Emma was very secretive about her past and, as Misha quickly discovers, has a shadowy ancestral history. In order to solve the mystery of who killed Emma, Misha sets out to Europe to find out where he—and his grandmother—really came from.
Peter Golden is an award-winning journalist, historian, and novelist. His previous two novels were published by Atria Books.
Dovetailing the intense velocity of Gross’s internationally bestselling contemporary thrillers with high-stakes drama of the race to construct the first atomic bomb, THE ONE MAN tells the story of a Polish Jew who must journey back to the very place where his family was murdered in a race against time to rescue the one man needed to insure the Allied victory
THE ONE MAN
by Andrew Gross
Minotaur Books, August 2016
Nathan Blum is a tenacious albeit desk-bound intelligence lieutenant, haunted by the scars of the past and the ghosts of kin lost. Across an ocean, in Auschwitz, a brilliant scientist and young chess savant together hold a knowledge that will change the course of not only a war, but history itself; if only Professor Alfred Mendel and Leo Wolciek can hang on against the atrocities that have already claimed the lives of their families. Blum is tasked by the U.S. government with what amounts to a suicide mission, navigating Nazi-steeped Europe to break into the notorious extermination camp to find them. And, once he has them, break back out again.
Andrew Gross has authored several New York Times and international bestsellers. He also co-authored five #1 bestsellers with James Patterson.
Wayétu Moore
Wayetu’s writing can be found in various literary journals. She has been featured in The Economist, NPR, Uptown Magazine, NBC, BET, and ABC, among others, for her work in advocacy for diversity in children’s literature. Wayétu is also an adjunct professor of writing at The College of New Rochelle. In addition to being a writer, Wayétu is the founder of One Moore Book (www.onemoorebook.com), a boutique publisher of multicultural children’s books aimed at readers in countries with low literacy rates.
MONROVIA
Graywolf, Fall 2018
Wayétu Moore’s brilliant novel set in the 19th century during the founding of Liberia centers around three indelible characters each of whom have supernatural abilities. There is the indigenous Gbessa from a small village who is cursed and exiled when she reaches thirteen years old, surviving in the woods despite having nothing to eat but nuts and berries and realizes she is immortal. June Dey is an orphaned slave on a plantation in Virginia who re¬alizes he is abnormally strong when his back does not scar when whipped and his skin repels bullets. He escapes slavery and finds his way onto a ship headed to a new colony called Monrovia formed by free slaves (later to be called Liberia). Norman Aragon is the son of a Jamaican Maroon and a British scholar. He uses his gift of invisibility to sneak onto a ship also bound for Monrovia. Gbessa, June Dey and Norman meet up in Monrovia and use their unlikely abilities to fight traders who still roam the Gold Cast illegally in search of vulnerable African tribes to steal slaves from. In the chaos, the three lose each other. Gbessa ends up uncomfortably the wife of a general of the new army just as a division grows between the newly empowered and “civilized” American“Settlahs” and the indigenous tribes from which Gbessa came.
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THE DRAGONS, THE GIANT, THE WOMEN
Graywolf, 2019
In her harrowing memoir, Wayétu Moore tells the story of how she, along with her father, and her sisters escaped from their Liberian suburb when civil war broke out in 1990 and spent months, averting their eyes to dead bodies in the streets, surviving random gun shots, hiding in abandoned homes, schools, and eventually in the town their grandparents were from—a town only reachable by canoe. Meanwhile, Wayétu’s mother (who was at Columbia University on a Fulbright Scholarship) could not reach her family for eight months—Liberia was completely cut off. Not knowing whether her family was alive or dead, and just having given birth to her son, alone, she defied all obstacles and got herself to Sierra Leone where, at a town on the Liberian border, she came across a female rebel solider who was bringing Liberians to safety. Giving her $600, a photo, and all her hopes, she sent her in search of her family.
The story of a woman coming home to the family she left behind—and to the woman she always wanted to be…
FLIGHT PATTERNS
by Karen White
Berkley, May/June 2016
Georgia Chambers has spent her life sifting through other people’s pasts while trying to forget her own. But then her work as an expert of fine china—especially of Limoges—requires her to return to the one place she swore she’d never revisit… It’s been thirteen years since Georgia left her family home on the coast of Florida, and nothing much has changed, except that there are fewer oysters and more tourists. She finds solace seeing her grandfather still toiling away in the apiary where she spent much of her childhood, but encountering her estranged mother and sister leaves her rattled. Seeing them after all this time makes Georgia realize that something has been missing—and unless she finds a way to heal these rifts, she will forever be living vicariously through other people’s remnants. To embrace her own life—mistakes and all—she will have to find the courage to confront the ghosts of her past and the secrets she was forced to keep…
Karen White is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. FLIGHT PATTERNS is her twentieth novel.
The wonderfully talented author of Mislaid returns with a fierce and audaciously funny novel of families-both the ones we’re born into and the ones we create-a story of obsession, idealism, and ownership, centered around a young woman who inherits her bohemian late father’s childhood home
NICOTINE
by Nell Zink
Ecco, June 2015
Penny Baker has rebelled against her family her whole life-by being the conventional one. Her mother, Amalia, was a member of a South American tribe called the Kogi; her much older father, Norm, long ago attained cult-like deity status among a certain cohort of aging hippies while operating a psychedelic “healing center.” But all that changes when her father dies, and Penny inherits his childhood home in New Jersey. She goes to investigate the property and finds it not overgrown and abandoned, but rather occupied by a group of friendly anarchist squatters whom she finds unexpectedly charming, and who have renamed the property “Nicotine.” In NICOTINE, Nell Zink exquisitely captures the clash between Baby-Boomer idealism and Millennial pragmatism, between the have-nots and want-mores, in a riotous yet tender novel that brilliantly encapsulates our time.
Nell Zink is the author of the internationally sold “Mislaid” and “Wallcreeper”.
Nancy Yost 2016 London Rights Guide
The newest title in this intelligent British mystery series in the tradition of Elizabeth George and P.D. James
GARDEN OF LAMENTATIONS
by Deborah Crombie
Morrow, Spring 2017
When the body of a young woman dressed all in white is found in a tranquil London park, Scotland Yard Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Inspector Gemma James embark on an investigation that’s both disturbing and deadly.
Deborah Crombie is the author of 15 novels featuring Scotland Yard Detective Superintendent Duncan Kincaid and Detective Inspector Gemma James. Her books are multi-award winning and nominated, as well as New York Times notables.
Film rights of this title have been optioned by FreemantleMedia – UK – the producers of 2013 Oscar-winning “Searching for Sugar Man.”
OTHER LISTS:
Leibo 2016 London Rights Guide
Kuhn Project 2016 London Rights Guide
Harvey Klinger 2016 London Rights Guide
David Black Agency 2016 London Rights Guide
BROWNE & MILLER FICTION – 2016 London Rights Guide
Beacon Press 2016 London Rights Guide