Frankfurt Book Fair 2021

Highlights
2
 Welcome to our Frankfurt 2021 Translation Rights Guide

Contents
Fiction pp. 4-12
Non-Fiction pp. 14-26

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 FICTION

LE MAÎTRE DE L’OCÉAN (THE MASTER OF THE OCEAN)

Diane Ducret
The Master of The Ocean is a gripping spiritual novella, inspired by the
French ‘Contes philosophiques’, popular internationally in the 18th and
19th Century. Diane Ducret has created an adventure story for our times,
exploring Taoism and the wisdom of Lao Tzu.
Hubei, China. One courageous mother, Yunhe, toils daily in the
fields to provide for her only son. Just before Yunhe’s untimely death,
she dreams of a golden sanctuary, high in the mountains. Her son decides
to dedicate his life to understanding his mother’s final dream. His uncle,
takes him to the Celestial Master of a Taoist temple in the Wudang
mountains. There, he is invited to join the Taoist temple, but he
struggles to live an ascetic life. He experiences an overwhelming call to
explore the ocean. The Celestial Master agrees on the basis that he
should only return once he has heard what the ocean has to say.
Equipped with a letter, the boy travels to Marseille, where a Priest
takes him to the monastery of Mont St Michel. In Europe, he learns
about Christianity, he is inspired by surfers who embrace the sea, and he
dives deep into the ocean to hear its heartbeat. Only when he has
France: Flammarion, January 2022 understood what the ocean has to say, will he return to the Hubei
mountains and discover his true calling.
Material: The Master of the Ocean fuses Eastern philosophy and Western
French MS, 97 pp religion, while inviting the reader to travel alongside the protagonist on a
powerful journey of self-reflection.

“During the current health crisis, it has been life-saving to immerse

ourselves in this wonderfully written, spiritual novel, which inspires the
reader to focus on their own personal development. This is a novel about
peace, serenity and philosophy. Diane Ducret’s hero takes us on an epic
journey and alongside him, we experience a wonderful array of sensations
– a positive rebirth which takes place before our own eyes.”
Anna Pavlowitch, Director of Flammarion

Diane Ducret is the bestselling author of Les Femmes des Dictateurs (2011), which sold over 1 million copies and
was translated into 25 languages. In 2014, she wrote La Chair Interdite (The Forbidden Flesh). In 2018, Flammarion
published The best way to walk is that of the pink flamingo, an autobiographical novel, which was a bestseller in
France. In 2020, Flammarion published La Dictatrice to critical acclaim, a speculative dystopian novel, asking
what does it take for society's values to crumble in the face of a charismatic leader promising easy solutions.
TV rights to La Dictatrice have been optioned by Stacey Sher.
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 FICTION

LA DICTATRICE
Diane Ducret
For many years, the grumbles of revolt have been heard across Europe.
There is a widespread feeling of discontent, while citizens believe that
progress is lacking. Suddenly, a violent storm erupts. A young woman
rises among the crowd.
Munich, November 2023. During a popular protest, Aurore Henri
grabs hold of a rock and throws it in the face of the Head of State.
Behind her magnetic blue eyes is an iron will and a passionate hope, to
cure men of their destructive tendencies and build a bold new society
where peace and harmony reign.
Diane Ducret gives us an infinitely romantic vision of a West
which falls into chaos, before finding its new guide in a woman whose
motivations are as secret as her ambition is outrageous.

France: Flammarion, January 2020

Material:
French MS, 512 pp
English sample

Film/TV rights: FX Disney,

Stacey Sher “Diane Ducret excels at describing a world which is both plausible and
chilling.”
Point de Vue

“The strength of this novel lies is in its mixing of the future with the past,
in such a way that the worst parts are always more believable.”
Le Figaro

“Diane Ducret marks out a chilling dystopian novel, shockingly close to

our world, which keeps the reader on tenterhooks thanks to her controlled
and dynamic style.”
Midi

“A cautionary tale”
Sud Ouest

“This novel questions the popular assertion that the world would be better
if women were in power.”
Livres Hebdo

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 LITERARY CRIME

SHE AND I
Hannah King
Best friends share everything. But murder is different. Isn't it?

Keeley and Jude are closer than blood. Inseparable since childhood, they
share everything: clothes, secrets, booze – and blame. So when they wake
up after a new year's party to find Keeley's boyfriend stabbed to death
beside them, they agree to share something else: the story they'll tell the
police.
But who is that story really meant to protect? Is Jude risking her
bright future to protect her friend? Is there more to sharp-eyed Keeley
than she lets on? Or are they conspiring to let Keeley's brother get away
with the drugs he's been selling in their small town?
As the murder investigation sends ripples through their community,
the history of the girls' claustrophobic relationship comes under scrutiny –
and they start to realise they might not, always, have shared as much as
they thought.

Can their friendship survive sharing everything?

UK: Raven Books
(Bloomsbury), January 2022

Material: “She and I had me hooked from the very first page. Keeley and Jude share
MS, 301 pp everything, but have they shared too much? Hannah King creates fascinat-
ing characters that burst off the page in a vivid portrayal of life in a small
TV rights: Firebird town Northern Ireland. The twisty, unnerving story took off in unex-
pected directions, spiced with a murderous sense of humour. King really
understands suspense - I can't wait to read her next book.”
Holly Watt, author of The Hunt and the Kill

Hannah King was born in County Down in 1994. She received a First Class degree in English with Creative
Writing from Queen’s University Belfast in 2016, and went on become a proof-reader at a Magic Circle law
firm while studying for her Master of Arts in Creative Writing in 2017. Her short story ‘A Fair Grief’ featured
in the 2019 QUB publication Blackbird. She and I is her first novel.

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 LITERARY FICTION

BETWEEN TONGUES
Paul McQuade
Tongues cut out and sewn back in, girls change bodies, become wolves,
coyotes, birds, and on an island in the north of Scotland, an unexpected
grave digger tries to mourn a loss that can’t be said. The stories of
Between Tongues take us to mining camps in post-war Japan, where in ‘In
Ribbons’, foxes hunt in the night, and a young boy finds himself
confronted with a past that hasn’t quite vanished, while in ‘This
Impossible Flesh’, a couple commit themselves to the gruesome task of
making a family out of their own bodies. For readers of Camilla
Grudova, Daisy Johnson and Carmen Maria Machado, among others,
McQuade’s stories span myth and fable, pressing the limits of
technology and language, searching out those strange places, as in ‘Les
Archives du Coeur’, where people without voices find themselves.

UK: Confingo, August 2021 “Equally at home with the weird and the everyday, McQuade is a
singular talent worth seeking out.”
Material: The Herald
MS, 157 pp
“A remarkable book. Paul McQuade isn’t one for the future, but one
for now.’
Bookmunch

Paul McQuade is an award-winning writer and translator. He was born in Glasgow and has since lived in
Edinburgh, Paris and Tokyo. He is currently based in upstate New York, where he recently completed a
PhD in Japanese literature at Cornell. He was awarded the Sceptre Prize for New Writing 2014 and was the
recipient of the ACF London Writing Prize 2017. His stories have been shortlisted for the White Review
Prize, the Bridport Prize and The Master’s Review Award. He has also been published in Gutter magazine,
Pank, Structo and Minor Literatures, and has had stories featured in anthologies including Best British Short
Stories 2019, Best of British Fantasy 2018, Out There: An Anthology of Scottish LGBT Writing and Haunted Voices:
An Anthology of Gothic Storytelling from Scotland. He is currently working on a novel.

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 LITERARY FICTION

THE BIRD TATTOO

Dunya Mikhail
Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2021

For readers who loved Khaled Husseini’s bestselling novel The Kite
Runner, a dramatic and moving story spanning two tumultuous decades
in Iraq.
Helen is a young Yazidi woman, living with her family in a
mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird
caught in a trap, and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first he
is angry at Helen for undoing his work, but soon he sees the error of his
ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again.
Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and start a family. But
their happy existence is shattered when Elias, a journalist, goes missing. A
brutal Organization is taking over the land, its members cloaking their
violence in religious devotion. Helen’s search for her husband results in
her own captivity: she is transported to a market and callously sold to the
highest bidder, again and again.
She eventually escapes her captors and is reunited with some of her
Arabic: Dar Alrafidain, family. But her life is forever changed. Elias remains missing and her sons,
June 2020 now young recruits to the Organization, are like strangers. Will she find
harmony and happiness again?
Material: Chronicling a world of great upheaval, love and loss, beauty and
Arabic MS, 256 pp horror, The Bird Tattoo will stay in readers’ minds long after the last page.
English translation by the
author

Rights sold:
Germany - Fischer

Publishers of The
Beekeeper of Sinjar:
France - Grasset
Italy - Nutrimenti
Poland - Otwarte
Portugal - ASAII
UK - Serpent’s Tail
US - New Directions

Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) worked as a journalist for the Baghdad Observer until, facing increasing threats from
the Iraqi authorities, she fled first to Jordan, then to the United States. In 2001, she was awarded the UN
Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. Her first book in English, the poetry collection The War Works
Hard (2005), won a 2004 Pen Translation Fund Award. Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea (2009) won the 2010
Arab American Book Award for poetry. Her third collection, The Iraqi Nights, was published in 2014. In 2018,
she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and published her first work of literary non-fiction, The Beekeeper of
Sinjar, to great acclaim. Her fourth collection, In Her Feminine Sign, was released in summer 2019, and her debut
novel, The Bird Tattoo, was published in Arabic in 2020.
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 THRILLER

THE RETREAT
Sarah Pearse
The follow-up to the Sunday Times and New York Times
bestseller The Sanatorium

One June day, in the grip of a heatwave, a group of friends and family
arrive at Lumen, an exclusive wellness resort on an island a few miles off
Devon’s dramatic south coast. It’s meant to be a family reunion, a
chance to let off steam, but the morning after they arrive, a body is
found on the rocks below the resort’s clifftop yoga pavilion.
The island, known locally as Reaper’s Rock because of the eerie
rocky outcrop that dominates the island, has a dark past. It’s still trying
to shake off the legacy of the Creacher Killings – a series of violent
murders on the island during a school adventure camp in 2002.
DS Elin Warner, only recently returned to work after a career
break, is assigned to the case, but her initial theories are soon discounted
when the body of another guest is found in a sinister setting. Elin
quickly realises she’s on the hunt for a ruthless killer.
With the police dealing with a major incident on the mainland,
Elin is forced to work the case alone. She’s desperate to prove herself,
UK: Transworld, April 2022
but rapidly has to face up to the island’s troubling past and her own
US: Pamela Dorman Books
memories of being on the island…
Material:
Praise for The Sanatorium
Edited MS due November
2021
“The Sanatorium is an absolutely splendid Gothic thriller – gracious in its
nods to the classic locked-room mystery, yet bold enough to burst out
Rights sold:
of that room through the window. Pearse writes prose fresh and crisp as
Brazil - Intrinseca
Swiss Alp powder, and her characters fascinate even as their numbers
Czech Republic - Euromedia
dwindle.”
France - Michel Lafon
A. J. Finn
Greece - Psychogios
Slovenia - Ucila
“Dark, suspenseful and downright chilling, The Sanatorium is a triumph.
Spain - Atico de los libros
It had me on the edge of my seat from the first page. Pearse has a big
future ahead of her.”
Sally Hepworth

Sarah Pearse studied English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick and then com-
pleted a Postgraduate Diploma in Broadcast Journalism at the University of Falmouth. After working in Lon-
don, she moved to Switzerland for several years, developing a love for the mountains, before returning to the
UK to work in PR for a multinational company. She eventually made the move back to Devon and has been
writing furiously ever since. Her debut thriller, The Sanatorium, was published in February 2021, entering
the Sunday Times chart at No. 3 four days after publication. The US edition was a Reese Witherspoon Book
Club pick, and entered the New York Times bestseller list at No. 5 a week after its release. Rights have been
sold in 29 territories and Film/TV rights optioned by Hyde Park/Studio Canal.
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 HISTORICAL THRILLER

THE RUST COUNTRY

Natasha Pulley
Before Chernobyl, there was City 40.

1963. Biochemist Valery Kolkhanov is serving a ten year sentence in a

Siberian labour camp when, with no warning and no explanation, he’s
transferred
His destination is City 40, one of the most important secret
nuclear facilities in the Soviet Union. Valery has been summoned here
as a researcher. Valery is overjoyed: not only is this the study of a
lifetime, but the city is wonderful. It’s modern, there’s real chocolate,
real bananas, and he isn’t starving to death any more.
But there are strict rules. Speak to no one outside. Never say City
40’s real name. Never stay outside for more than half an hour. Never
try to leave.
Soon, Valery begins to realize that the beautiful city and all the
unheard-of privileges of its citizens are covering over something
terribly wrong. Deep in a forest beyond the city, the trees are dying, and
villages stand in burned-out ruins.
UK/US: Bloomsbury, July 2022 It isn’t long before he’s faced with a horrible choice: keep quiet
at the cost of thousands of lives, or investigate and risk being sent back
Material: to the gulag — or worse.
MS, 319 pp

Publishers of The Kingdoms: Praise for The Kingdoms

Germany - Klett Cotta
Italy - Bompiani “Speculative fiction and historical fiction are closer cousins than one
might think, and alternate-history novels can give enterprising writers
the chance to work in both genres at once. Fans of such stories will be
richly entertained by the lavish world-building and breakneck plotting
of Natasha Pulley’s The Kingdoms…Beautiful, surreal imagery appears
throughout the novel, too...Clear a weekend if you can, and let yourself
be absorbed.”
The New York Times Book Review

Natasha Pulley is the author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Lost Future of Pepper-
harrow and The Kingdoms. An international bestseller, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street won a Betty Trask Award
and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award, the Locus Awards, and remained on the
Sunday Times bestseller list for much of summer 2016. The Bedlam Stacks was longlisted for the Walter Scott
Award and shortlisted for the Encore Award. Natasha has lived in Japan as a Daiwa Scholar, as well as China
and Peru. She recently sailed around the Outer Hebrides on a tall ship and was thrilled to encounter Eilean
Mor, the lighthouse featured in The Kingdoms. She teaches on the Bath Spa University’s Creative Writing BA,
alongside short course at the Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education, and gives Masterclasses for The
Guardian and for Arvon.

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 LITERARY FICTION

VOYEUR
Francesca Reece
A brilliant new voice in fiction, for readers of Naoise Dolan,
Anna Hope, Sally Rooney and Emma Jane Unsworth.

Leah, a young woman who has found herself 'ambitioned' out of

London, is now aimlessly adrift in Paris. Tired of odd jobs in cafés
and teaching English to unresponsive social media influencers, her
heart skips a beat when she spots an advert for a writer seeking an
assistant.
Michael was once the bright young star of the London literary
scene, now a washed-up author with writer's block. He doesn't place
much hope in the advert, but after meeting Leah is filled with an
inspiration he hasn't felt in years.
When Michael offers Leah the opportunity to join him and his
family in their rambling but glorious property in the south of France
for the summer, she finally feels her luck is turning. But as she begins
to transcribe the diaries from his debauched life in 1960s Soho,
something begins to nag at Leah's sense of fulfilment; that there might
UK: Tinder Press (Headline), be more to Michael than meets the eye.
June 2021 A sizzling, propulsive story of desire, power and the internalised
male gaze; a meditation on class, memory and the act of storytelling
Material: itself.
MS, 103,000 words

Rights sold: “It's devastatingly witty, compulsively readable and a little like Sally
Germany - Fischer Rooney meeting Martin Amis in Paris.”
Poland - Prószyński Francine Toon

Film/TV rights: Urban Myth “Unsettling, addictive, and razor-sharp, Francesca Reece is a
Film devastatingly compelling new voice in literary fiction”
Louise O’Neill

“Set to rule the literary summer.”

Sunday Times Style

“A sultry novel that shimmers.”

Daily Mail

Francesca Reece was born in Wales in 1991 and studied French and English Literature at King’s College
London and the Sorbonne. She was the 2019 recipient of the Desperate Literature Prize for her short story So
Long Sarajevo/They Miss You So Badly. This is her first novel, acquired by Tinder Press in a two-book pre-empt.
She is now working on her second novel.
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 THRILLER

SUNDIAL
Catriona Ward
‘I feel her, the old Rob, when I come to Sundial, hiding in the dawn
and at the edges of things; the ghost of who I once was. But this is the
only place where Callie and I can work things out. I buried my old self
at Sundial. We need to leave parts of Callie here, too.’
Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones
and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because she fears what
Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds
her of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her
childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she
will have to make a terrible choice.
Callie is afraid of her mother. Rob has begun to look at her
strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite
her. And Callie is beginning to wonder if only one of them will leave
Sundial alive...
From the bestselling author of The Last House on Needless
Street comes a stunning thriller exploring the toxicity of the mother-
daughter bond, and the power of the past to twist the present.
UK: Viper, March 2022
US: Tor Nightfire, March 2022
Praise for The Last House on Needless Street
Material:
MS, 90,000 words “The buzz is real.. I haven't read anything this exciting since Gone Girl.”
Stephen King
Rights sold:
France - Sonatine “This spectacular gothic fantasy is one of the most extraordinary thrillers
Italy - Sperling of the year.”
Poland - Wydawnictwo Poznańskie Daily Mail

“This is the most gloriously complex, shifting story, deeply disturbing yet
also, somehow, heart-warming.”
The Observer

“A dark, audacious highwire act of a novel.”

The Guardian

Catriona Ward was born in Washington, DC and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen,
and Morocco. She read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford and is a graduate of the Creative Writing MA at the
University of East Anglia. Her debut Rawblood (W&N, 2015) won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fanta-
sy Awards, was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award and a WHSmith Fresh Talent title.
Her second novel, Little Eve (W&N, 2018) won the Shirley Jackson Award 2018, was a Guardian best book of
2018 and won the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel 2019. She is the only woman to have won the
award twice. Her third novel, The Last House On Needless Street (Viper 2021) was a BBC2 Between The Covers
Pick, and a Richard & Judy Book Club pick. Film rights were optioned by Andy Serkis’s The Imaginarium.

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NON FICTION

13
 CURRENT AFFAIRS

THE FORTY YEAR WAR IN AFGANISTAN

Tariq Ali
The story of NATO’s disastrous occupation of Afghanistan, and how it
repeated the mistakes of the Soviet occupation which preceded it.
The NATO occupation of Afghanistan is over, and a balance-sheet
can be drawn. These essays on war and peace in the region reveal Tariq
Ali at his sharpest and most prescient.
Rarely has there been such an enthusiastic display of international
unity as that which greeted the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Compared to Iraq, Afghanistan became the “good war.” But a stalemate
ensued, and the Taliban waited out the NATO contingents. Today, with
the collapse of the puppet regime in Kabul, what does the future hold
for a traumatized Afghan people? Will China become the dominant
influence in the country?
Tariq Ali has been following the wars in Afghanistan for forty
years. He opposed Soviet military intervention in 1979, predicting
disaster. He was also a fierce critic of its NATO sequel, “Operation
Enduring Freedom.” In a series of trenchant commentaries, he described
the tragedies inflicted on Afghanistan, as well as the semi-Talibanization
UK/US: Verso, November 2021 and militarization of neighbouring Pakistan. Most of his predictions
proved accurate. The Forty Year War in Afghanistan brings together the
Material: best of his writings and includes a new introduction.
MS, 288 pp

Writer, renowned journalist and film-maker Tariq Ali was born in Lahore. He graduated from Oxford Univer-
sity and on leaving went on to lead the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. During the 1980s he owned his own
independent production company, Bandung, which produced programmes for Channel 4 in the UK. He is a
regular broadcaster on BBC Radio and contributes to magazines and newspapers including The Guardian and
the London Review of Books. He is editorial director of London publisher Verso and is on the board of the New
Left Review, for whom he is also an editor. His fiction includes a series of historical novels about Islam: Shadows
of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin (1998), The Stone Woman (2000), A Sultan in Palermo (2005)
and Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010). His non-fiction includes 1968: Marching in the Streets (1998), a social histo-
ry of the 1960s, The Obama Syndrome (2010) and The Dilemmas of Lenin (2017).

14
 HISTORY

GLYPH
Daniel Harbour
Glyph is an enthralling history of decipherment. Describing how codes
were cracked and scripts unlocked, often for the first time in millennia,
it will follow the paths of the great decipherments from Mayan to
Egyptian Hieroglyphs, and from Ancient Chinese to modern day
ciphers.
Glyph will tell tales of human obsession and frustration, delving
into the lives and minds of the individuals who dedicated themselves
to unlocking dead languages. However, alongside being a straight-
forward narrative, Glyph will also offer an extra dimension. Readers
will be able to solve the mysteries of dead scripts for themselves as
they progress through the book.

UK/US: Bloomsbury, Autumn

2023

Material:
Proposal
MS due March 2022

Rights sold:
France - Flammarion (pre-empt)
Germany - Aufbau Verlag
Netherlands - Nieuw Amsterdam
Spain - Critica

Daniel Harbour is a linguist with a particular interest in endangered minority languages and ancient scripts.
Educated at Oxford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the Professor of the Cognitive
Science of Language at Queen Mary University of London and is one of the few people in the world, beside
tribal elders, familiar with the Kiowa language of Oklahoma. Beyond academia, he is the author of An
Intelligent Person’s Guide to Atheism and has translated little known sources on Plains and Zionist history
from six languages. He is also a senior member of the UK Linguistics Olympiad and has been interviewed on
language, atheism, poetry, and extraterrestrials on television and radio in the UK, US, and Australia.
15
 PSYCHOLOGY

5 ROWS ALL COUPLES (NEED TO) HAVE

Jo Harrison
A route map for how to have better relationships.

We often have the same rows with our partners over and over again.
This is because there are 5 distinct issues that all couples have got to
try and work out if they are going to have a healthy, functioning
relationship.
Grounded in her experience in psychotherapy, Joanna Harrison
asks us to think about the problems and difficulties we might all be
having in our relationships – and offers some ideas about how to
improve things for the better.

UK: Profile Books, June 2022

Material:
MS due November 2021

Joanna Harrison is a wife, mum, experienced couple therapist and former divorce lawyer, all of which have
led her to conclude that relationships are hard work, and that we all need all the help we can get. She is a sen-
ior clinician at Tavistock Relationships, where she has worked with all sorts of couples from London since
her training there over 15 years ago. She also works in private practice in central London, and has developed
a particular expertise in working alongside solicitors to support people going through a divorce.

16
 HISTORY

THE BLAZING WORLD: A History of Revolutionary

England, 1600-1700
Jonathan Healey
The seventeenth century was a revolutionary age for the English. It
started with them suddenly ruled by a Scotsman, and ended in the
shadow of an invasion by the Dutch. Under James I, England suffered
terrorism and witch panics. Under his son Charles, state and society
collapsed into civil war, to be followed by an army coup and regicide.
For a short time England was a republic. There were no boundaries to
politics. In fiery, plague-ridden London, in coffee shops and alehouses,
new ideas were forged that were angry, populist, and almost impossible
for monarchs to control.
But the story of this century is less well known than it should be.
The political narrative of the Stuart Age has long seemed the
unattractive sequel to the more glamorous Tudors. Myths have
accumulated around key figures like cobwebs obscuring an old antique.
The Gunpowder Plot and the Great Fire of London have stuck in the
popular mind, but the Civil War is a half-remembered mystery to many.
And yet the seventeenth century has never seemed more relevant. The
British constitution is currently once again being bent and contorted,
UK: Bloomsbury, Autumn and there is a clash of ideologies reminiscent of when roundhead fought
2022 cavalier. The Blazing World brings the story of this strange, twisting,
US: Knopf fascinating century to a bigger audience. It shows a society in sparkling
detail, using as many unpublished manuscripts as possible. It was a new
Material: world of wealth, creativity, and daring curiosity, but also of greed,
Proposal and sample chapter pugnacious arrogance, and colonial violence. A society on fire, but a
MS due October 2021 society simultaneously forging the future.

Jonathan Healey is a historian of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He writes history from the
bottom up, focusing on ordinary people – their lives, loves, culture and politics. He is Associate Professor in
Social History at Oxford, the university from which he got his doctorate in 2008. He lives in London, and
can usually be found brandishing an obscure manuscript at the National Archives. The Blazing World is his
first book.

17
 MEMOIR/CURRENT AFFAIRS

THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU HERE

Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century
Fiona Hill
Fiona Hill grew up in a world of terminal decay. The last of the local mines
had closed, businesses were shuttering, and despair was etched in the faces
around her. Her father urged her to get out of their blighted corner of
northern England: “There is nothing for you here, pet,” he said.
The coal-miner’s daughter managed to go further than he ever could
have dreamed. She studied in Moscow and at Harvard, became an
American citizen, and served three U.S. Presidents. But in the heartlands of
both Russia and the United States, she saw troubling reflections of her
home-town and similar populist impulses. By the time she offered her brave
testimony in the first impeachment inquiry of President Trump, Hill knew
that the desperation of forgotten people was driving American politics over
the brink—and that we were running out of time to save ourselves from
Russia’s fate. In this powerful, deeply personal account, she shares what she
has learned, and shows why expanding opportunity is the only long-term
hope for our democracy.

US: Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, October 2021
"This book has a miraculous quality... As a memoir this is hard to put down; if
you are seeking a better American future you should pick it up."
Material:
Timothy Snyder, Yale University, New York Times best-selling author
MS, 432 pp
of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century

“[An] ambitious, immensely compelling memoir, Hill interweaves her

interesting life story with events and issues she has continued to observe dur-
ing her career . . . Drawing insightful parallels between Trump and Putin, she
unpacks how the threat of populism can quickly undermine democracy . . . A
shrewd, absorbing memoir that casts a sharp eye on America's future while
offering feasible solutions for change.”
—Kirkus Reviews, *starred* review

Fiona Hill is the Robert Bosch Senior Fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe in the Foreign
Policy program at the Brookings Institution. From 2017 to 2019, she served as deputy assistant to the president
and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. From 2006 to 2009, she
served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. She has re-
searched and published extensively on issues related to Russia, the Caucasus, Central Asia, regional conflicts,
energy, and strategic issues. Coauthor of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin and The Siberian Curse: How Communist
Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold, she holds a master’s degree in Soviet studies and a doctorate in history from
Harvard University and a master’s in Russian and modern history from St. Andrews University in Scotland. She
also has pursued studies at Moscow’s Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. Hill is a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations and lives in the Washington, DC, area.

18
 ACTIVISM

THE ENTANGLED ACTIVIST

Anthea Lawson
The Entangled Activist is the story of how activism is entangled in the
problems it seeks to solve, told by a hard-hitting campaigner who learns
to see activism very differently. After years of thinking that her task was
to ‘get the bastards,’ campaigner, writer and reporter Anthea Lawson
came to see that activism often emerges from the same troubles it is trying
to fix, and that its demons, including righteousness, saviourism, burnout
and treating other people badly, can be a gateway to understanding the
depth of what really needs to change.
The Entangled Activist is a profound call to acknowledge our
entanglement with the world. To those sceptical of ‘activism’, it offers
possibilities for action beyond righteous reactivity. And to those who so
want to help, it unearths a different starting place, one where transforming
ourselves is inherently part of transforming the world.

UK: Persectiva Press, June 2021 “An essential manual for getting better both at activism and being
human.”
Material: Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for
MS, 140 pp People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

“Please read this book for your own sake and for all of us.”
Dr Gail Bradbrook, co-founder, Extinction Rebellion

“A book of liberating honesty.”

Alastair McIntosh, co-author of Spiritual Activism and
Riders on the Storm

Anthea Lawson has worked on campaigns to shut down tax havens, prevent banks from facilitating corrup-
tion and environmental devastation, and control the arms trade. At Global Witness, she launched a prize-
winning campaign that changed the rules on secret company ownership and resulted in new laws in dozens of
countries. She’s done a TEDx talk and had op-eds published in the Financial Times, Guardian and New York
Times; is an editor at the Dark Mountain Project, where she has published essays in book anthologies; and has
published two short stories in Andrew Simms’ edited collections There Was A Knock At the Door. She trained
and worked as a reporter at The Times, where she also had a regular book review column. She studied history at
Cambridge, graduating with a first.
19
 MEMOIR/SELF HELP

THE INSOMNIA DIARIES: How I Learned to Sleep Again

Miranda Levy

From summer 2010 until the start of 2019, Miranda Levy suffered from
severe, crippling insomnia. For a woman who seemed to have everything
going for her – a high-powered career running a magazine alongside a busy
family life – finding a cure was a must. And yet, there wasn’t one. No GP,
psychiatrist, hypnotist, acupuncturist, therapist or sleep clinic could find a
solution, and the days and months became years of sleepless torture. In
January 2019, things started to improve, and Miranda began talking about
what had happened to her. She began a blog, which turned into a column
for a national newspaper: friends and readers alike soon started sharing
their own battle stories with her (and there were many).
The science of sleep is all the rage, but sometimes there isn’t an easy
answer – it’s about adapting, and finding a way to manage nonetheless.
Through her personal journey and in her recent work as a journalist,
Miranda has tried, tested and written about every ‘remedy’ for insomnia
there is, and explores related issues such prescription pill dependency and
residential rehab. Drawing on expert advice and rigorous research as well as
her own experiences, she weaves a wealth of scientific and practical
UK: Aster (Octopus),
information into her story, as she encounters them.
June 2021
This is a darkly funny but ultimately hopeful story of one woman’s
struggle against chronic insomnia, a story of survival which seeks to bust
Material:
the myth that there’s a cure for everything in a world.
MS, 219 pp

Rights sold:
Korea - Sigma Books
Taiwan - The Walk Publishing A Financial Times readers' best 2021 summer book

“A powerful new book.”

The Daily Mail

“Quite the story... Fascinating”

Claire Byrne, RTE1

“This memoir meets manual with expert tips is both honest and helpful.”
Victoria Woodhall, Get the Gloss

Miranda Levy is a journalist and author of more than 25 years’ experience. Since gaining her UCL English
degree and postgrad journalism diploma from City University, she has worked on magazines
including Cosmopolitan and New Woman. Miranda then hacked it at the Daily Mail and Sunday Mirror before
heading back to glossies and the launches of Glamour and Grazia. She had two babies, wrote the Rough Guide
to Babies in 2006, and became editor of Mother & Baby, where she was twice nominated for a British Society
of Magazine Editors award. Now a freelance writer, Miranda covers many topics, but particularly health and
sleep – mainly for the Daily Telegraph, where she has written a weekly online column called ‘The Insomnia
Diaries’. Miranda has been published in titles as diverse as the Spectator, the Jewish Chronicle and the New York
Post.
20
 HISTORY

THE WEST: A NEW HISTORY IN 14 LIVES

Naoise Mac Sweeney

The West is not a thing or a place, but an idea. As far as ideas go, it is an
exceptionally powerful one - it has shaped the lives of millions, structured
the world around us, and changed the course of history - but it is an idea
nonetheless. The Invention of the West presents a radical new his-tory of the
West as a concept, challenging established myths about its origins and
development, and looking forward into its future.
Naoise questions the legitimacy of the West through the lives of
fouteen individuals throughout history, starting with Herodotus and ending
with Carrie Lam, the current Chief Executive of Hong Kong. The Invention
of the West offers a truly global retelling of history, drawing on lives and
sources that span from Germany to the USA, and from Ancient Greece to
Baghdad.

World English: W H Allen

(Ebury), August 2022

Material:
Proposal
MS due December 2021

Rights sold:
Portugal – Saida de Emergencia

Born in London to Chinese and Irish parents, Naoíse Mac Sweeney worked in international development
and as a model before pursuing an academic career. She is currently Professor of Classical Archaeology at the
University of Vienna, having previously taught for ten years at the University of Leicester. She has also held
positions at Cambridge and Harvard, and received her PhD in classics from Cambridge University in 2007.
Her last book, Troy: Myth, City, Icon, was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2018 and was shortlisted for
a PROSE award. The West is her first mainstream publication.

21
 POPULAR SCIENCE

ONE MEDICINE: How Kissing a Frog Can Save Your Life

Dr Matt Morgan
The need to adapt in order to survive on our brutal earth started at the
dawn of life 4.8 billion years ago. Whilst 6 million years of human
evolution have moulded us to cope with the challenges of everyday life,
when people become critically ill, doctors such as Dr Matt Morgan are
forced to explore radically different strategies to try and ensure their
patients’ survival. As an intensive care consultant, Morgan treats the
sickest patients, whose organs are failing and lives fading. Some patients
can be saved, thanks to the sophisticated technology and drugs that we
have developed. However, these technologies were only made possible
by looking at how animal species have adapted to life’s challenges.
Morgan will take readers on a journey to discover how some of
the greatest advances in human medicine were achieved through
understanding how animals survive. He will explore how all kinds of
creatures breathe, eat, sleep, reproduce and die. Real cases of patients
with critical illness will be used to illustrate the links between these
animal discoveries and the diagnoses, drugs and technologies used in
human medicine.
UK: Simon & Schuster,
Spring 2023

Material:
Proposal Praise for Critical
MS due early 2022
“A very special book filled with stories of survival, hope and loss.”
Rights sold: Adam Kay
Korea - Idea Shelf
Russia - Eksmo “A gripping realism of life in intensive care that reminds us how fragile
is life. Written with humility and insight this is an intriguing glimpse into
Previous publications: a world of life-saving decisions. It is life affirming and hugely re-
Critical (2019) assuring.”
Professor Dame Sue Black
Previous publishers:
China - Yilin Press Over 35,000 copies sold
Poland - Insignis
Portugal - 20/20

Dr Matt Morgan is a British intensive care doctor with a wealth of clinical, research and education experi-
ence. He has postgraduate qualifications in intensive care medicine, has worked in some of the largest UK
and Australasian hospitals and has a background in military medicine. He has won prizes for his research in-
terests and has completed a PhD using artificial intelligence to help solve complex medical problems. He is
passionate about medical education and public engagement, has written multiple scientific articles and con-
tributed to a number of books. He lives in Cardiff with his family. Matt’s first book Critical, a compelling and
insightful look into the world of intensive care medicine, was sold to Simon & Schuster UK in a six-figure,
two-book deal, and was published in 2019.

22
 HISTORY

WASHED
Norman Ohler

Washed is the secret story of the latter half of the 20th century,
from the author of global bestseller Blitzed.

In 1943, World War II is entering its decisive phase. The Wehrmacht are
retreating on all fronts, and their methamphetamine-stimulated victories
are already history. It is now that a new class of drugs, the hallucinogens,
enters the global stage. Their story – how they will shape the immediate
post-war era with effects lasting until the present day – is untold.
In this sweeping narrative following Arthur Giuliani, an American
vice cop wading through the physical and moral wreckage of 1945
Berlin, Norman Ohler shows us how the Americans adopted and further
advanced Nazi experiments and interrogation techniques to stop the
spread of communism after World War II. Where the Nazis had
experimented on concentration camp inmates, the Americans used
prison inmates; in place of the Nazi’s mescaline, they used a drug newly
discovered in Switzerland called LSD. They didn’t share Nazi ideology,
but the objective was similar: to control the human mind and become
master of another.
Germany: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, Spring 2023 But the U.S. establishment’s fascination with drugs as a means to
US: Houghton Mifflin further American power globally is only one side of this story.
Harcourt, 2023 WASHED also uncovers how Giuliani became the vector by which the
UK: Atlantic Books, 2023 Nazi’s punitive drug ideology as applied to their own citizens escaped
the ruins of the Third Reich. Ohler’s extensive archival research and
Material: trademark noirish style reveal in thrilling detail the true origins of the
Proposal War on Drugs, and how this ideology has warped Western politics and
MS due early 2022 societies in ways still with us today.
Rights sold:
France - Payot & Rivages
Hungary - Libri
Italy - Rizzoli

Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist. His fiction includes Die Quotenmaschine, the first hypertext-novel
worldwide, published in 1995, Mitte, and Stadt des Goldes (Ponte City in the English translation). His first non-
fiction book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany is an international bestseller and currently translated into over 25
languages. His second work of non-fiction, Harro und Libertas, was published in Germany in September 2019,
and was published in English as The Bohemians by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US) and The Infiltrators by
Atlantic Books (UK) in 2020. Ohler also works in film, and co-wrote Palermo Shooting with Wim Wenders as
well as the script Kilo with Dennis Hopper. He lives in Berlin with his two children.

23
 HISTORICAL BIOGRAPHPY

THE PORTINGALL QUEEN

Sophie Shorland
When Catherine of Braganza stepped from the swaying boards of the
Royal Charles onto solid ground at Portsmouth harbour, she brought
with her not only vast riches, spices and a hold full of sugar, but the
power of the Portuguese Empire, then at the height of its territories in
India and South East Asia. But any rise is followed by a fall, and part of
Catherine’s dowry was Bombay, considered an unimportant swamp by
many of her contemporaries. It was Britain’s first territory on the Indian
subcontinent, the base for the expansion of the East India Company,
and would become the economic powerhouse of Mumbai. As Portugal’s
territory and trade in India fell, Britain’s rose. Catherine’s life marks a
decisive turning point in this narrative of trade and empire.
According to history, however, Catherine of Braganza failed as
Queen of England. She was boring, plain, and neglected to produce an
heir to the throne. Three unforgiveable sins for a woman. Little matter
that she helped broker the longest alliance between two countries in
British or Portuguese history, or that she brought the first Indian
possession into British hands. Catherine also popularised trousers for
women, Baroque art and music, and – perhaps most long-lastingly – tea
UK: Atlantic Books, 2024 drinking, bringing England’s national drink into fashion for the first
(two-book deal) time. Her life was at the nexus of Old and New worlds, war and
exploration, frivolity and scientific enquiry.
Material:
Proposal and two sample chapters
MS due early 2023

Rights sold:
Portugal - PRH (six-way auction)

Sophie Shorland has a PhD in early modern literature, with a focus on the cultural history of the late Elizabe-
than and Jacobean periods. A former Research Fellow at the University of Warwick, she is interested in
queenship, celebrity, and the geopolitics of the past. She was shortlisted for the Tony Lothian Prize for a first-
time biography proposal, and in 2019 was a semi-finalist in the BBC New Generation Thinkers programme.
Sophie is currently editing an issue of the Royal Studies Journal, and has an upcoming chapter in Palgrave Mac-
millan’s ‘Queenship and Power’ series. The Portingall Queen is her first book; her second book will be about the
suitors of Elizabeth I.

24
 HISTORY

THE FRENCH MIND

Peter Watson
The idea of the French way of life has been an endless source of
fascination. When we think of France we think of food and fashion, of
intellect and taste, sociability and fierce national pride. What is behind
these
conceptions of the French? How did France become the country it is
today, and what makes it exceptional?
Journalist and historian Peter Watson sets out to answer these
questions in The French Mind, a dazzling cultural history of France that takes
us from the 17th century to the present day through the nation’s most
innovative and influential thinkers. He opens the doors to the Renaissance
salons that acted as a breeding ground for poets, philosophers and
scientists, and tells the extraordinary forgotten stories of the women who
ran these vibrant and definitively French institutions, fostering a culture of
intellectualism unmatched anywhere else in the word. On the way we
witness the rise of café and restaurants, the changing relationship between
the bourgeoisie and the French monarchy, and the bloody birth of a
republic. From the French revolution to the country’s occupation by Nazi
UK: Simon and Schuster,
Germany, Watson argues that a series of devastating military defeats played
March 2022
a key role in shaping the resilient character of a nation, as well as its
ex-ceptionalism.
Material:
The French Mind is a history of breath-taking scope, propelled forward
MS, 912 pp
by the characters Watson brings to vivid life: the artists, revolutionaries and
writers who loved, inspired and competed with one another over four
Previous publishers:
hundred years. It documents the shaping of a nation whose global
Spain - Critica
influence, in art and culture, politics and philosophy, cannot be
Taiwan - Linking Publishing
overestimated.
US - Public Affairs

Peter Watson is an intellectual historian, journalist, and the author of thirteen books, includ-
ing Convergence; Ideas: A History; The Age of Atheists; The German Genius; The Medici Conspiracy; and The Great Divide.
He has written for The Sunday Times, The New York Times, the Observer, and the Spectator. He lives in London.
25
 HISTORY

RULE, NOSTALGIA: The Backwards Story of a Very British

Obsession
Hannah Rose Woods
A tour through six centuries of looking back to the past, from the EU
Referendum to the English Reformation.
From politicians who draw on nostalgia for the ‘Blitz spirit’ to
reminiscences of an era when Britannia ruled the waves, England is a
nation obsessed with its past, yearning for the stability and certainty of a
vanished golden age that never quite existed.
Nostalgia, however, has a long history. For more than 500 years
politicians, poets, novelists and social commentators have mourned the
loss of old England, and called for a revival of simpler, better ways of
life. Beginning with an exploration of nostalgia in the 21st century,
Hannah Rose Woods delves back in time to uncover the nostalgias of
the past.

UK: Ebury, May 2022

Material:
Proposal and sample chapter
MS due November 2021

Hannah Rose Woods is a cultural historian who is particularly interested in the history of people’s emotional
lives. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge, where she taught modern British history, and in 2016
captained her college’s team to victory on University Challenge. She has written on history, politics and culture
for the New Statesman, the Guardian, Standpoint and Elle magazine, and has appeared as a contributor on Dan
Snow’s History Hit Podcast, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4. She lives in London and Nottinghamshire.

26
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