Portuguese Pre-empt for THE GLASS ROOM by Simon Mawer!
In my first posting back in March I mentioned how engrossed I was by Simon Mawer’s new novel, THE GLASS ROOM, well my assistant, Lettie, loved it too and achieved the first foreign deal for this beautiful masterpiece. Lettie pitched THE GLASS ROOM to a Portuguese publisher she met at the London Book Fair, immediately submitted the manuscript to him after the fair, and this week convinced him to increase his opening offer to a pre-empt. I was completely swept away from the first page to the very end, and even after finishing it a month ago I’m still dreaming of the characters and the stunning house based on the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, Czech Republic that was built in 1930 by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Simon Mawer makes you feel like you have been with them, witnessing everything that happens in the light-filled room, even after the Jewish family who first lives in it has to flee. The UK publisher, Little, Brown, who will publish as a lead novel in January 2009 is not exaggerating in their blurb that says “Meticulously researched and imaginatively conceived, Simon Mawer’s virtuoso novel THE GLASS ROOM is resounding evidence of an author working at the very peak of his powers.” The Portuguese publisher is Civilizacao and if you have not yet read THE GLASS ROOM yourself then I hope this will convince you to put it on top of your manuscript pile before we accept any more pre-empts!
Dutch publishers are loving THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE STRANGE TIMES by Adam Foulds!
A first Dutch offer from an editor whose taste I’ve always respected was made this week for Adam Foulds’ award-winning debut novel, and it looks like at least one other similarly selective publisher will be offering next week. I’ve set a deadline for best offers by Tuesday, May 6th. THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE STRANGE TIMES has reminded me never to give up hope for a truly special novel even if it initially gets overlooked. It was barely noticed over a year ago when first submitted as an unedited manuscript and hardly received any reviews when Weidenfeld and Nicholson first published last summer (the few reviews it did get were very positive), but now that Adam Foulds has won The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award (see my previous posting below), publishers across Europe are keen to read this heartwarming, funny, yet completely unsentimental and unusual story. THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE STRANGE TIMES is also long-listed for The Desmond Elliott Prize and I think it’s very likely to make the shortlist announced on May 22nd. A fantastic, two-page interview with Adam Foulds was in The Sunday Times last weekend . I’m hungry to read everything Adam Foulds ever writes after loving THE TRUTH ABOUT THESE STRANGE TIMES when I read it last year and now being stunned by the intensity of Adam’s poem, “The Broken Word”, that Robin Robertson/Jonathan Cape just published to astonishing acclaim (Random House controls rights to “The Broken Word”). My previous posting below did not include this Sunday Times review : “An exhilarating tour de force. Its 33-year-old author moves around territory that is half a century and thousands of miles away from him with uncanny accomplishment. Place and period are conjured up as confidently as if he had been there…What Foulds brings to the portrayal of violence and terror is the elegance of accuracy combined with emotional power and imaginative finesse. It makes his book - concise and precise, attentive and inventive - a superlative achievement.” There was also a great recent Guardian review: “A moving and pitiless depiction of the world as it is rather than as we might like it to be, and the terrible things we do to defend our place in it.” It’s rare for a first book of poetry to have full reviews in the broadsheets and it’s even rarer for a previously unknown author to in one year have two such different books published by two major publishers. Meanwhile Adam Foulds’ primary agent, Anna Webber, just received the complete manuscript of his second novel which sounds even more ambitious and intriguing. It is a historical novel set in the 1840s in an insane asylum where the poet John Clare was a patient.
Third Foreign Deal in Three Weeks for ONE MORNING LIKE A BIRD by Andrew Miller!
We just accepted a great offer (via Pikarski Agency) for Hebrew rights from the excellent publisher, Achuzat Bayit (who will also be publishing Adam Foulds in Israel). As posted below, I accepted offers right before the book fair from Salamandra/Spain and Hanser/Germany. ONE MORNING LIKE A BIRD is one of the most intimate and passionate, yet elegant and balanced novels I’ve ever read and it was one of the most requested manuscripts at The London Book Fair, especially of interest in Holland, France and Italy where I am opening up the submission beyond Andrew Miller’s previous houses. Sceptre will publish ONE MORNING LIKE A BIRD as a lead novel in September 2008 and it was great to have Andrew Miller’s editor, Carole Welch, sharing her passion for his writing with all the foreign editors she saw.
New deals for Fiona Neill, Toby Faber, and Paul McKenna!
The only offers I received at the London Book Fair itself were from the fantastic Brazilian publisher, Record: a pre-empt for THE SECRET LIFE OF A SLUMMY MUMMY (the sixteenth language deal for Fiona Neill’s bestselling debut); a first translation offer for FABERGE’S EGGS by Toby Faber; and a strong offer for I CAN MAKE YOU RICH by Paul McKenna. These were the first offers presented by Tassy Barham, who I started working with for Brazil right before the book fair and I have no doubt now that this was the right decision. Tassy reported strong Brazilian interest in fiction and non-fiction titles across our list. I wonder what offers she will send us next!
Since the book fair, I’ve also done new deals for Paul McKenna in Greece, Italy (I CAN MAKE YOU THIN was a bestseller last year for TEA/Mauri Spagnol), Arabic, and now for the first time ever in Sweden. Forum will publish a Swedish edition of I CAN MAKE YOU THIN next year. I CAN MAKE YOU THIN is the longest-running non-fiction bestseller in the UK (over 900,000 copies sold) and has the highest success rate of any diet book in the world (an over 70% proven success rate). Paul McKenna recently launched his I CAN MAKE YOU THIN television show as a weekly series in the US on the cable channel TLC and it has the highest ever number of viewers for any show of that kind! To date Paul McKenna’s books are being published in 23 languages. Amazingly rights are still available for all of his books in Spain/Latin America and in Portugal. You can read more about Paul McKenna’s best-selling books here.
London Book Fair interest across the list!
Besides the above titles the most requested literary fiction that we are submitting now or very soon is:
POLLARD by Laura Beatty - to be published by Chatto in July as “an astonishing first novel which is tough, rough and beautiful” and with “prize-winning quality”
THE GATE OF AIR by James Buchan - the acclaimed author’s first novel in 10 years, a love story and ghost story, to be published in September by The MacLehose Press/Quercus
THE LUMINOUS LIFE OF LILLY APHRODITE by Beatrice Colin - to be published in August as a lead summer novel by Riverhead/US as “The Glimmer Palace”, John Murray/UK, Q/Querido/Netherlands, and Neri Pozza/Italy. Great advance quotes are now coming in:
“Written with intelligence and shimmer, The Glimmer Palace transports the reader to Berlin in the first part of the twentieth century. Colin’s heroine, Lilly Aphrodite, is as rich, alive, and dangerous as the city she inhabits; and as the novel progresses, Berlin’s history becomes her own.”
—David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl and The 19th Wife
“There are few characters as beguiling as the incomparable Tiny Lil. And Colin tells her riveting story—and the enthralling story of pre-war Berlin—breathlessly and triumphantly.”
—Jennifer Gilmore, author of Golden Country
“As moving as it is smart, this tough-minded extravaganza had me from page one. The Glimmer Palace is a dazzling tale of survival in the urban wilderness.”
—Emma Donoghue, author of Slammerkin and Life Mask
THE WILDERNESS by Samantha Harvey - a moving, beautiful, and courageous debut novel about Alzheimer’s to be published in Spring 2009 by Jonathan Cape/UK, Nan A. Talese Books/USA, DVA/Germany, Ambo Anthos/Netherlands, and Keter/Israel. It was great to have Dan Franklin talking this up at the book fair.
UNTITLED by Claire Kilroy - a novel set in 1980s Dublin that dispels all illusions about what it means to be a writer while surprising the reader with a exhilarating and romantic ending, by the acclaimed Irish author of “Tenderwire”, to be published by Faber
A WINDING ROAD by Jonathan Tulloch - a novel about art, lust, war, obsession, and a lost Van Gogh masterpiece, to be published by Jonathan Cape
I was also pleased that literary editors from Germany, Spain, and Scandinavia are still seriously interested in PILCROW by Adam Mars-Jones. If you have any doubt about Adam Mars-Jones’ singular brilliance after reading about the fantastic first reviews in my posting below, then read James Wood’s review that just appeared in The London Review of Books! This trumps all previous reviews: “This constantly surprising book is nothing if not a calculated strike against the old novelistic tendency to connect moral and physical impotence… it is impressive, given the odds stacked against it, how lively most of the book is, and how funny, too. Mars-Jones is challenging us, rather as Harold Brodkey did in his enormous, microscopically narcissistic novel, The Runaway Soul, to keep up with the book’s massive deceleration… Pilcrow is not only a fat gauntlet thrown down measuredly at our hurrying feet, but a subtle send-up of various genres: the family memoir, full as a biscuit tin with old brand names and sweet lost objects; the gay coming-of-age novel and memoir; and the English boarding-school novel… Mars-Jones’s scrupulous, compound eye enables him to see a whole era… It is full of scintillating phrases and original observations…. Generally, Mars-Jones’s prose is exceptionally nimble, dry, humorously restrained… He can describe more or less anything and make it interesting…. Pilcrow is a peculiar, original, utterly idiosyncratic book. It is admirably courageous, both in what it heaps on us, and in what it holds back.” I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a few more of the most courageous foreign publishers will not hold back from offering for Adam Mars-Jones’ tour-de-force. One of the most special experiences of The London Book Fair, or any previous book fair, was having lunch with Adam Mars-Jones and his Italian publisher, Stile Libero/Einaudi. It as also great seeing his French publisher, Isabel Laffont/J.C. Lattes, at the fair and sharing our joy over this rare novel that will be remembered and cherished for years to come.
Most requested commercial fiction:
A SNOWBALL IN HELL by Christopher Brookmyre - a sensational new thriller featuring a charistmatic serial killer who targets B-list celebrities and his nemesis, a tough female cop who looks like Halle Berry and is secretly in love with a mysterious bank robber, to be published in August by Little, Brown/UK.
THE MINUTES OF THE LAZARUS CLUB by Tony Pollard - a thrilling debut novel of historical murder and intrigue in Victorian London to be published by Michael Joseph/UK and there’s now a Russian offer!
HIS OTHER LOVER by Lucy Dawson (bestselling debut women’s fiction published by Little, Brown/UK, and to be published by Avon/HarperCollins/US, Rowohlt/Germany, House of Books/Netherlands and we just accepted a Hungarian offer) - According to Booktrack, HIS OTHER LOVER has sold almost 35,000 copies in the UK alone (it peaked at 6,900 copies a week here, which is a massive achievement for first fiction) and has been reprinted four times since publication mid March. Lucy is about to deliver her second novel which will follow in May next year with very much the same look and feel.
You can read some truly outstanding customer reviews on Amazon here.
And Bookzone has clips of Lucy reading from and being interviewed about HIS OTHER LOVER here.
Little, Brown has a nice interview with Lucy here.
And most requested Non-fiction:
WHERE UNDERPANTS COME FROM by Joe Bennett - just now published by Simon and Schuster/UK and there’s a great first review in The Daily Mail: “There are many moments of humour, but this is a surprisingly thoughtful book… As an introduction to this vast, fastchanging and still frequently baffling country, it’s fascinating.”
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION AND ITS CONSEQUENCES by James Buchan - to be published in 2010 by John Murray/UK and The Free Press/US
WHY US?: HOW SCIENCE REDISCOVERED THE MYSTERY OF OURSELVES by James Le Fanu - a provocative and eloquent challenge to Dawkins and Darwin, to be published by HarperCollins/UK and Pantheon/US in February 2009.
THE USES AND ABUSES OF HISTORY by Margaret Macmillan - to be published by Profile/UK, Random House/US in 2009, and now published by Penguin/Canada
BAD SCIENCE by Ben Goldacre - to be published by Fourth Estate/UK in August 2008
FRIENDS LIKE THESE by Danny Wallace - to be published by Ebury/UK in July and in 2009 by Little, Brown/US, and Forum/Sweden
You can read more about many of these titles in postings below and all of them on the full United Agents Rights lists available on the United Agents website here. I will never tire of book fairs or travel. I’m away next week to Italy for the Turin Fiera del Libro!
