THE MARSH AGENCY LTD
Translation Rights List
London Book Fair 2015
50 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BD, UK
www.marsh-agency.co.uk
FICTION
LITERARY FICTION
ALPHABET SOUP or THIS THING THAT HAS NO NAME by Anita Nair
AGENT: Jessica Woollard, The Marsh Agency
PUBLISHER(S): India – HarperCollins
RIGHTS SOLD: Italian – Guanda
PUBL. DATE: October 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: Lena and her husband KK are happily married only because Leela is not in love with her husband. She knows that as soon as love enters a relationship, it is fraught with expectations and disappointments follow. They live in the hills in a tea plantation and since it is a not-so-profitable business anymore, they run a home-stay within the plantation. Their lives continue in an absolute plateau until the arrival of a guest Shoolapani, a well known movie star at the home-stay. Shoolapani has run away from life to escape the pointlessness that he feels his life is all about.
Lena and Shoolapani are friends at first. Friends who heal each other until they are unable to imagine a life apart. For now they are Lee and Ship. However they are both married. What happens next is the climax of the novella.
The story of their love is told through the voice of a housekeeper who has been with Lena a long time. The maid describes the episodes in the love story using the English alphabet she is learning to master. However the conventional letter-object method doesn’t work for her and she finds an Indian dish or ingredient to help her memorize the letter of the alphabet. The ingredient or dish is a metaphor for her reflections about life, love and compromises made. And along with her observations of the love story unfolding before her eyes, she ruminates on her own aborted love story.
There are 26 chapters and each chapter is named after one letter of the alphabet and the sequence will be A to Z. The alphabet won’t necessarily have to be translated as the foods/ dishes Anita uses could be left in their Indian originals, e.g. A is for ‘Arisi appalam’ or apple fritters, B for Badam, a delicious sweet nut.
SALES OF CUT LIKE WOUND: Dutch – Signatuur, French – Albin Michel, Italian – Guanda, Spanish - Duomo
AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING by Elizabeth Poliner
AGENT: Duvall Osteen, Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Lee Boudreaux Books/Little, Brown Inc
RIGHTS SOLD: German – DuMont
PUBL. DATE: May 2016
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: 'The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident with a man who would have given his life rather than have it happen…'
And so begins Elizabeth Poliner’s heart-wrenching meditation on grief, guilt, and the boundaries of love, in her debut novel AS CLOSE TO US AS BREATHING. Uncovering the ways in which family members struggle to understand one another in the face of loss, Poliner delivers a multigenerational family saga that begins with a tragic accident in the summer of 1948, the impact of which unfolds across decades.
This gorgeous, layered novel has already received an endorsement from Elizabeth’s mentor Edward P. Jones, who was her first reader.
Edward P. Jones (Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Known World) “Vivid, complex, and beautifully written, Elizabeth Poliner’s novel, As Close to Us as Breathing, brims with characters who leave an indelible impression on the mind and heart. This moving story of the way one unforgettable family struggles with love and loss shows an uncommon depth of human understanding. Elizabeth Poliner is a wonderful talent and she should be read widely, and again and again.”
In the narrative vein of Eugenides’s, Middlesex, with the familial dissolution of Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys, and the heft of religious tradition in the likeness of Goodman’s Katterskill Falls¸ Poliner’s novel is an immensely readable, richly textured debut.
BARBARA THE SLUT AND OTHER PEOPLE by Lauren Holmes
AGENT: Duvall Osteen, Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Riverhead Penguin, UK – Fourth Estate
RIGHTS SOLD: German - Rowohlt
PUBL. DATE: August 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: In nine stories, Holmes’s characters navigate the ridiculousness found in the mundane patterns of our most familiar relationships. Language, gender, and sex are all on trial here, and Holmes’s humor tears through the niceties that we use as social comforts with the clear, casual voice of intimate knowledge.
In “Desert Hearts,” a woman takes a job selling sex toys when she can’t face using her newly acquired law degree. In “Pearl and the Swiss Guy Fall in Love,” a romantic fling turns a Swiss germaphobe into an unlikely and unwelcome house guest when he falls in love with a neurotic pit-bull. And in “Barbara the Slut” a young woman’s love of sex is complicated by a culture of slut shaming. As Lauren says about her writing “humor is how I deal with everything in real life, especially the bad things…I want to be funny about sad things. So that's what I try to do.”
There’s already an outpouring of support for BARBARA THE SLUT AND OTHER PEOPLE. Philipp Meyer (author of The Son) says “an astonishing collection—one of those rare books that manages to be both poignant and hilarious. The last time we had a debut this big was Junot Díaz with Drown. Holmes is a major talent.”
Lauren Holmes grew up in upstate New York. She received a BA from Wellesley College and an MFA from Hunter College, where she was a Hertog Fellow and a teaching fellow. Her work has appeared in Granta, where she was a 2014 New Voice, and in Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
BESIDE MYSELF by Ann Morgan
AGENT: Hardman & Swainson
PUBLISHER(S): WEL – Bloomsbury
PUBL. DATE: Spring 2016
MATERIAL: ms due August 2015
ABOUT THE BOOK: When bossy six-year-old Helen swaps places with her shy identical twin Ellie, their fun at playing each other seems harmless. But the game soon turns into a trap when Ellie refuses to give Helen her identity back, forcing her sister to live her life instead. With those around her seemingly oblivious to her plight, the girl who used to be Helen withdraws into a spiral of behavioural problems, delinquency and mental illness, while her sibling blossoms with the approval and praise that their harsh and distant mother used to give to Helen.
It is only twenty-five years later, when her estranged mother calls to tell her that her now-celebrity sister has had a car crash and is in a coma, that former Helen (or Smudge, as she has come to think of herself) has the chance to revisit the past. Battling the bipolar disorder and alcohol abuse that have taken over her existence, will Smudge finally discover what really happened to her sister and her self?
Ann Morgan is a freelance writer and editor based in London. Her first book, the non-fiction title READING THE WORLD: Confessions of a Literary Explorer, is published by Harvill Secker and in the US in May under the title THE WORLD BETWEEN TWO COVERS by WW Norton / Liveright.
CREATED EQUAL by Stephen O’Connor
AGENT: The Jennifer Lyons Agency
PUBLISHER(S): US – Viking
PUBL. DATE: Spring 2016
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: CREATED EQUAL is debut novel from Stephen O'Connor, whose short fiction has recently appeared in the New Yorker and in the 2014 Best American Short Stories.
When Martha Jefferson dies in September 1782, Thomas Jefferson is so wracked by grief that his friends worry he might go insane. Thinking that a change of scene would do him good, they arrange for him to be given a diplomatic post in Paris. He brings only his eldest daughter, Patsy, leaving his younger two in Virginia. When Lucy dies of whooping cough, however, nine-year-old Polly must cross the Atlantic to join her father and only remaining sister in Paris. Unbeknownst to Jefferson, Polly is escorted by fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings.
Thus begins--haltingly--an affair between Jefferson and Hemings. It is an affair that will bring poor Sally Hemings into contact with revolutionaries and aristocrats, that will span two continents, that will bear four children and several more stillborns, that will drive Sally further and further from her class and her culture, and that will allow her to be her "best self." It is a relationship sorely tested by the pressures of Jefferson's political duties, by the difference in class, and by the evils of slavery--only further reinforced for Hemings by the sweetness of freedom she experienced in Paris. Sally is forced to confront what it means to live among her people with such conflicting love and resentment for a slaveholder; Jefferson must assess the effect of the political fallout when--not if, but when--his affair is made public. Despite these difficulties, the two spent almost forty years together, until Jefferson's death. Even then, even in the face of encroaching bitterness, Sally was left with the memory of Jefferson's laugh.
Stephen O'Connor is the author of two collections of short fiction, HERE COMES ANOTHER LESSON and RESCUE, and of two works of nonfiction, ORPHAN TRAINS, a history of a pioneering nineteenth century child welfare effort, and WILL MY NAME BE SHOUTED OUT?, a memoir of his years teaching creative writing in New York City public schools. His fiction and poetry have appeared in The New Yorker, Conjunctions, One Story, The Missouri Review, Poetry Magazine, Electric Literature, Agni, Threepenny Review, The Quarterly, Partisan Review, among many other places. His essays and journalism have been published in The New York Times, DoubleTake, The Nation, Agni, The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, The New Labor Forum, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA programs of Columbia and Sarah Lawrence.
DEVOTION by Ros Barber
AGENT: Rupert Heath Literary Agency
PUBLISHER(S): UK – Oneworld
PUBL. DATE: June 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: April is angry. Only nineteen, she has blown up a bus killing over a dozen people and believes that God is her personal pen pal.
Dr Finlay Logan is broken. Still reeling from the death of his daughter he must assess April’s sanity at a time when religious fundamentalism is on the verge of being classified as a form of mental illness.
Dr Gabrielle Salmon is beautiful. Notorious for her controversial scientific experiments, she thinks she can help April and she knows she can help Logan. But is she too odd? Too clever? Too convenient?
Weaving together a moving story of grief with a gripping narrative about religion, science and the role that psychology plays to bridge the gap, Devotion is a fascinating novel that asks fundamental questions about the nature of reality while balancing the emotional and rational sides of human experience.
This novel is aptly titled, in that it deals with love in its most observational forms - the love of God, the dedication of a wife to her husband in the absence of all affection; the love of a father for a lost child. But it is also a novel of science, and the science of emotion: it asks fundamental questions about the nature of reality when balancing the emotional and rational sides of human experience.
Ros Barber was born in Washington D.C. to British parents and grew up in Colchester, Essex, before moving to Brighton at the age of 18. She has worked in IT as an analyst programmer, and taught Creative Writing at the University of Sussex for 12 years. Ros's debut novel The Marlowe Papers was longlisted for the Bailey's Prize 2013, was the winner of the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2013, and the winner of the Society of Authors' debut novel award 2013.
GOLD, FAME, CITRUS (previously The Dowsers) by Claire Vaye Watkins
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Riverhead
RIGHTS SOLD: Dutch – Arbeiderspers, German – Ullstein, Italian – Neri Pozza
PUBL. DATE: Autumn 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: GOLD, FAME, CITRUS is set in a future California, after the state has been rendered barren through drought. The west has effectively been closed down and most Americans have moved as refugees to the east coast. Some people chose to remain however, amongst them the couple at the heart of this novel – however they are forced to go on the run after kidnapping a child they believe is being abused, only to be “rescued by” and drawn into, a commune headed by a charismatic wild guy resembling Charles Manson.
Claire was born in Bishop, California in 1984 and raised in the Mojave Desert. Her first book, a collection of short stories entitled Battleborn, won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Battleborn was also named a best book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, Flavorwire and NPR.org.
SALES OF BATTLEBORN: Chinese – China Times, Dutch – Arbeiderspers, French – Calmann Levy, German - Ullstein, Italian – Neri Pozza, Japanese - Iwanami Shoten
THE FOLLOWERS by Rebecca Wait
AGENT: Hardman & Swainson
PUBLISHER(S): UK – Picador
PUBL. DATE: May 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: On the bleak, windswept moors of northern England, a small religious cult has cut itself off from society. Led by their prophet Nathaniel, they eagerly await the end times. But when the prophet brings in a new recruit, Stephanie, along with her rebellious daughter Judith, the group’s delicate dynamic is disturbed. Judith is determined to escape, but her feelings are complicated by a growing friendship with another of the children, the naïve and trusting Moses, who has never experienced the outside world.
Meanwhile, another member is starting to have doubts of his own, unleashing a horrifying chain of events that will destroy the followers’ lives.
In the aftermath, the survivors struggle to adjust to the real world, haunted by the same question: if you’ve been persuaded to surrender your individual will, are you still responsible for your actions? And is there any way back?
Rebecca was born in Oxfordshire in 1988. Her first novel THE VIEW ON THE WAY DOWN was published in 2013.
SALES OF THE VIEW ON THE WAY DOWN: Dutch – Artemis, German - Kein & Aber
A GOD IN RUINS by Kate Atkinson 
AGENT (translation rights only): The Marsh Agency Ltd
PUBLISHER(S): UK – Transworld, US - Little Brown, Canada – Bond Street Books
RIGHTS SOLD: Chinese – China South Booky, Czech – Argo, Danish – Gads, Dutch – Atlas-Contact, German – Droemer, Italian – under offer, Swedish – Massolit, Turkish – Yapi Kredi
PUBL. DATE: May 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: A GOD IN RUINS will follow Teddy, the younger brother of Ursula Todd, the protagonist from Life After Life.
In Life After Life, Ursula lived through the turbulent events of the 20th century again and again. Her younger brother Teddy and his fate was a key feature in the novel. In A GOD IN RUINS, Atkinson will focus on Teddy, would-be poet, RAF bomber pilot, husband and father – as he navigates the perils and progress of the 20th century. For all Teddy endures in battle, his greatest challenge will be to face living in a future he never expected to have. A GOD IN RUINS is a masterful companion to Life After Life, and will prove once again that Kate Atkinson is one of the finest novelists of our age.
Kate Atkinson was born in York and now lives in Edinburgh. Her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and her last novel, Life After Life, won the 2013 Costa Novel Award and the IBW Book Award for 2014. The book, Atkinson’s eighth novel, was also shortlisted for a number of awards, including the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
SALES OF LIFE AFTER LIFE: Bulgarian – Colibri, Chinese/complex – Global Group Holdings, Ltd., Chinese/simplified –China South Booky Culture Media Co Ltd, Croatian – Vukovic & Runjic, Czech – Argo, Danish – Gads, Dutch – Atlas-Contact, Estonian – Ersen, Finnish – Schildts & Soderstroms, French – Grasset, German – Droemer, Greek – Metaihmio Publications, Hebrew – Miskal, Hungarian – Geopen, Italian – Casa Editrice Nord, Japanese – Tokyo Sogensha, Korean – Munhak Sasang, Latvian – Zvaigzne ABC, Lithuanian – Tyto Alba, Macedonian – Matica, Norwegian - Press, Polish – Czarna Owca, Portuguese/Brazil – Editora Globo, Portuguese/Portugal – Relogio d`Agua Editores Lda, Romanian – Editora Art, Russian – Azbooka, Slovak – Ikar, Spanish – Editorial Lumen, Swedish – Massolit, Turkish – Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, Vietnamese – Youth Books
THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS by Aleksandar Hemon 
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – FSG
RIGHTS SOLD: Bosnian – Buybook, German – Knaus, Italian – Einaudi, Portuguese/ Brazil – Rocco, Spanish – under offer
PUBL. DATE: May 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS is about an aspiring screenplay writer, full of script ideas but unable to follow through with any of them, whose life changes when he becomes entangled with a Bosnian woman and her violently jealous husband. Sardonic, tender, very cheeky THE MAKING OF ZOMBIE WARS will bring Hemon's writing to a whole new readership.
Aleksandar Hemon was born in 1964, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He came to the US as part of a month long cultural exchange program of journalists and was supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1st 1992, the same day that Sarajevo came under siege so was instead granted political asylum in the US. Hemon began writing fiction in English in 1995 and one of the first stories he wrote in English, “Islands”, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1999 (ed. Amy Tan). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. From 2010 to 2013 he served as editor of Best European Fiction anthologies (Dalkey Archives).
SALES OF THE BOOK OF MY LIVES: Bosnian – Buybook, Croatian – V.B.Z, Dutch – Karaat, German – Knaus, Italian – Einaudi, Norwegian – Gyldendal, Portuguese/Brazil – Rocco, Serbian – Rende, Slovene - Modrijan zalozba, Spanish - Duomo
MAKING NICE by Matt Sumell
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Holt, UK - Harvill Secker
RIGHTS SOLD: German – Fischer, Italian – Einaudi/Stile Libero, Spanish – Turner Publicaciones
PUBL. DATE: February 2015
ABOUT THE BOOK: A gut-punch of a debut about love, grief, and family; the arrival of a brilliant, infectious new voice for our age. In Matt Sumell’s blazing first book, our hero Alby flails wildly against the world around him—he punches his sister (she deserved it), "unprotectos" broads (they deserved it and liked it), gets drunk and picks fights (all deserved), defends defenseless creatures both large and small, and spews insults at children, slow drivers, old ladies, and every single surviving member of his family. In each of these stories Alby distills the anguish, the terror, the humor, and the strange grace—or lack of—he experiences in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Swirling at the center of Alby’s rage is a grief so big, so profound, it might swallow him whole. As he drinks, screws, and jokes his way through his pain and heartache, Alby’s anger, his kindness, and his capacity for good bubble up when he (and we) least expect it. One part Junot Diaz and one part Barry Hannah, Sumell delivers "a naked rendering of a heart sorting through its broken pieces to survive.*"
MAKING NICE is a powerful, full-steam-ahead ride that will keep you laughing even as you try to catch your breath; a new classic about love, loss, and the fine line between grappling through grief and fighting for (and with) the only family you’ve got.
Matt Sumell is a graduate of UC Irvine's MFA program where he was a recipient of a Glenn Schaeffer Award as well as an Arlene Cheng Fellowship, and his fiction has since appeared in the Paris Review, Electric Literature (twice), Noon, Esquire magazine, Byliner.com and elsewhere.
MUSIC FOR WARTIME by Rebecca Makkai
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Viking 
PUBL. DATE: June 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: A spellbinding short story collection from a master of the form, the acclaimed author of The Hundred-Year House.
Rebecca Makkai’s first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the acclaimed writer returns with a highly anticipated collection of short stories marked with her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.
A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, while her own relationship falls apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction.
Makkai has been anthologized four times in The Best American Short Stories as well as The Best American Nonrequired Reading. These wide-ranging and deeply moving stories—some inspired by her family history—will delight her many fans, as well as readers of Lorrie Moore, Jim Shepard, and Karen Russell.
SALES OF THE BORROWER: Dutch – Bruna, French – Gallimard, German – Ullstein, Italian – Piemme, Portuguese/Portugal – Asa, Russian – Corpus, Spanish – Maeva
THREE MOMENTS OF AN EXPLOSION by China Mieville
AGENT: Mic Cheetham Agency
PUBLISHER(S): UK – Pan Macmillan
PUBL. DATE: July 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
A highly anticipated collection of short fiction listed in the Guardian's 'Essential Literary Calendar' for 2015 from one of the most exciting and original authors writing today.
The multi-award-winning China Miéville has been called 'the equal of David Mitchell or Zadie Smith' (Scotland on Sunday), whose 'inventiveness and precision is awesome' (Independent), and who writes with 'an imagination of immense power' (Guardian). In this extraordinary series of stories, defying definitions and literary stereotyping, he once again proves why he 'is one of the most interesting and promising writers to appear in the last few years in any genre' (Carlos Ruiz Zafon).
In these stories, glistening icebergs float above urban horizons; a burning stag runs wild through the city; the ruins of industry emerge unsteadily from the sea; and the abandoned generations in a decayed space-elevator look not up at the stars but down at the Earth. Ranging from portraits of childhood to chilling ghost stories, from dystopian visions to poignant evocations of uncanny love, with beautiful prose and melancholy wit, this breath-taking collection poses searching questions of what it is to be human in an unquiet world. It is a humane and unsentimental investigation of our society, our world, and ourselves.
SALES OF EMBASSYTOWN: Bulgaria – Enthusiast, Czech – Laser, French – Poche, German – Luebbe/ Heyne, Hungarian – Agave Kiado, Japanese – Hayakawa, Polish – Zysk, Romanian – Art, Russian – Eksmo, Spanish – Penguin Random House, Turkish – Yordam Kitap
THE TUSK THAT DID THE DAMAGE by Tania James 
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Knopf
RIGHTS SOLD: Italian – under offer
PUBL. DATE: March 2015
ABOUT THE BOOK: This is a novel about the elephants of Southern India and about the folklore and mythology that surrounds them. About the villagers Jayan, and Manu who fear and hunt them for their tusks; the bureaucrats and rangers and keepers who have to control them - and those who hunt them; and the outsiders Emma and Teddy who want to film them to depict their story for the world. And at the heart of this novel is one elephant - the Gravedigger or Sooryamangalam Sreeganeshan - orphaned, huge, man-killing, who affects everyone he meets.
Born in Chicago, James moved to Louisville with her family when she was 5. She said she lived an 'insular' life growing up in Louisville's East End suburbs, never really fitting in when she tried to hang out in arty, bohemian neighborhoods like the Highlands. Despite being drawn to writing early on, it would be a while before the thought of pursuing writing as a career would cross James' mind. The seed was planted during her days at the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts when she was a student at Kentucky Country Day School. She confessed that the reason she wanted to be part of the program was because she figured it would look good on her resume. But that changed when she was introduced to African-American writers like the noted poet Frank X Walker. After graduating from Kentucky Country Day, James went on to study filmmaking at Harvard University but never lost her itch to write fiction. She would eventually go to Columbia University for a master's of fine arts in writing.
SALES OF THE ATLAS OF UNKNOWNS: Dutch - Atlas-Contact , French – Stock, German – Albrecht Knaus, Hebrew – Matar, Italian - Guanda, Spanish - Salamandra
YOSSI TAVILI STANDS IN THE FIELDS by Bethany Ball
AGENT: Duvall Osteen, Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Grove/Atlantic
PUBL. DATE: Summer 2016
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: A multigenerational family saga set in Israel, New York City, and Connecticut.
Yossi Tavili Stands in the Fields captures the cultural and communal art of storytelling in a tightly wrought narrative that explores the moral complexities of the divide between religious tradition and secular life. The novel maneuvers through the growth of a Jewish settlement at various points in time, from the early 1900s to 2011, with an almost fable-like exploration of human behavior, and the consequences of circumstance.
In the foreground, we meet Aaron Grossman, an Israeli ex-Navy Seal, who is falsely accused of money laundering through his hedge fund. His American wife, Carolyn, makes meager attempts to hold their family of five together, as she readily embraces her own demons. As the story unfolds across its nearly one hundred year span, we encounter major players both in and outside of the Grossman family, learning their secrets and engaging in their politics, from the founding of the kibbutz that ties them together, to Wall Street office that ultimately tears them apart. It's a powerhouse of a novel, short, elegant, and deftly linked through generations.
Some early praise:
Brian Morton (Starting Out in the Evening) "Bethany Ball lays bare the complexities of modern life in prose that has the resonant simplicity of a fairy tale. Readers who love I.B. Singer and Grace Paley now have another writer to adore."
David Hollander (L.I.E.) “In Yossi Tavili Stands in the Fields, Bethany Ball peels back the manicured surface of family and community to surgically expose a world of hurt. Told in a razor-sharp prose that takes no prisoners, this is that rare book that can make you laugh while it’s breaking your heart. I couldn’t get enough.”
LITERARY FICTION WITH A HISTORICAL SETTING
LANDFALLS by Naomi Williams
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – FSG, UK - Little, Brown
RIGHTS SOLD: German – DuMont, Italian – Neri Pozza
PUBL. DATE: August 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: In 1785, two French frigates, L’Astrolabe and La Boussole, sailed away on a voyage of exploration around the world, following Louis XVI’s instructions to “complete the globe”. The expedition’s leader was the deliciously named Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse. The ships crossed the Atlantic and rounded the Horn without incident, charting previously unknown islands and bays, fixing cartographic errors, describing the natives they encountered, while looking for economic and political opportunities for France. Disaster struck the following year when 21 crewmembers drowned in a boating accident in Alaska. Then, in 1787, a violent interaction between the Frenchmen and a group of Samoans, resulted in the deaths of 12 members of the expedition and an unknown number of islanders. The expedition pressed on, however, and in March 1788 sailed from Botany Bay, Australia, for what was to be the last leg of their journey. But no European ever saw them again, and their fate remained a mystery for almost 40 years, until evidence of the ships, both wrecked, turned up off the coast of Vanikoro in the Solomon Islands. The story of this expedition is told in LANDFALLS.
Naomi J. Williams was born in Japan and spoke no English until she was six years old. Her short fiction has appeared in journals such as A Public Space, One Story, The Southern Review, and The Gettysburg Review. In 2009, she received a Pushcart Prize and a Best American Honorable Mention. Naomi has an MA in Creative Writing from UC Davis. She lives with her family in Davis, California.
PARIS RED by Maureen Gibbon
AGENT: Aragi, Inc.
PUBLISHER(S): US – Norton
RIGHTS SOLD: French - Christian Bourgois Editeur
PUBL. DATE: April 2015
ABOUT THE BOOK: Paris, 1862. A city of cafes, dance halls and new boulevards. A young woman in a threadbare dress and green boots talks to a handsome stranger. The encounter will change her life—and the art world—forever.
When Victorine Meurent meets Édouard Manet on a Paris street, she doesn't know his identity or reputation. She's seventeen and wants experience, attention, and more than what she has in life. Flâneur and boulevardier, Manet observes and embraces all of Paris. He's intrigued by Victorine’s manner—and her red hair.
With Manet, Victorine begins to move through layers of Parisian society and meets writers and artists like Baudelaire and Alfred Stevens. Stirred by his young model’s direct gaze and dirty feet, Manet leaves behind his academic training to fully embrace the modern. He becomes the painter that all of Paris knows, the painter that scandalizes the most cosmopolitan of cities when he exhibits Olympia. Manet becomes himself because of Victorine. But what does she become, that figure on the divan?
In a novel filled with singular detail and written in a modern voice, Maureen Gibbon takes us inside Manet’s studio and onto the streets of Paris in the 1860s. She gives us the voice and vision of the woman who may be the most famous artist’s model of all time.
Maureen Gibbon is the author of Swimming Sweet Arrow, a novel; Magdalena, a collection of prose poems; and Thief, a novel. A graduate of Barnard College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Gibbon was awarded a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship in 2001 and Loft McKnight Artist Fellowships in 1992 and 1999. In 2006, she received a Mill Foundation Artist Residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute.
SALES OF THIEF: Italian - Casa Editrice Bompiani
SHE WEEPS EACH TIME YOU’RE BORN by Amy Quan Barry
AGENT: Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency
PUBLISHER(S): US – Pantheon
PUBL. DATE: February 2015
ABOUT THE BOOK: While much is known about the American war in Vietnam, the story of what happened in that country in the decades before and after the fall of Saigon remains little examined in western literature. Epic in scope, Amy Quan Barry’s exciting debut novel SHE WEEPS EACH TIME YOU’RE BORN takes the reader on a mystical journey through Vietnamese history as experienced by Rabbit, a young girl born a few years before reunification, under mysterious circumstances and with the otherworldly power of hearing the voices of the dead. The novel follows Rabbit as she comes of age in a newly reunited nation experiencing painful growth pangs of its own, from the French annexation in 1875 to the WWII rubber plantations, the reeducation camps, and modern-day Hanoi's legendary thirty-six streets. With its use of magical realism as Rabbit encounters the spirits of the dead, the novel follows in the tradition of such novels as One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved, works similarly interested in reconstructing tumultuous historical periods through a painterly human lens. Ultimately, this is the story of one woman's struggle to unearth the true history of Vietnam while simultaneously carving a place for herself within it.
Amy Quan Barry was born in Saigon and raised on Boston’s north shore. She is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she recently directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing.
UPMARKET COMMERCIAL FICTION
AFTER BEFORE by Jemma Wayne
AGENT: Watson, Little Ltd
PUBLISHER: UK – Legend Press
PUBL. DATE: June 2014
ABOUT THE BOOK: Longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2015.
During a cold, British winter, three women reach crisis point. Emily, an immigrant survivor of the Rwandan genocide, is existing but not living. Vera, a newly Christian Londoner is striving to live a moral life, her happiness constantly undermined by secrets from her past. Lynn, battling with an untimely disease, is consumed by bitterness and resentment of what she hasn’t achieved and what has been snatched from her.
Each suffering their own demons, their lives have been torn open by betrayal: by other people, by themselves, by life itself. But as their paths interweave, they begin to unravel their beleaguered pasts, and inadvertently change each other’s futures.
WHEN THE MOON IS LOW by Nadia Hashimi
AGENT: The Helen Heller Agency
PUBLISHER(S): US – William Morrow
PUBL. DATE: July 2015
MATERIAL: ms available
ABOUT THE BOOK: When Fereiba's husband Mahmood is taken one night by the Taliban and never seen again, she realizes she and her young family must flee Kabul and make their way to Western Europe to join her sister. This is a novel of their desperate attempt to reach London, via Turkey, Greece, Italy and France and the hardships and injustices they must face along the way - it is the universal story of the quandary of refugees forced into an underworld by the desire to have a better life. Told through Fereiba's eyes and those of her young son Saleem, forced to grow up well before his time it is a glimpse in to a dark world of harrowing risks and depravation, but also a story that celebrates at its core, the kindness of strangers and the overwhelming bond of a family's love for one another as they struggle for the chance of a normal life.
PREVIOUS SALES: French – Bragelonne, German – Luebbe, Indonesian - PT Bhuana Ilmu Populer, Italian – Piemme, Norwegian – Cappelen Damm, Polish – Illuminatio, Turkish – Lemur Kitap
MY SISTER'S SECRET by Tracy Buchanan
AGENT: Hardman & Swainson
PUBLISHER(S): UK - Avon
PUBL. DATE: August 2015
MATERIAL: ms due May 2015
For fans of Liane Moriarty and Diane Chamberlain, My Sister’s Secret is a novel filled to the brim with secrets, lies and shocking twists that keep readers guessing right until the last tantalising page.
Now: When rescue diver Willow discovers an old map charting the locations of submerged forests – the underwater remains of fossilized trees from ancient times – she decides to fulfil her mother Charity’s dream of visiting each forest. But as she delves deeper into her mother’s past, she’s shocked to uncover a web of secrets and lies all stemming from one fateful night.
Then: After Charity is made redundant from her counselling job, she’s forced to return to the seaside town she’s spent years running away from after her sister Faith was killed in a hit and run. When she discovers her ex-boyfriend Niall has returned home too, painful memories from the night Faith died resurface and tensions rise with her remaining sister, Hope.
When Niall convinces Charity to fulfil the sisters’ dream of visiting submerged forests around the world, Charity finds the past catching up with her, leading to a devastating showdown.
UPMARKET FICTION WITH A HISTORICAL SETTING
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