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ROGERS, COLERIDGE & WHITE LTD

RIGHTS LIST – LONDON


2009
ROGERS, COLERIDGE AND WHITE LTD
20 Powis Mews
London W11 1JN

Tel: 020 7221 3717


Fax: 020 7229 9084

For foreign rights enquiries please contact:


Laurence Laluyaux; Stephen Edwards

Email:
l.laluyaux@rcwlitagency.com
stephen@rcwlitagency.com

For Melanie Jackson titles, please note that the Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish,
Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish language rights are handled by
Laurence Laluyaux at Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd. For all other language rights,
please contact Melanie Jackson directly at: m.jackson@mjalit.com .

For Robinson Literary Agency titles, please note that German rights are handled on
our behalf by Anoukh Foerg Literarische Agentur. Italian rights are handled on our
behalf by Robert Santachiara Agency.

For Rogers, Coleridge & White and Anne McDermid & Associates titles, please
note that German rights are handled on our behalf by Paul and Peter Fritz AG. Italian
rights are handled on our behalf by Robert Santachiara Agency.

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FOREIGN REPRESENTATION

- For Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish
language rights please contact Laurence Laluyaux at Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd. (For Brazilian
rights in Melanie Jackson titles please contact Melanie Jackson directly: m.jackson@mjalit.com)

- For other languages, including Turkish, please contact Stephen Edwards at Rogers, Coleridge and
White Ltd or the following Associate Agents directly:

Bulgarian/Macedonian/Romanian/Serbian: ANDREW NURNBERG ASSOCIATES SOFIA,


11 Slaveikov Square, P O Box 453 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria; attn: Mira Droumeva (mira@anas-bg.com)
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Kwanten (luckwanten-prc@bigapple1.info)
Croatian/Hungarian: ANDREW NURNBERG ASSOCIATES BUDAPEST,
Gyori út 20, Budapest 1123, Hungary; attn: Judit Hermann (j.hermann@nurnberg.hu)
Czech/Slovak/Slovene: ANDREW NURNBERG ASSOCIATES PRAGUE, Jugoslavskychlavskych
Partyzanu 17, 160 00 Praha 6, Czech Republic, attn: Petra Tobisková (tobiskova@nurnberg.cz)
Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian: ANDREW NURNBERG ASSOCIATES BALTIC,
PO Box 77, Riga LV 1011, Latvia; attn: Tatjana Zoldnere (zoldnere@anab.apollo.lv)
German (for RCW & Anne McDermid titles): PAUL & PETER FRITZ AG, Jupiterstrasse 1, CH -
8032 Zurich, Switzerland (info@fritzagency.com)
German (for RLA titles): ANOUKH FOERG Literarische Agentur, Bechsteinstr. 3, 80804 München,
Germany (Email: anoukhfoerg@anoukhfoerg.com)
Greek: JLM LITERARY AGENCY, 9 Andrea Metaxa Street, 106 81 Athens, Greece;
attn: Mrs Nelly Moukakou (jlm@jlm.gr)
Hebrew: I. PIKARSKI LTD LITERARY AGENCY, 200 Hayarkon Street, PO Box 4006, Tel-Aviv
61040, Israel; attn: Ms Gal Pikarski (gal@pikarskiagency.co.il)
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Serpong- Tangerang 15810, Indonesia; attn: Mr Santo Manurung (santo@cbn.net.id)
Italian: ROBERTO SANTACHIARA LITERARY AGENCY, Via Griffini 14, 27100 Pavia, Italy;
attn: Mr Roberto Santachiara (agenzia@robertosantachiara.com)
Japanese:
THE ENGLISH AGENCY (JAPAN) LTD, Sakuragi Building 4f, 6-7-3 Minami Aoyama, Minato-ku
Tokyo 107-0062, Japan; attn: Mr Hamish Macaskill (hamish@eaj.co.jp)
or
TUTTLE-MORI AGENCY INC., 2-15 Kanda Jimbocho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 101-0051, Japan; attn:
Ms Asako Kawachi; (asako@tuttlemori.com)
Korean:
ERIC YANG AGENCY (EYA), 3F, eB/D 54-7 Banpo-Dong Seocho-Ku Seoul 137-803, Korea;
attn: Mrs Sue Yang (sueyang@ericyangagency.co.kr)
Polish: GRAAL LTD, Pruszkowska 29 lok.252, 02-119 Warszawa, Poland;
attn: Maria Strarz-Kanska; (maria@graal.com.pl)
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Blvd Moscow 127051, Russia; attn: Ms Ludmilla Sushkova (Sushkova@awax.ru)
Thai: TUTTLE-MORI (THAILAND) CO. LTD, 6th floor, Siam Inter Comics Bldg 459 Soi
Piboonoppathum Ladprao 48) Samsen Nok Huay Kwang Bangkok 10310, Thailand;
attn: Ms Pimolporn Yutisri (pimolporn@tuttlemori.co.th)

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NEW FICTION

SHADOW by Karin Alvtegen (PS) (original title: SKUGGA)


- Shortlisted for the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award 2007
for Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year.
- Winner of the Danish Academy of Crime Writers’ Award "The Palle Rosenkrantz Prize 2008"
for Best Crime Novel in Denmark of the year

“Take care of this child. Forgive me”

As darkness falls on 10th May 1975, a little boy waits alone on the steps of an amusement park. The
park is about to close and everyone is leaving, except this child. He continues to wait there, not daring
to move. He has been told to stay right where he is.
Only no one is coming back for him.

Why has he been abandoned, with only the briefest of notes to whoever finds him? And what
connection do the events of this day have to the death of Gerda Persson thirty years later – a woman
who leaves few clues to her life, apart from a freezer full of books?

SHADOW is an unputdownable story of dark secrets, murder and the depths to which the human mind
will sink in order to protect its own…

Praise for SHADOW: “Taken together, the gallery of characters in SHADOW produce a both
disturbing and entertaining image of how a writing career – not to mention the expectations and the
publicity that come with it – can have a devastating effect on the creative process. But SHADOW is
also a genuinely wicked story of a family that snares you with its dysfunctional relationships and
secrets of the darkest kind. In addition, SHADOW is a truly irresistible read” Skånska Dagbladet
”Karin Alvtegen is a gifted storyteller, with a strong sense of style and shades of meaning. She gets
under the skin of her characters and portrays them in a credible way. At the core of SHADOW is a
strong moral indignation and the question of what we do with our lives.” Norrtelje Tidning
”Karin Alvtegen raises some very important questions in this dense, thrilling and well written crime
novel, where the story is reminiscent of the Glenn Close movie Fatal Attraction.” Tara
“Alvtegen excels at glorious complexity and writes with great intelligence and pace.” Sunday
Telegraph
“…contains disquieting images that remain with the reader long after the end. This
carefully structured crime novel opens with the mystified perspective of the abandoned
child, then moves confidently through scenes involving other apparently unconnected
characters and the telling of the story that links them is done with great skill.” Sydney Morning
Herald

Karin Alvtegen (http://www.karinalvtegen.com/index_eng.htm) was born in Jönköping, Sweden, in


1965 and had a varied career, including work in set design for film and stage, before she started to
write. She is the author of four novels, MISSING, BETRAYAL, SHAME and now SHADOW.
MISSING won Sweden's most prestigious crime novel award, the Glass Key in 2000 and it has just
been shortlisted for an Edgar (The Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award) for 2008
Best Novel of the Year. Karin is the great-niece of Astrid Lindgren (author of the Pippi Longstocking
stories), and lives in Stockholm.

SHADOW (SKUGGA): Sweden: Natur och Kultur; UK: Canongate (pub March 2009); Australia:
Text; Denmark: Tiderne Skifter; Estonia: Eesti Raamat; Finland: WSOY; France: Plon; Germany:
Dumont; Greece: Orfeas; Holland: De Geus; Italy: Nottetempo; Japan: Shogakukan; Lithuania:
Baltos Lankos; Norway: Cappelen Damm; Poland: Bertelsmann Media; Romania: RAO. (English
edition now available)

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THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker
(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

THE ANTHOLOGIST is narrated by Paul Chowder – a once-in-a-while-published kind of poet who is


writing the introduction to a new anthology of poetry. He’s having a hard time getting started because
his career is floundering, his girlfriend Roz has recently left him, and he is thinking about the great
poets throughout history who have suffered far worse and deserve to feel sorry for themselves. He has
also promised to reveal many wonderful secrets and tips and tricks about poetry, and it looks like the
introduction will be a little longer than he’d thought.

What unfolds is a wholly entertaining and beguiling love story about poetry, from Tennyson,
Swinburne, and Yeats to the moderns (Roethke, bogan, Merwin) to the staff of The New Yorker, what
Paul reveals is astonishing and makes us realize how incredibly important poetry is to our lives. At the
same time, Paul can barely manage to realize all of this himself, and the result is a tenderly romantic,
hilarious and inspired novel.

Praise for previous title, HUMAN SMOKE: “This quite extraordinary book—impossible to put
down, impossible to forget—may be the most compelling argument for peace ever assembled.
Nicholson Baker's meticulously curated catalogue of texts displays in astonishing, fascinating detail
mankind's unstoppable descent into the madness of war—slowed only occasionally, but then invariably
most movingly, by the still small voices of the sane and the wise.” Simon Winchester
“riveting and fascinating. It is as though a brilliant film editor, with an urgent argument to make,
began to work with gripping newsreels.…a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about
pacifism. [Baker] has produced an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate
targeting of civilians can never be justified.” Colm Toibin, New York Times Book Review

Nicholson Baker was born in 1957. He is the author of several novels, including THE MEZZANINE,
VOX and THE FERMATA, and four works of non fiction: U AND I, THS SIZE OF THOUGHTS,
DOUBLE FOLD (winner of the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award), and HUMAN SMOKE
which was a New York Times and Los Angeles Times bestseller. He lives in Maine.

Previous title, HUMAN SMOKE: US: Simon & Schuster; UK: Simon & Schuster; Brazil: Companhia
das Letras; France: Bourgois; Germany: Rowohlt; Israel: Kinneret; Spain: Debate.

US: Simon & Schuster (pub September 2009); UK: Simon & Schuster; Italy: Mondadori.

SANDSTEALERS by Ben Brown (DM)

“We live more in a year than most people live in a lifetime.” The words of Danny Lowenstein, a
journalist for the New York Times, apply to him and the cadre of war junkies who group around the
international conflicts of the 1990s and early 2000s - from Bosnia, Rwanda and Chechnya to modern
day Iraq. Danny’s life certainly bears that out when he is ambushed in Baghdad. As his friends -
rivals and ex-lovers among them - take in the news, it becomes apparent Danny was set up to walk into
the militia’s trap - but by which one of the Junkies, and why? Ben Brown’s debut is infused with a
deep knowledge of modern war and its reporting, but above all, it is a triumphant thriller about the
heart and where it takes you.

Advance praise for SANDSTEALERS: “Ben Brown has written a powerful novel set against the
brutal backdrop of modern war. It is a gripping journey, both thriller and love story, whose real theme
is the struggle for tenderness in the face of cruelty.” Fergal Keane, author of Season of Blood:
Rwandan Journey

Ben Brown is a journalist and television news presenter. As a special foreign correspondent for BBC
News, he covered a variety of major stories across the globe before moving behind the desk on BBC
News 24 in 2006. SANDSTEALERS is his first novel.

SANDSTEALERS: UK: HarperCollins (pub June 2009); Poland: Amber

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SPILT MILK by Chico Buarque (original title: LEITE DERRAMADO)
(in association with Companhia das Letras)
- A number 1 bestseller in Brazil

A very old man lies in a hospital bed. In a monologue directed at his daughter, the nurses and whoever
else will listen, he tells the story of his lineage, reaching back to his Portuguese ancestors, then tracing
the line down to a baron in Brazil’s imperial period, a senator of the country’s First Republic, and his
great-great-great grandson, a playboy in the Rio de Janeiro of today. It is the story of an old family’s
social and economic decline, set against the backdrop of the last two centuries of Brazil’s history.
Throughout the novel, like a continuous bass line, is the narrator’s frustrated and misunderstood
passion for his wife. The narrator’s prejudices and sick jealousy stop his wife from feeling fully
realized and bring her to a sad end, which, without the certainty and theatricality of Madame Bovary or
Ana Karenina, has the poignancy of disaster.

Other figures also put in regular appearances: the arrogant French engineer Dubosc, whose response to
everything is “merde alors”; the narrator’s mother, who is so repressed and repressive that she “plays”
the piano without any sound; his great grandson’s girlfriend with her bellybutton piercing and slang.
SPILT MILK is the work of a writer in full command of his talent and craft.

Praise for new title, SPILT MILK: "If Chico Buarque's new book were a soccer match, it would be
one of those full of unforgettable moves, remarkable dribbles, and master passes.” Folha de S. Paulo
"This is Brazil in the form of a novel” Jornal do Brasil,
"SPILT MILK is a major book, one in which Chico Buarque goes beyond BUDAPEST and reaches,
fictionally, the same imaginative and vernacular strength of his best songs."
O Estado de Sao Paulo

Praise for previous title, BUDAPEST:


“Chico Buarque is very bold. He writes across an abyss, walks on a tightrope and reaches the other
side. (…) Something new has happened in Brazil with this book.” José Saramago
“Perhaps the most beautiful of Chico’s three mature books, BUDAPEST is a labyrinth of mirrors
whose resolution comes not in the plot, but in the words, like in poems.” Caetano Veloso

Francisco Buarque de Hollanda was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1944. Singer and composer, he has
written the plays RODA VIVA (1968), CALABAR (1973), GOTA D’AGUA (1975) and OPERA DO
MALANDRO (1979); and the novelette FAZENDA MODELO (1974). His novels TURBULENCE
(1991) BENJAMIN (1995), and BUDAPESTE (2003) have all been published by Companhia das
Letras.

Previous title, BUDAPEST (BUDAPESTE): Brazil: Companhia das Letras; UK: Bloomsbury; US:
Grove Atlantic; Czech Republic: Labyrint; Denmark: Aschehoug; France: Gallimard; Germany:
Fischer; Holland: Meulenhoff; Hungary: Atheneum; Israel: Miskal; Italy: Feltrinelli; Japan:
Hakusuisha; Korea: Prunsoop; Norway: Aschehoug; Poland: Muza; Portugal: Dom Quixote;
Serbia: Alfa Narodna; Spain: Salamandra (Spanish), RBA (Catalan), Faktoria (Galician); Sweden:
Tranan; Turkey: Dogan.

New title, SPILT MILK (LEITE DERRAMADO): Brazil: Companhia das Letras (pub March 2009);
Portugal: offer. (English synopsis & extract available)

MOTHERLAND by Bernardo Carvalho (original title: O FILHO DA MAE)


(in association with Companhia das Letras)

“There can be no war without mothers. More than anyone, mothers dread loss. Everyone has a
mother, even the worst lowlife, the worst butcher. You can’t say it’s not a certain form of fanaticism”.

In MOTHERLAND, Bernardo Carvalho orchestrates a multiplicity of voices and view points without
ever losing his focus on a recurring motif of motherhood, interwoven with its opposite, a sense of
orphanhood, groundlessness and maladjustment, the rawest representation of which is war. “Mothers
have a lot more to do with war than you’d imagine”, says one of the characters at a certain point, and
the book is, in a sense, a poetic demonstration of precisely that.

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Set against the backdrop of the Second Chechen War in 2003, the mothers in this novel are modulated
and refracted from the various intertwined stories and provide the backbone of a singular plotline: the
struggle to save their sons from war, solitude and crime.

Saint Petersburg, the literary city par excellence, is the epicentre of the tragedy. And yet, as usually
occurs in the work of Bernardo Carvalho, the action spirals out across time and space. From the
Amazon Rainforest to the seas of Japan come the shards of these nuclear dramas of guilt-laden
mothers, lost sons and tyrannical or absent fathers. All of the characters are, to some extent, out of
place, as if born into the wrong family or nation – hence the power the context bestows upon the
monstrous figure of the chimera, an aberration rejected by both nature and man.

A novel with a high emotional charge, MOTHERLAND is a step forward in the always restless and
surprising literature of the author of NINE NIGHTS, MONGOLIA and THE SUN SETS IN SÃO
PAULO.

Praise for MOTHERLAND: "A dizzying narrative of facts from the past, arranged in a cadence of
anxiety, which leads to the original scene of the symbiotic love of mother and son, with its dynamics of
adoration and repulse.” Folha de S. Paulo
"A polyphonic work, a rhapsody on displaced characters in a city projected under the logic of the total
visibility, where no one escapes the control of power.” O Estado de S. Paulo

Bernardo Carvalho was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Among his works of fiction published by
Companhia das Letras are NINE NIGHTS, winner of the Portugal Telecom Prize, MONGOLIA,
winner of the Jabuti Award, and THE SUN SETS IN SÃO PAULO.

Previous title, THE SUN SETS IN SÃO PAULO (O SOL SE POE EM SAO PAULO): Brazil:
Companhia das Letras; France: Metailie; Germany: Luchterhand; Portugal: Cotovia

New title, MOTHERLAND (O FILHO DA MAE): Brazil: Companhia das Letras (pub: March 2009);
France: offer; Portugal: Cotovia.
(English synopsis & extract available)

SPILT MILK, BLACK COFFEE by Helen Cross (DR)

Handsome Amir, somewhere in his twenties, somewhere in a Yorkshire town, is torn between duty and
lust. While his tradition-bound family urges him to choose a wife from a parade of blank and bashful
beauties, he remains a slave to boozy blonde goddess Jackie, his fellow worker at the department store
in town.

Pushing forty, with bubblegum hair and a filthy laugh, Jackie is an unlikely muse. She is openly
entertained by Amir’s teetotalism and moral sincerity, but behind her whip-smart wit is a forgiving and
optimistic heart. And she has a smile that lingers in the air like smoke.

Meanwhile, at home, Amir must dodge his family’s plans for him to join the family newsagent
business, ‘Fags ‘n’ Fings’, and dutifully care for his beloved but increasingly demented mother.

Jackie’s sensitive, sassy, exasperated, twelve-year-old daughter Elle lurks in a black hoodie and crops
her hair to look as unlike her flamboyant mother as possible. She avoids the beautiful girls at her
Catholic school, and leads a double life: singing raucous ballads of the seventies with wine-soaked
Jackie; eating organic raisins and visiting stately homes with perfect Claire, her father’s faultless wife.

In a northern town rife with racial tension and tabloid outrage, SPILT MILK, BLACK COFFEE is a
romantic comedy of twenty-first-century multicultural Britain, a hilarious, beguiling and unlikely love
story.

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Praise for previous title, THE SECRETS SHE KEEPS: “Cross satirises the fragile values of her
generation with a fantastical sense of the absurd and a startling, melancholic poetry.” Metro
“Helen Cross has an ability to imbue the everyday world with sensuality and strangeness… a writer to
watch…” The Sunday Telegraph
“The setting is contemporary, but there’s a timeless feel to this tale of loneliness, greed, and beauty.
Cross writes as beautifully as you’d expect.” Daily Mail

Helen Cross was born and brought up in East Yorkshire. She was educated at Goldsmiths College,
University of London and the University of East Anglia. The author of two novels, MY SUMMER OF
LOVE, which won the Betty Trask Prize in 2002 and was made into a BAFTA award-winning feature
film by Pawel Pawlikowski, and THE SCRETS SHE KEEPS. She lives in Birmingham.

Previous title, THE SECRET SHE KEEPS: UK: Bloomsbury; Italy: Fandango

New title, SPILT MILK, BLACK COFFEE: UK: Bloomsbury (pub April 2009)

GALORE by Michael Crummey


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

Sprawling and intimate, stark and fantastical and bawdy and true, GALORE is a novel about the power
of stories to shape and sustain us, about the invincible human instinct for resurrection. It is Michael
Crummey’s most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

An intricate family saga and a love story spanning two centuries, GALORE offers a portrait of the
vestigial medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to
be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to savage extremes of climate and fate, the brilliantly rendered
outport of Paradise Deep exists in a realm where the line between the everyday and the improbable,
between the mundane and the otherworldly, is impossible to distinguish.

Propelled by the disputes and alliances, grievances and trade-offs that bind the Devines and the
merchant family of King-me Sellers through half-a-dozen generations, GALORE is alive with
remarkable characters, with political and emotional intrigue, and an uncommon insight into the
complexities of human nature.

Praise for Michael Crummey: “Crummey has a sharp eye for detail and an often breathtaking
lucidity of expression.” The Independent
“The novel [WRECKAGE] will probably be compared to Shirley Hazzard’s [National Book Award-
winning] The Great Fire. ... The comparison does credit to both authors.” Quill & Quire
“There’s a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey’s quite literally astonishing
debut novel is one of the brightest jewels in its crown.” Kirkus
“This Newfoundland poet's prose is gorgeously sculpted, never precious, always alive to the mysteries
of human experience.” Newsday
“Michael Crummey is a tremendously gifted writer.” Alistair MacLeod, author of No Great
Mischief
“Like David Adams Richards…Crummey favours the minimalist stroke, the revealing detail relied
upon to spill its magic gracefully, with tremendous emotional and psychological impact.” Toronto
Star
“Crummey’s craftsmanship is masterful.” Maclean’s

Michael Crummey is a poet and author of the critically acclaimed novel RIVER THIEVES, which was
nominated for the Giller Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award. His second novel, THE WRECKAGE
(2005), was longlisted for the IMPAC Award, shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Award, and was
also a national bestseller.  Michael won the The Writers' Trust of Canada's Timothy Findley Award in
2007.

Previous title, THE WRECKAGE: Canada: Doubleday; Holland: De Geus

New title, GALORE: Canada: Doubleday Canada (pub September 2009)

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I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER: A Novel by Percival Everett
(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my
place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier.

Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother
orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the
famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting
Corporation.

Everett’s hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney’s tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to
balance his skin colour with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than-watchful eye of his
adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while African-
American, sparks a dinner table explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a
murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem:
“What’s your name?” a kid would ask. “Not Sidney,” I would say. “Okay, then what is it?”

Praise for previous title, THE WATER CURE: “THE WATER CURE is most decidedly a novel, it is
also a meditation on what it means to be a victim and a torturer at the same time. [Everett’s] finest
book to date…This is a book that not only makes you feel, but think” The Washington Post
“Everett sets the narrative adrift on a tide of language which is at times theological, philosophic,
didactic and poetic, but always crackles with an electric current… Everett bends language like
Superman bends steel - effortlessly and because he can” The San Francisco Chronicle
 
Percival Everett is a professor of English at the University of Southern California and the author of
seventeen novels, including THE WATER CURE, WOUNDED, and GLYPH.

Previous title, THE WATER CURE: US: Graywolf; France: Actes Sud; Greece: Polis

New title, I AM NOT SIDNEY POITIER: US: Graywolf (pub date June 2009)

THE BLASPHEMER by Nigel Farndale (DM)

On holiday in the Galapagos Islands, two things happen to zoologist Daniel Kennedy. When the small
aircraft carrying him and Nancy, the mother of his daughter, crashes into the sea he is confronted with
a Darwinian option: should he save himself, or the woman he loves? When he escapes the plane,
Daniel thinks he might have seen an angel.

When he and Nancy return home the fissures in their relationship soon show, as Daniel also faces the
truth about the death of his great grandfather on the first horrific day of Passchendaele. Then Daniel is
given a second chance to prove his courage and earn Nancy’s forgiveness.

Nigel Farndale’s THE BLASPHEMER is a story about altruism, conditional love and the possibility of
redemption - and what happens to a man of science when he is forced to question his certainties. It is a
rare novel of ambition that will appeal to the head as well as the heart of any reader.
 
Praise for previous (non-fiction) title, HAW-HAW: “A model of its kind” The Economist
“As compelling as Sophocles, a very deep book indeed” Times
“Wit, compassion and insight permeate every chapter” Daily Telegraph
“Stylish and compelling” Literary Review
“Exciting and endlessly fascinating” Mail on Sunday

Nigel Farndale is the critically acclaimed author of HAW-HAW: The Tragedy of William and
Margaret Joyce, which was shortlisted for the 2005 Whitbread Prize and the James Tait Black
Memorial Prize. A collection of his award-winning interviews - with Paul McCartney and Stephen
Hawking, among others - was published in 2003.

UK: Doubleday (pub January 2010)

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THE FALLEN by Stephen Finucan
(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

In the winter of 1944, the newly liberated city of Naples has become an ever more dangerous place. As
the German army retreats northwards, and the Americans advance from the south, the collapse of all
normal civic structure leaves a vacuum in which the mafia thrives. Among those charged with
maintaining the military security of the city is a young Canadian, Lieutenant Thomas Greaves.

Greaves seems naive at first, but it soon becomes clear that he has demons to exorcise and that he sees
his time in Naples as the opportunity to make amends for a tragic mistake made on the battlefield. But
his plans go awry, and Greaves lands in the murky world of gangsters and black marketeers. This is a
literary thriller whose strong atmosphere evokes Graham Greene more than any contemporary writer.

Stephen Finucan's first book, HAPPY PILGRIMS, was published by Insomniac Press in 2000 and was
shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewing Company Writer's Craft Award. His second book of short
stories, FOREIGNERS, was published in 2003, by Penguin Canada.

THE FALLEN: Canada: Penguin Canada (pub August 2009)

WANTING by Richard Flanagan (DR)


- Longlisted for the 2009 Miles Franklin Award

Bass Strait, 1839. A young Aboriginal girl, Mathinna, runs through the wet kangaroo grass of a wild
island at the edge of the world to get help for her dying father. Eighteen years later in Manchester, the
great novelist Charles Dickens is a sensation, starring in a play that more and more resembles the
frozen landscape of his own inner life.

Joining the two are the most celebrated explorer of the age, Sir John Franklin, and his wife Lady Jane,
who adopt Mathinna as an experiment to prove that the savage can be civilized – only to discover that
within the most civilized can lurk the most savage. When Sir John disappears while searching for the
fabled Northwest Passage, Lady Jane turns to Dickens for help.

Inspired by historical events, WANTING is a haunting meditation about love, loss and the way life is
finally determined never by reason, but only ever by wanting.

Praise for WANTING: “This is the best novel I have read this year or expect to read for several
more” The Sydney Morning Herald
“Moving seamlessly through time, across two continents and between three storylines, WANTING is a
marvel of precision and cohesion” The Sun-Herald
“Flanagan is a beautiful writer and WANTING is a beautiful addition to his oeuvre” The Age
“The novel boasts many symmetries and ironies, which are the stuff of poetry rather than history” The
Australian
“This is in short a stunning book. It is the best book I have read this year and I can’t think readily of a
better novel in 2007 either” The Sunday Tasmanian
“WANTING is a novel you never want to end. As a reader, I can offer no greater accolade” The
Canberra Times
Praise for previous title, THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST: “A dazzling job of limning its subject,
conjuring up the postmodern, post-sci-fi world of globalized terror and trade… Flanagan captures the
nervous jujitsu that passes for debate and conversation in the streets, and the frenetic, strobe-lit pulse
of the urban wasteland that is modern Sydney — T. S. Eliot’s unreal city gone Aussie and electric. And
he’s written a book that deserves to win him the sort of readership enjoyed by two much better-known
novelists with whom he has much more in common: Don DeLillo and Martin Amis” Michiko
Kakutani, The New York Times

10
Richard Flanagan is the author of DEATH OF A RIVER GUIDE, which won the Victorian Premier’s
Literary Award for First Fiction and the South Australian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, THE
SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING, which won the Australian Booksellers Book of the Year Award
and the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, GOULD’S BOOK OF FISH, which won the 2002
Commonwealth Prize, and THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST, which was longlisted for the 2007 Miles
Franklin Award. His work has been published in 27 countries. He directed a feature film version of
THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING and recently co-wrote the screenplay of Baz Fuhrman’s
movie, Australia. He lives in Tasmania.

Previous title, THE UNKNOWN TERRORIST: AUS: Picador; US: Grove Atlantic; UK: Atlantic
Books; CAN: HarperCollins; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Denmark: Tiderne Skifter; France:
Belfond; Germany: Atrium/Arche; Greece: Agra; Holland: Ambo/Anthos; Israel: Sifriat Ma’ariv;
Italy: Frassinelli, Japan: Hakusuisha; Norway: Cappelens; Romania: Paralela; Slovenia: Mish

New title, WANTING: UK: Atlantic Books (pub September 2009); AUS: Random House (pub
November 2008); US: Grove Atlantic; Canada: Harpers; France: Belfond; Germany: Atrium/Arche;
Holland: Ambo/Anthos; Italy: Frassinelli

COLD TO THE TOUCH by Frances Fyfield (GC)

Jessica, Jessy, Jess, Jezabel, she had been called all these and other names besides, the voices ringing in
her ears as she'd fled the village over-looking the sea which she still thinks of as home. She'd burnt her
boats there, but she longs to return, to turn rejection into acceptance. Above all she longs to be with the
man who has spurned her adoration.

Sarah Fortune, a stalwart friend, recognises Jessica Hurly's despair as strongly as she needs to distance
herself from her usual London haunts. She takes herself to Pennyvale in search of the reason for
Jessica's exile, hoping to find a way to allow her to return home. She finds a place of smug
contentment, where the Hurly family hold sway, but there are fissures in the façade; cracks of distrust
and jealousy, hints of incest and buried secrets. And back in London Jessica is sure she can persuade
the man of her dreams to take her back … and then she disappears.

When her body is found it is not in London, but in the butcher's shop in Pennyvale, hanging amongst
the carcases of meat in its antiseptic chiller. Sarah's hunt to connect Jessica's London affair with
Pennyvale takes her into places colder than the grave, but nothing will thwart her fulfilling the final
obligation of friendship – to find out why Jessica had to make that final journey home.

Praise for Frances Fyfield: “One of Highsmith's few true heirs” Laura Wilson, Guardian
“No crime writer can beat her” The Times
“'The best female crime writer in this country” A.N. Wilson
“Classic Fyfield, which is to say it's as good as it gets” Andrew Taylor, The Spectator
“Never ordinary ... Frances Fyfield challenges us to deal with an extraordinary situation and to
ponder its consequences. It is an unexpectedly liberating experience” TLS
“Once again, Frances Fyfield turns her gimlet eye onto seemingly ordinary folk and finds in them both
extraordinary evil and extraordinary strength” Time Out
“A deeply satisfying read ... powerfully drawn characters and compelling tension” The Independent

Frances Fyfield (www.francesfyfield.co.uk) is a criminal lawyer, a profession that has inspired and
informed her novels. She was awarded the CWA/Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel of
2008 with BLOOD FROM STONE, and is also the winner of the CWA Silver Dagger Award and
of the Prix de Literature Policiere in France. Several of her books have been televised, and her
short stories have been dramatised for BBC Radio 4. She lives in London and in Deal.

Previous title, BLOOD FROM STONE: UK: Little Brown; France: Presses de la Cité; Holland:
Archipel/Arbeiderspers; Japan: Random House Kodansha; Korea: Younglim Cardinal; Poland:
Amber; Spain: Alba Editorial SL.

New title, COLD TO THE TOUCH: UK: Little Brown (pub November 2009)

11
THE ISLAND CITY by Milton Hatoum (original title: A CIDADE ILHADA)
(in association with Companhia das Letras)

The short story, as the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar once said, is a small, perfect sphere made of
words, which carries within it a single seed, just on the point of bursting open. This seed can be
anything – a face, a place, an event – so long as the skilled hands of the good story-teller make it the
centre from which the narrative sphere irradiates. The stories collected by Milton Hatoum in THE
ISLAND CITY are exactly that: glimpses of lived experience, conveyed in tiny plots, succinctly told,
in which everything takes on the greatest clarity – and the greatest power to illuminate.

The seeds of these stories could hardly be more diverse: the first visit to a brothel in ‘Eve’s Veranda’; a
passage from Euclides da Cunha in ‘A Letter from Bancroft’; the life of exiles in ‘Barbara in Winter’
or ‘Meetings in the Peninsula’; the platonic love for an English girl in ‘A Foreigner in our Street’.

Discreetly, with all the experience at his command, Hatoum works on these fragments of memory until
they acquire another character – how or when we will never know; products of chance and of the
writer’s life, they turn out to be perfect images of the course of our own desires and failures.

All of them, moreover, take us to the underground network that ties the stories of THE ISLAND CITY
together. If desire – in the form of love, literature or travel – makes the characters expand their field of
action and cross the barriers of childhood and morality, class and local origins, these same barriers
never admit defeat, and only await the right moment to ambush the hero with a power deriving from
history or from sexual desire, which brings them back to a unchanging centre: “Wherever I go, Manaus
comes after me”. Perfect spheres or dizzying spirals? Short as they are, Milton Hatoum’s stories have
the same expansive, explosive power already familiar to readers of his novels.

Praise for new title, THE ISLAND CITY: "In a place that mixes the nostalgia of adolescence with
the pessimism in regard of the degradation of the city which had grown disorderly, Hatoum has
incorporated notorious real characters. […] The title of the anthology, and the setting of almost all the
stories, take us to Manaus, but the watery landscape of Amazonia’s capital city, just as in Hatoum’s
novels, is a fictional space in which realistic description takes on a metaphorical dimension, full of
individual, historical and literary tensions.” Folha de S. Paulo

Praise for previous title, ASHES OF THE AMAZON: “THE BROTHERS, translated from the
Portuguese in 2002, confirmed Hatoum as one of South America's leading contemporary novelists.”
The Guardian
“With ASHES OF THE AMAZON, Milton Hatoum, though he has published relatively little,
definitively establishes himself as a central figure in contemporary Brazilian literature.” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
“Everything is connected; nobody is truly free. Those who try to escape are felled like trees. [...] This
is a powerful piece of writing.” The Telegraph

Born in Manaus in 1952, Milton Hatoum studied architecture. He taught Brazilian literature at the
Federal University of Amazonas and at the University of California, Berkeley, before publishing his
first novel, TALE OF A CERTAIN ORIENT, in 1989; it was awarded the Jabuti Prize for the best
novel of the year. His second novel, THE BROTHERS, published in 2000, also won the Jabuti, and has
been translated into eight languages. With ASHES OF THE AMAZON, in 2005, Hatoum again won
the Jabuti, and the Bravo!, APCA and Portugal Telecom Prizes. In 2008, he published his first novella,
Orphans of Eldorado. THE ISLAND CITY is his first collection of stories.

Previous title, ASHES OF THE AMAZON (CINZAS DO NORTE); Brazil: Companhia das Letras;
UK: Bloomsbury; France: Actes Sud; Germany: Suhrkamp; Holland: Atlas; Italy: Tropea;
Portugal: Cotovia; Spain (Catalan): 1984 Ediciones

New title, THE ISLAND CITY (A CIDADE ILHADA): Brazil: Companhia das Letras (pub March
2009): Portugal: Cotovia.
(English synopsis & extract available)

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JOHANNES CABAL THE NECROMANCER by Jonathan L. Howard
(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

For all of us, there is only one true battle. We fight it from the second of our birth until the moment we
inevitably lose. And we accept both the defeat and the inevitability. After all, nobody can beat death.
Can they? Johannes Cabal begs to differ. He is dedicated with a single-minded, obsessive, burning,
frightening, no, terrifying passion to the defeat of death. Dedicated body, heart, and soul. Well, perhaps
not soul.

After a youthful indiscretion Cabal's soul now rests in the possession of Satan himself, who enjoys
such things. Cabal wants it back – its absence is proving a nuisance – but Satan never parts easily with
his prizes. So, he makes Cabal a wager. If Cabal can persuade one hundred people to sign over their
immortal souls, he will have his own back. Satan will even help; Cabal will have the use of a diabolical
contrivance, a hellish engine of deceit, seduction, and corruption to aid him. A "carnival" as they are
sometimes known. One year, one carnival, one hundred souls. It would almost be a fair bet if Cabal had
the faintest idea what he was doing. But what he lacks in fairground acumen he more than makes up for
with determination, ruthlessness, and the social conscience of anthrax. It will be an interesting year.

Advance praise for JOHANNES CABAL: “Jonathan Howard has written a delightfully wicked and
inventive story on the game of beat the devil.  He turns conventions of the Faustian tales into a modern
carnivalesque that is witty, macabre, and unexpectedly touching.  If you like the dead to have a little
life in them yet, JOHANNES CABAL, THE NECROMANCER is the kind of book you'll die for.” Keith
Donohue, author of The Stolen Child

Jonathan L. Howard is a game designer and scriptwriter who has worked in the computer games
industry since the early ‘nineties. Jonathan describes Cabal as “a necromancer of some little infamy,
who has been digging up bodies without permission for several years now. His first appearance in print
was in the short story ‘Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day’, published in the premier issue of H.P
Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror. Where he lives is none of your verdammt business.” This is the first
of a projected trilogy and Jonathan hopes to deliver Book 2 (JOHANNES CABAL THE DETECTIVE)
in May 2009.

JOHANNES CABAL THE NECROMANCER: UK: Headline (3-book deal, Book 1, pub June 2009);
US: Doubleday (2-Book deal); Germany: Goldmann (3-book deal); Poland: Mag (2-book deal)

NOCTURNES: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall by Kazuo Ishiguro (DR)

In a sublime story cycle, Kazuo Ishiguro explores ideas of love, music and the passing of time. From
the piazzas of Italy to the Malvern Hills, a London flat to the 'hush-hush floor' of an exclusive
Hollywood hotel, the characters we encounter range from young dreamers to cafe musicians to faded
stars, all of them at some moment of reckoning.

Gentle, intimate and witty, this quintet is marked by a haunting theme: the struggle to keep alive a
sense of life's romance, even as one gets older, relationships flounder and youthful hopes recede.

Praise for previous title, NEVER LET ME GO: “Counterposing insinuating and disconcerting
narrative effects is a technique Ishiguro has used in the past and expertly perfected…Ishiguro has
found an ingenious way to evade banality and bring the reader to a raw confrontation with death –
loss – and the unendurable fragility of everything we love.” TLS
“NEVER LET ME GO is not offering a salutary warning about the dangers of future human cloning, it
is a vision of the way we live already, transposed to an invented realm. It is peculiarly pure fiction in
this way, abstract, uncluttered by reference, claiming no great knowledge other than of the heart.”
Evening Standard
“With perfect pacing and infinite subtlety, Ishiguro reveals exactly as much as we need to know about
how efforts to regulate the future through genetic engineering create, control, then emotionlessly
destroy very real, very human lives-without ever showing us the faces of the culpable, who have ‘tried
to convince themselves... That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.’ A masterpiece of
craftsmanship that offers an unparalleled emotional experience. Send a copy to the Swedish
Academy.” Kirkus Reviews (starred)

13
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Japan and came to Britain at the age of five. He is the author of five
previous novels, including WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS, which was shortlisted for The Booker
Prize, and the Booker Prize-winning THE REMAINS OF THE DAY, which was later translated into
an award-winning film. His work has been translated into 36 languages

NOCTURNES: UK: Faber (pub May 2009); US: Knopf; CAN: Knopf; Brazil: Companhia das Letras;
China; Shanghai Translation House; Denmark: Gyldendal; Estonia: Varrak; Finland: Tammi;
France: Editions de Deux Terres; Germany: Blessing; Greece: Kastaniotis; Holland: Atlas; Israel:
Hakibbutz Hameuchad; Italy: Einaudi; Japan: Hayakawa; Korea: Minumsa; Norway: Cappelen
Damm; Poland: Albatros; Portugal: Gradiva; Romania: Polirom; Russia: Eksmo; Spain: Anagrama
(Catalan: Anagrama); Sweden: Wahlstrom & Widstrand

DARK TIMES IN THE CITY by Gene Kerrigan (PS)

Danny Callaghan is having a quiet drink in a Dublin pub when two men walk in with guns. They’re
here to take care of a minor problem – petty criminal Walter Bennett. On impulse, Danny intervenes to
save Walter’s life. Soon, his own survival is in question.
 
With a troubled past and an uncertain future, Danny finds himself drawn into a vicious scheme of
revenge.

DARK TIMES IN THE CITY portrays an edgy city where affluence and cocaine fuel a ruthless gang
culture, and a man’s fleeting impulse may cost the lives of those who matter most to him. Kerrigan’s
new novel is his finest yet; gripping from start to finish, powerful, original and impossible to put
down.  

Praise for previous title, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR: “…an absorbing, beautifully written, gritty
tale…full of believable characters and bleak Dublin settings” The Times
“…a brilliant novel…Kerrigan comes to the table armed with two formidable weapons: a first-rate
grasp of narrative structure, and a ruthless eye for the social nuances and the psychological
complexities of individuals who don’t exactly exude grace under pressure. Indeed one of the many
pleasures of this taut, superbly thought-out novel is watching Kerrigan construct a jigsaw like plot out
of several disparate characters…bracingly complex novel…With this novel, he becomes one of
(Ireland’s) leading writers.” The Irish Times
“A terrific novel, tense and exciting…tremendous” The Independent on Sunday
“The writing is fiercely unsentimental, the plotting complex and the characterisation pleasingly
contrary...But it’s the bleakness that impresses most…This is not an easy read but it will stay with you
for a long time” Metro
“…a vivid tapestry of 21st century Irish life…impressive second foray…a relentless pace…This is a fine
achievement, one of the best crime novels of the year” The Irish Independent

Gene Kerrigan left school at 14 and started working as a journalist in his late twenties. He quickly
became one of the top reporters and columnists in Ireland, twice Journalist of the Year. He lives in
Dublin and has written several best-selling non-fiction books and two novels, LITTLE CRIMINALS
and THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR.

Previous title, THE MIDNIGHT CHOIR: UK: Harvill; US: Europa; France: Le Masque/Lattès

New title, DARK TIMES IN THE CITY: UK: Harvill (pub May 2009); US: Europa

14
UNPLUGGING PHILCO by Jim Knipfel
(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

Eleven years after the mysterious events in Tupelo – now widely assumed to be the work of Australian
terrorists – life in Brooklyn hasn’t been the same for Wally Philco. When he finally snaps, he finds
refuge with the members of an underground movement of Unpluggers – fighting for just a few minutes
of peace and quiet. With a cast of Dickensian characters, from Wally’s prying neighbour Whit
Chambers to stroller-wielding Brooklyn mothers, former Kennedy spooks, and Norwegian cowboys,
UNPLUGGING PHILCO is a wildly funny look at our life and times, filled with sharp cultural
references and vivid, witty prose that testifies to a keenly perceptive mind behind the madness.

Praise for Jim Knipfel: “Knipfel is the Balzac of the bin, who brings to fiction the authenticity, the
narrative exuberance, the integrity of his cheerfully undeluded American voice.” Thomas Pynchon

Jim Knipfel is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including SLACKJAW and QUITTING
THE NAIROBI TRIO. He lives in Brooklyn.

US: Simon & Schuster (pub April 2009)

THE MAN FROM SAIGON by Marti Leimbach (PS)


 
1967. Vietnam. Susan Gifford, is one of the first female correspondents on assignment in Saigon,
dedicated to her job and passionately in love with an American TV reporter. Son is a Vietnamese
photographer anxious to get his work into the American press. Together they cover every aspect of the
war from combat missions to the workings of field hospitals. Then one November morning, narrowly
escaping death during an ambush, they find themselves the prisoners of three Vietcong soldiers who
have been separated from their unit.

Now, under constant threat from American air strikes, helpless in the hands of the enemy, they face the
daily hardships of the jungle, living always with the threat of being killed. But Son turns out to have a
history that Susan would never have guessed, and which will one day separate her from her American
lover. Held under terrifyingly harsh conditions it becomes clear just how profound and important their
relationship has become to both of them.

THE MAN FROM SAIGON is an enthralling and beautiful story of trust, loyalty and love set against
the background of a devastating war.

Praise for previous title, DANIEL ISN’T TALKING: “I was riveted, engrossed… her portrayal of
a mother facing unbelievable hardship was very real and gripping... I adored it.” Anita Shreve
“A terrific book, informed passionate and touching. She handles the problem of the autistic child
beautifully and I was thoroughly engrossed until the last page.” Joanne Harris
“Marti Leimbach's terrific novel manages to be both realistic and upbeat about a difficult subject and
is shot through with wonderful moments of humour.” Kate Long
“Heartfelt, realistic and informative. This is thought-provoking writing” The Sunday Times

Marti Leimbach is the author of several novels, including the international bestseller, DYING YOUNG
(1990), which was made into a major film starring Julia Roberts, and DANIEL ISN’T TALKING
(2006), which was published in twelve countries with film rights to Fox 2000. Born in Washington,
D.C., she now lives in England and teaches at Oxford University’s Creative Writing Programme.

Previous title, DANIEL ISN’T TALKING: UK: HarperCollins; US: Doubleday Nan A. Talese;
Canada; McClelland; Germany: Bertelsmann Club; Holland: Luitingh; Indonesia: Gramedia; Italy:
Salani; Korea: Hyundaemunhak; Portugal: Difel; Russia: Phantom; Spain: Almuzara; Sweden:
Wahlstrom & Widstrand

New title, THE MAN FROM SAIGON: UK: Fourth Estate (pub May 2009); US: Doubleday Nan A.
Talese

15
THE GOOD PARENTS by Joan London (ZW)

Maya de Jong, an eighteen-year-old country girl from Western Australia, comes to live in Melbourne
and is seduced by her boss, the enigmatic Maynard Flynn. When Maya's parents, Toni and Jacob,
arrive to stay with her, they are told by her housemate that Maya has gone away. No one knows where
she is or why she left.

As Toni and Jacob wait and search for Maya in Melbourne, everything in their lives is brought into
question. They recall the dreams and ideals, the betrayals and choices of their pasts - choices with
unexpected and irrevocable consequences. With Maya's disappearance, the lives of all those close to
her come into focus to reveal the complexity of the ties that bind us to one another, to parents, children,
siblings, friends and lovers.

Haunting and enthralling, The Good Parents is at once a vision of contemporary Australia and a story
as old as fairytales; that of the runaway girl.

Praise for THE GOOD PARENTS: “Joan London’s shimmering new novel, THE GOOD PARENTS
explores the questions of sexual trade agreements, generational patterns and others, with subtlety and
intelligence.” The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“The author comes at her characters from every angle, laying bare their compromises and delusions.
Shifting between landscapes worldly and remote, she pulls off the tricky feat of making the act of
reflection suspenseful, turning the past into a living, unfinished thing, still bristling with what could
be.” The New Yorker
“A marvellous story told by a writer with a profound understanding of human behavior. This is
outstanding contemporary fiction” Good Reading Magazine
“The characters in Joan London’s outstanding THE GOOD PARENTS are wonderfully drawn,
especially Cy, the villain (though he’s more than that). I can see Javier Bardem playing him in the
movie; Random House should courier the book to the Coen brothers” Australian Literary Review
“This is an exquisite piece of writing, carefully and deliberately told, the stark plains of inland West
Australia as real as the damp laneways of Melbourne” Herald Sun
“London pushes characters towards each other against the forces of nature. The results are as
powerful as they are unsettling.” Sydney Morning Herald
“Novelist and short-story writer Joan London's three previous books have all won important awards.
London's first novel, Gilgamesh, was published in 2001, short-listed for the Miles Franklin and won
the 2002 The Age Book of the Year fiction prize. THE GOOD PARENTS is better; it ought to win every
prize going.” The Australian

Joan London is the author of two prize-winning collections of stories published in Australia.
GILGAMESH, her first novel, was short-listed for the Miles Franklin Award and was chosen as the
Age Book of the Year for Fiction 2002. She lives in Fremantle, Western Australia.  

THE GOOD PARENTS: AUS: Random House; US: Grove Atlantic; UK: Atlantic (pub November
2009)

IRONS IN THE FIRE by Juliet E. McKenna


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

In the war-torn country of Lescar six rival dukes lay claim to the crown of High King. They pursue
their ambitions through strength of arms while their duchesses plot strategic marriages. Amoral
opportunists seek their fortunes amid the warfare while ordinary folk struggle to raise their crops and
families or admit defeat and flee. Now a mismatched band of exiles and rebels agree that enough is
enough. Can a small group, however determined, really end such misery? Perhaps. A few falling stones
can start a landslide. But who can predict the final outcome, when all the dust has settled?

16
Juliet E. McKenna has had a long-fascination with myth and history and other worlds since childhood.
She studied Greek and Roman history and literature at St Hilda’s, Oxford. Her first novel, THE
THIEF’S GAMBLE was published in 1999, first of the highly acclaimed TALES OF EINARINN
series. THE ALDABRESHIN COMPASS sequence concluded with EASTERN TIDE, her ninth book.
IRONS IN THE FIRE will be the first in a trilogy, THE CHRONICLES OF THE LESCARI
REVOLUTION series. She is also one of the leading lights of The Write Fantastic, a successful
authors’ initiative promoting the SF&F genre. She lives in Oxfordshire with her husband and sons.

New title, IRONS IN THE FIRE: UK/US: Solaris (June 2009)

RANSOM by David Malouf (DR)

With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf revisits Homer's ILIAD.
Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam
and the cart-driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are
explored.

Praise for new title, RANSOM: “RANSOM, his first novel in 10 years, it must be said at once, is
(however abused the word) a masterpiece, exquisitely written, pithy and wise and overwhelmingly
moving, constructed with invisible, successful craft that leaves the reader wondering how in the world
it has been done.” Alberto Manguel, Australian Literary Review

Praise for previous title, THE COMPLETE STORIES:“The beauty of language, alongside the
seduction of rhythm is stamped on the prose throughout.” The Age
"Readers won't want to skim a single page of the 31 stories in this epic collection, a few of which are
novella length. Together, they represent a quarter-century of a formidable craftsman's career."
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“Malouf is one of our finest writers, a poet with an ear for language that transforms an interesting
concept into a classic meditation on the role of chance in each of our lives.” San Francisco Chronicle
“David Malouf's The Complete Stories represents one of the finest achievements in short fiction in the
national literature; this from a writer who is also a celebrated poet and novelist. Traversing a quarter-
century of his career, the stories insinuate us into the consciousness of individuals at points of crisis-
muted or violent. The prose is eloquent, resonant, measured. The settings transport us across
countries, languages and different ways of reckoning the world with a cosmopolitan ease matched by
dew Australian writers.” Fiction Judging Panel’s comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Award
2008

David Malouf is the author of poetry, three opera libretti and acclaimed novels including THE GREAT
WORLD, winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize and the Prix Femina Etranger,
REMEMBERING BABYLON, shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the IMPAC Dublin
Literary Award, and the collection of stories, EVERY MOVE YOU MAKE. The comprehensive
compilation of David's shorter work, THE COMPLETE STORIES, won the 2008 Asia-Australia
Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the inaugural Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award 2008.

RANSOM: Australia: Random House; UK: Chatto & Windus (pub November 2009); US: Pantheon

THE MAINTENANCE OF HEADWAY by Magnus Mills (DM)

"There's no excuse for being early." So begins Magnus Mills' sixth novel, described by its author as a
"learned treatise with swearing."

Ten years since his Booker-shortlisted debut THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS ("the book I wanted to
win" wrote the novelist Penelope Fitzgerald, a judge of that year's prize), Mills returns us to a world he
knows better than many novelists, describing in his distinct, deadpan way the surreality of work. And
this time, it's a world he knows better than anyone: life as a bus driver.

Praise for Magnus Mills: “like P.G. Wodehouse, Mills has created his own deeply English world,
rich in comic possibilities” The Independent

17
“A demented, deadpan comic wonder.” Thomas Pynchon
Praise for previous title, EXPLORERS OF THE NEW CENTURY:
“…with EXPLORERS OF THE NEW CENTURY Magnus Mills asserts himself as [black comedy’s]
blackest, funniest and most astute practitioner” The Daily Telegraph - Novel of the Week
“To write one unique book is a rare achievement. The ability to produce several is truly special.”
The Independent on Sunday

Magnus Mills’ first novel THE RESTRAINT OF BEASTS was short-listed for the 1998 Booker Prize,
the 1998 Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and won the 1999
McKitterick Prize. His other work includes ALL QUIET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, ONLY
WHEN THE SUN SHINES BRIGHTLY, THREE TO SEE THE KING, THE SCHEME FOR FULL
EMPLOYMENT, ONCE IN A BLUE MOON and EXPLORERS OF THE NEW CENTURY. He
currently drives a bus and is learning to play the piano. His work has appeared in over twenty
languages.

Previous title, EXPLORERS OF THE NEW CENTURY: UK: Bloomsbury; US: Harcourt Brace;
Germany: Suhrkamp; Holland: Podium; Norway: Cappelen

the maintenance of headway: UK: Bloomsbury (pub August 2009)


(previously entitled: the arch, the circus and the cross)

STILL MIDNIGHT by Denise Mina


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

It’s a peaceful Sunday evening in suburban Glasgow. TVs are on and dinner is in the oven. But this
peace is rudely shattered when a battered van pulls up to the door of one of the somnolent homes and
disgorges a group of armed men in balaclavas. They smash into the house and hold the family within at
gunpoint and demand millions of pounds. Baffled, the assembled people protest that they don’t have
access to that sort of money. The attackers kidnap the elderly grandfather and storm off into the night.
Now senior policewoman, Detective Superintendent Alex Morrow, has been summoned to investigate
the case. But there are so many mysteries. Who were the men? And why did they think a normal
household concealed untold riches. The family is certainly not talking. But as Alex starts to delve
deeper, she realises that there are dark secrets all around

Praise for previous title, THE LAST BREATH: “Mina infuses the city with human warmth and
social realism; dialogue is convincingly street-witty and Paddy is an endearing heroine.” The Times
“Uncompromisingly real... Another fine book from Mina, and in Paddy Meehan, she has created a
touching and loving heroine.” The Sunday Telegraph
“Paddy Meehan is the most unlikely, and most realistic, investigator in recent crime fiction . . .” Wall
Street Journal

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. She is the author of eight novels, including
GARNETHILL (1998), the first in the Garnethill Trilogy, for which she won the John Creasy Dagger
for best first novel, and the Paddy Meehan series, which consists so far of: THE FIELD OF BLOOD,
winner of the 2006 Barry Award, THE DEAD HOUR, which was nominated for a 2007 Edgar Award,
and THE LAST BREATH.

Previous title, THE LAST BREATH: UK: Transworld; US: Little, Brown; Finland: Like; France:
Lattes; Germany: Heyne; Holland: Ambo Anthos; Norway: Fagbokforlaget; Poland: WAB; Spain:
Roca; Sweden: Forum.

New title, STILL MIDNIGHT: UK: Orion (pub July 2009); US: Little, Brown; Germany: Heyne;
Holland: Ambo Anthos; Sweden: Forum
(previously entitled: IN THE STILL SUBURBAN MIDNIGHT)

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FEBRUARY by Lisa Moore
(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

In 1982, the oilrig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm.
All eighty-four men aboard died. FEBRUARY is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind
when her husband, Cal, drowns. It begins in the present-day, but spirals back again and again to the
"February" that persists in Helen's mind and heart.

In her external life, Helen O'Mara cleans and does yoga and looks after her grandchildren and shakes
hands with solitude. In her internal life, she continually revisits Cal. Then, one night she gets a phone
call: her son John is coming home. He has made a girl pregnant after a brief, sex-filled week in Iceland.
As John grapples with what it might mean to be a father, Helen comes to terms with her need to
remember the dead.

Writing at the peak of her form, her steadfast refusal to sentimentalize coupled with an almost shocking
ability to render the precise details of her characters' physical and emotional worlds, Lisa Moore gives
us her strongest work yet. Here is a novel about complex love and cauterizing grief, about past and
present and how memory knits them together, about a fiercely close community and its universal
struggles, and finally about our need to imagine a future, no matter how fragile. A profound, gorgeous,
heart-stopping work from one of our best writers.

Praise for Lisa Moore: “Lisa Moore brings to her pages what we are always seeking in fiction and
only find in the best of it: a magnetizing gift for revealing how the earth feels, looks, tastes, smells, and
an unswerving instinct for what's important in life . . .. Ms. Moore can flat-out write.” Richard Ford,
author of Independence Day
“Moore writes with deep, truthful observation and is often extremely funny.” The Times (London)
“Moore's spare, economical writing is full of offhand beauty. Her images are so surefooted they give
the impression of having been rendered not merely in the best words available but in the only words
imaginable.” The New York Times Book Review

Lisa Moore's first collection of short stories, DEGREES OF NAKEDNESS, was published in 1995
(House of Anansi Press). In 2002, she publisher her second collection of short fiction, OPEN, which
was short-listed for the Giller Prize, shortlisted for the Winterset Award and won the Canadian Authors
Association Jubilee Award for Short Stories. Lisa Moore won her second Giller Prize nomination in
2005 for her first novel ALLIGATOR, which has been published in the UK, the US, France, Quebec
and Holland. ALLIGATOR was long-listed for the Orange Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers
Prize (Canada/Caribbean region) in 2006. Lisa Moore also edited the acclaimed PENGUIN BOOK OF
CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES BY CANADIAN WOMEN (2006) and GREAT
EXPECTATIONS, an anthology of stories about birth (2008) published by House of Anansi Press.

Previous title, ALLIGATOR: Canada: House of Anansi Press; US: Grove Atlantic; UK: Virago (Little
Brown); Quebec: Boréal; Holland: Meulenhoff; Turkey: Erko (all translation rights: House of
Anansi Press)

New title, FEBRUARY: Canada: House of Anansi Press (pub June 2009); US: Grove Atlantic; UK:
Chatto; France: Plon.

A GATE AT THE STAIRS by Lorrie Moore


(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

A GATE AT THE STAIRS is set in 2001-2002 in the American Midwest.

While the US begins its gearing up for war in the mideast, 20-year-old Tassie Keltjin, the daughter of a
gentleman farmer, takes a part-time nanny job in the college town where she is a university student.
The family she works for seems both mysterious and glamorous to her and her relationship with them,
especially with their young child, becomes a deep and unexpected thing. As her year unfolds -
dramatically and sorrowfully - life reveals its inevitable surprises and secrets and returns Tassie to her
home a somewhat different person.

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A narrative that references both JANE EYRE and MADAME BUTTERFLY and that takes into its
embrace the changes and upheaval of the contemporary American heartland, A GATE AT THE
STAIRS’ themes concern matters of race in America and the fate of children.

Praise for previous title, COLLECTED STORIES: “Lorrie Moore's verve and temerity, her grip on
the exotic dailiness of human life and her depiction of the cluttered griefs of existence, make her an
extraordinary short-story writer. What makes her a deeply moving one is harder to define, but it has to
do with her fearless dissection of the human condition, and the generosity with which she makes this
fallible world her own.” Helen Dunmore, The Financial Times
“Very many writers have written with varying degrees of expertise on similar themes. What makes
Moore's work distinctive is a quality of observation so intense that it amounts to a form of delicate
violence, a slicing through the surface of things to what lies beneath ... by some narrative alchemy [her
stories] seem melancholy as one reads them, but leave an after-image of slightly compromised
hopefulness that is not really like Chekhov or anyone else, but entirely distinctive.” The Sunday
Telegraph

Lorrie Moore is the author of three collections of short stories and two novels. She is the winner of The
Irish Times International Prize for Literature. Other honours include an O. Henry Award, the
PEN/Malamud Award, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, inclusion in John Updike’s BEST
AMERICAN SHORT STORIES OIF THE CENTURY. She was recently inducted into the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at the University of Wisconsin.

Previous title, BIRDS OF AMERICA: US: Knopf; UK: Faber; China: Chinese Literature Plus;
France: Rivages; Germany: Berlin Verlag; Holland: Atlas; Israel: Babel; Italy: Frassinelli; Japan:
Shinchosha; Portugal: Relogio d’Agua; Spain: Salamandra; Sweden: Fischer

New title, A GATE AT THE STAIRS: US: Knopf (pub September 2009); UK: Faber; Spain: Seix
Barral; Catalan: Edicions 62

THE SEVEN-YEAR ITCH by Kate Morris (PS)


 
Ellie is stifled by her marriage to Jack, an actor who has just been killed off in the television soap opera
he has been starring in for seventeen years, and the demands of her two young children. Having a
highly glamorous and confident au pair makes Ellie feel old and inadequate but gives her the chance to
open a café with her friend Tilda. But as busy as she is, she can't seem to stop herself fantasising about
random, highly inappropriate men, ex-boyfriends, and most of all, life without Jack.
 
Ellie embarks on a quest to inject more excitement in to her life and marriage, but it will not come
without a price. Is there really something - or someone - better out there for Ellie, or is she just facing a
classic Seven Year Itch?

Kate Morris is a prolific and respected journalist who has written for many publications including
Tatler, Vogue, Harpers & Queen, Vanity Fair, and Saturday Telegraph Magazine. She wrote a column
for Tatler entitled ‘The Seven Year Itch’ which gave her the idea to write a novel with the same title.

THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH: UK: Penguin (May 2009). 

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TALK OF THE TOWN by Jacob Polley (PS)

We don’t always get to choose when we grow up

1986, the last day of the summer holidays, and Christopher Hearsey is wondering why his best mate
Arthur has suddenly disappeared, and whether lippy Gill Ross a few doors down might know anything
about it.

The great border city of Carlisle is buzzing with rumours following an act of terrible violence, and in
order to begin his search Chris must face down his own dread, not only of the consequences of his own
actions, but of local big man Bobby Grove, and his psychotic sidekick Carl ‘the black’ Hole, who is
keen to settle an old score.
 
Populated by a menacing and hilarious cast of characters, and moving from the dark aggrieved streets
of the city to the agricultural hinterland of the of the Solway Firth, this is the story of a boy desperate to
get out of town, out of a bad situation, even out of his own skin. Written with a moving demotic
brilliance, reminiscent of Huckleberry Finn, TALK OF THE TOWN is an exhilarating and terrifying
odyssey.

Advance praise for Jacob Polley: “A fierce cry of talent, raw as a confession and tender as a poem.
Polley's language is mercurial, his humour quick and surprising. A moving and unmissable debut.”
Chris Cleave, author of Incendiary and The Other Hand/Little Bee  

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, in 1975. Picador published his first book of poetry, THE BRINK, in
2003 and his second, LITTLE GODS, in December 2006. As well as poems, he has also written the
short film Flickerman and the Ivory-skinned Woman with the director, Ian Fenton. Jacob was selected
as one of the Next Generation of British poets in 2004. In 2002 he won an Eric Gregory Award and the
Radio 4/Arts Council ‘First Verse’ Award. He was the Visiting Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at
Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-07. TALK OF THE TOWN is his first novel.

TALK OF THE TOWN: UK: Picador (pub June 2009)

GENEROSITY by Richard Powers


(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old survivor of the endless Algerian civil war, arrives in Chicago, taking
night classes at an arts college in the South Loop. Her instructor, Russell Stone, expecting a damaged
refugee, is astonished to find her an extremely solid and buoyant young woman, contagiously,
relentlessly happy. Psychological examinations reveal her to be hyperthymic— blessed with a
productive, continuous mania without the depression, hardwired for happiness. She comes to the
attention of Thomas Kurton, a genomic researcher committed to the prospect of genetic understanding
and control. Kurton and his fellow researchers declare Thassa’s happiness to be the product of a suite
of genes that produce elevated well-being, an association that they promptly move to patent.  When
media, the infotainment industry, bloggers, politicians, religious leaders, Big Pharmacology, and other
national interests get wind of the story, the future of the race’s well-being goes up for grabs and Thassa
Amzwar and Russell Stone go on the run.

Praise for previous title, THE ECHO MAKER: “An exhilarating narrative feat… Masterfully
controlled… This is a lucid, fiercely entertaining novel.” Sebastian Faulks, The Washington Post
“…his philosophical musings have the energy of a thriller, and he gives lyrical, haunting life to the
landscape of the Great Plains.” The New Yorker

Richard Powers in the author of nine novels, including GALATEA 2.2 and THE GOLD BUG
VARIATIONS, both of which were nominated for the US National Book Critics Circle Award;
OPERATION WANDERING SOUL, which was nominated for the US National Book Award for
Fiction; PLOWING THE DARK; GAIN; and, THE TIME OF OUR SINGING, winner of the WHS
Smith Literary Award. His most recent novel, THE ECHO MAKER (2006) won the US National Book
Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Illinois.

21
Previous title, THE ECHO MAKER: US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; UK: Heinemann; Albania: Ombra;
China: Yilin Press; Czech: Odeon; Denmark: Per Kofod; Finland: Gummerus; France: Le Cherche
Midi; Germany: S. Fischer; Greece: Hestia; Holland: Contact; Indonesia: Maroon Books; Israel:
Am Oved; Italy: Mondadori; Japan: Shinchosha; Norway: Aschehoug; Poland: Otwarte; Portugal:
Casa das Letras; Romania: Polirom; Spain: Random House Mondadori; Sweden: Norstedts.

New title: GENEROSITY: US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (delivery December 2008): UK: Atlantic;
France: Le Cherche Midi; Germany: S. Fischer; Holland: Contact; Italy: Mondadori.

SHADOW CHILD by Libby Purves (DM)

There is no right way to deal with the loss of a beloved son. Marion and Tom are doing their dignified
best, but their own relationship is taking a battering.

So when a fierce, strange woman turns up and demands to see the dead boy, Marion is almost glad of
the distraction. Against Tom’s wishes, she determines to find out more about her son's life away from
home.  
The quest takes her out of her comfortable, conventional world to a shabby office in East London, and
a series of shocks. Tom, furious, finds his own solution, and amid scandal, sorrow and exaltation the
quiet Middle-Englanders discover that there is more than one kind of family.

Praise for previous title, LOVE SONGS AND LIES: “Purves is a fine writer and the slow pace at
the start of the novel proves well pitched to heighten the rising tension of the story” She Magazine
“A bouncy and enlightening read” Good Housekeeping
“The story is cleverly and compellingly told, full of perceptive insights and reflections, the Seventies
period details are squirmingly familiar, the influence of Eng. Lit on a developing emotional
consciousness is sensitively woven in, the parallel lives of students then and now are neatly drawn”
The Spectator

Libby Purves is a writer and also a broadcaster who has presented the talk programme Midweek on
BBC Radio 4 since 1984 and formerly presented the Today Programme. She is a main columnist on the
Times and in 1999 was named the Granada “What the Papers Say” Columnist of the Year, and awarded
an O.B.E for services to journalism. She lives in Suffolk with her husband. Her books on family life,
HOW NOT TO BE A PERFECT MOTHER, HOW NOT TO RAISE A PERFECT CHILD, and HOW
NOT TO BE A PERFECT FAMILY have been widely translated.

SHADOW CHILD: UK: Hodder (pub April 2009)

INHERENT VICE by Thomas Pynchon


(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon- private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally,
out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with
the L.A. fog

It’s been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend. Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up
with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love
with. Easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that ‘love’
is another of those words going round at the moment, like ‘trip’ or ‘groovy’, except that this one
usually leads to trouble. Despite which he soon finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives
and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan
shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, and ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for
Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set
up by some dentists.

In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre, provides a classic illustration
of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren’t there….or…if you were there, then
you…or, wait, is it…

22
Praise for Thomas Pynchon: “Pynchon at his best – and V and GRAVITY’S RAINBOW bear
unmistakable marks of genius – could be defined without much exaggeration as a supreme teller of
tales from the dark underground of the imagination, where ‘truth of falsity don’t apply’” Guardian
“Sentence by sentence he can do more than any novelist of this century with the resources of the
English-American language…Possibly the most accomplished writer of prose in English since James
Joyce” London Review of Books
“The American voice of the late twentieth century” Los Angeles Times Book Review

Thomas Pynchon was born on Long Island in 1937 and educated at Cornell. He is the author of V.,
THE CRYING OF LOT 49, GRAVITY’S RAINBOW, SLOW LEARNER, a collection of short
stories, VINELAND, MASON & DIXON, and AGAINST THE DAY. He received the National Book
Award for GRAVITY’S RAINBOW in 1974.

Previous title, AGAINST THE DAY: US: Penguin Press; UK: Cape; Brazil: Companhia das Letras;
France: Seuil; Germany: Rowohlt; Greece: Kastaniotis; Holland: De Bezige Bij; Italy: Rizzoli;
Norway: Gyldendal; Poland: Nowa Proza; Spain: Tusquets; Sweden: Bonniers (Catalan: Ara
Llibres)

New title, INHERENT VICE: US: Penguin (pub August 2009) UK: Cape (pub August 2009)

DESIGNS FOR A HAPPY HOME by Matthew Reynolds (PS)

'Design - For Life!'... 'And Live - For Design!' (Magic Mottoes 2 & 3)

Can Interior Design make you a better person? Alizia Tamé believes it can. In this novel she takes you
on a journey through the most private Interior of all: her thoughts and feelings. Everyone has heard of
her creations - the Bridge Hallway, the Funnel Office, the Dawson House with its sofas that run on
rails: now you can experience the life that lies behind them.

Meet her husband Jem - the postmodern potter - who is in many ways her inspiration. Share the thrills
and anxieties of juggling family and career. Discover the truth about her partnership with Fisher Paul
and Simon Sanders at IntArchitec, the world's most innovative Design practice. Remember that when
your world flips upside-down it is sometimes the most surprising people who turn out to be your
friends.

For while Alizia has a Design for everything from relationships to work to motherhood, the people who
matter most to her refuse to fit. As the gloss she has put on her life begins to crack she realises there
may not, after all, be a Magic Motto for everything. And where can she find happiness then?

DESIGNS FOR A HAPPY HOME is the sparkling story of a sometimes impossible, often infuriating
but ultimately loveable heroine whose pilgrim's progress through modern marriage is at once funny,
poignant and unforgettable.
 
Advance praise for DESIGNS FOR A HAPPY HOME: “I enjoyed DESIGNS FOR A HAPPY
HOME” enormously. It's such a strikingly original and funny novel, which hits its targets with deadly
accuracy. I loved the writing and Alizia's voice. She may be breathtakingly obtuse and a monomaniac
but she's also a truly endearing character. And Marion - what a familiar monster she is. The whole
organisation of the book is superb.” Helen Dunmore

Matthew Reynolds is known as a critic and scholar, author of The Realms of Verse and of many essays
in the LRB and TLS, editor of DANTE IN ENGLISH and of Manzoni’s THE BETROTHED. He spent
time in London, Cambridge, Pisa and Paris before settling in Oxford where he lectures at the
University and is a Fellow of St Anne’s College. He lives with his unruly family in a thoroughly
imperfect interior.

DESIGNS FOR A HAPPY HOME: UK: Bloomsbury (pub May 2009)

23
THE PARABOLIST by Nicholas Ruddock
(in association with Anne McDermid Associates Ltd)

Part comedy, part mystery, The Parabolist is a novel about murder and sex in the medical
establishment, and poetry and vigilante justice on the streets of Toronto in 1975.

Among the unforgettable cast of characters are a charismatic Mexican poet, a first-year medical student
whose libido repeatedly gets him into trouble, a runaway teen from the country who finds work on the
streets, and a raven-haired beauty whom everyone seems to fall for. Their exploits are told through
interlapping narratives, as their lives become intertwined as in a vortex. At the centre is an unsolved
crime: on a rainy summer night, a woman is raped and very nearly murdered, but for the intervention of
two drunken vigilantes, who kill her attacker before fleeing the scene; the only clue the police have
about their identities is a slab of Crisco shortening found on the body, which connects one of them to a
home invasion in Toronto’s most affluent neighbourhood.

The result is a by-turns dark, nail-biting, funny and tender story of young people on the cusp of
adulthood, where their noblest intentions and earnest need for love expose them to the darkest side of
human nature.

Praise for Nicholas Ruddock: “Ruddock has a refined ear for dialogue and a mischievous sense of
humour. He also knows how to bring a story to a memorable conclusion.” David Bezmozgis, The
Journey Prize Anthology #19 2007
“Nobody can mistake the ingenuity of Nicholas Ruddock, whose story, ‘The Steamer’, is a terrific read.
Ruddock has talent to burn; he writes with verve and style.” Madeleine Thien, Prism International
Summer 2006
“Accomplished, original, witty and wise, ‘The Housepainters’ is a wonderful piece of writing.” Helen
Humphreys, judge of the Antigonish fiction prize
“Our first-prize winner, ‘The Housepainters,’ evokes obvious masterpieces of absurdist and
experimental drama: the impish exchanges of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead, the hypnotic stasis of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ and the provocations of Luigi
Pirandello’s ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author’.” Richard Cumyn, The Antigonish Review
Nicholas Ruddock is a family practitioner whose fiction and poetry has been published in such literary
magazines as The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, Prism International, Grain,
sub-Terrain, Event, and Exile. His short story ‘How Eunice Got her Baby’ was published in the
JOURNEY PRIZE ANTHOLOGY in 2007, and a short film adaptation is being made at the Canadian
Film Centre (founder Norman Jewison) and will be screened at the Toronto Film Festival this autumn.
Canada: Doubleday Canada (pub February 2010)

THE DEVIL’S MUSIC by Jane Rusbridge (HW)

It is 1958 and the Sputnik satellite has taken a dog up into space; back on earth, five-year-old Andy has
a new sister, Elaine – a baby who, his father insists, is ‘not quite all there’. While his parents argue over
whether or not to send Elaine away, Andy sleeps beside her cot each night, keeping guard and watching
as his mother – once an ambitious, energetic nurse – twists away into her private, suffocating sadness.

Knots keep treasures safe, Andy’s rope-maker grandfather tells him, and so Andy begins to learn: the
Carrick Bend, the Midshipman’s Hitch and the Monkey’s Fist. His grandfather recounts stories of the
great Harry Houdini and Andy dreams of becoming an escapologist too, practising untying knots and
holding his breath underwater in the bath.

When a young painter hired to decorate the family’s house coaxes responses from soft, silent Elaine, he
seems to call Andy’s mother back from the grief in which she is lost. And then, at The Siding – the old
railway carriage that serves as the family’s seaside retreat – Andy is left in charge of his baby sister on
a wind-chopped beach, where he discovers that not all treasures can be kept safe for ever.

24
Three decades later, when his father dies and his other sister calls him home, Andrew returns from self-
imposed exile to The Siding, the place where his life first unraveled. Looking back on the broken
strands of his childhood, he tries, at last, to weave them together, aided by his grandfather’s copy of
The Ashley Book of Knots and the arrival of a wild-haired, tango-dancing sculptor – a woman with her
own ideas about making peace with the past.

Advance praise for THE DEVIL’S MUSIC:“THE DEVIL’S MUSIC is that rare thing, a novel that
is as bold as it is subtle. It's a powerful and deeply affecting story of the bond between a mother and
her children. It's also a sharp expose of the devastating effects of the taboos that govern motherhood.
The characters are tenderly drawn. The mystery at the heart of the story is compelling. Jane Rusbridge
is a brilliant new voice.” Alison Macleod
“This intricately structured, brilliantly observed modern take on a family saga is both passionate and
moving” Lesley Glaister
“Vividly and intensely written” Jane Rogers, author of Mr Wroe's Virgins
Jane Rusbridge has a gift for evoking both characters and place – THE DEVIL’S MUSIC was pure
pleasure to read. Sensuously written and beautifully woven together, the various strands of the story
converge in a heartrending - and heartwarming – climax”
Kathy Page, author of The Story of My Face

Jane Rusbridge lives on the coast in West Sussex with her husband, a farmer, and three of their five
children. She taught at primary and preschool levels before returning to education herself as a mature
student to read English at Chichester University, where she went on to gain an MA in Creative Writing.
For the past ten years she has worked at Chichester University as an Associate Lecturer in English.
THE DEVIL’S MUSIC is her first novel.

THE DEVIL’S MUSIC: UK: Bloomsbury (pub July 2009)

NEW YORK by Edward Rutherfurd (GC)

New York- the world’s greatest city and the world’s greatest story

Edward Rutherfurd tells this story as no other author - from the epic, empty grandeur of the New
World, to skyscrapers of the City that Never Sleeps, from the intimate detail of lives long forgotten to
those lived today at breakneck speed - four centuries brought to brilliant life by one of the world’s
greatest historical novelists.

The novel begins with a tiny Indian fishing village and the Dutch traders who first carved out their
hopes amidst the unpeopled splendour of wilderness. The British settlers and merchants followed, with
their aristocratic governors and unpopular taxation, which led to rebellion, war, the burning of the city
and the American Nation. Yet a country that had already torn itself asunder once did so again over
slavery. As the country fought its bloody Civil War, the city was nearly destroyed by deadly riots.
Hopes and dreams, greed and corruption—they have always been the companions of freedom and
opportunity in the city’s teeming streets. As the immigrant ships berthed next to Ellis Island in the
shadow of the Statue of Liberty, they poured more and more Germans, Irish, Italians and Jews into the
churning ethnic mix of the city. Deals were struck, politicians corrupted, men bought or assassinated,
heiresses wooed, fortunes were speculated on Wall Street and men became richer than avarice. The
heady seesaw of wealth and poverty was seen in the Roaring Twenties and the Great Crash, the city’s
hope of recovery symbolised by the skyscrapers that seemed to define mankind’s future: the Empire
State, the Chrysler Building, the Twin Towers.

Rutherfurd tells the irresistible story through a cast of fictional and true characters whose fates
interweave in the rise and fall, fall and rise of the city’s fortunes. It is the story of how in four centuries
New York became the envy of the world, the Big Apple, loved and hated in equal measure until those
who envied it most sought to destroy it. And in telling the story through the lens of New York,
Rutherfurd brings the story of America itself to imperious life in this epic masterpiece.

25
Praise for DUBLIN: FOUNDATION and IRELAND AWAKENING: “A sweeping, carefully
reconstructed portrait of a nation . . . Leaps through the centuries.” New York Times
“Edward Rutherfurd has written about Dublin with love. It is an expertly researched and highly
readable account of a place he has grown to know well […] A giant, sprawling, easy-to-read story told
in James Michener fashion.” Maeve Binchy, Ireland on Sunday
“Spellbinding . . . [A] page-turning Dublin saga . . . Rutherfurd does a magnificent job of packaging a
crackling good yarn within the digestible overview of complex historical circumstances and events.”
Booklist
“Edward Rutherfurd . . . writes wonderful sagas, tales that cover centuries. . . . [He] does the
painstaking research; the reader has all the fun.” Seattle Times
“A contemporary James Michener . . . Like the American writer, Rutherfurd creates large-scale,
multigenerational historical fiction that focuses on distant times and places. With hefty historical
novels such as SARUM, RUSSKA and LONDON, Rutherfurd has established a strong track record
[and] in The DUBLIN Saga, he explores in an energetic and often celebratory tone the original Celtic
roots.” USA Today

Edward Rutherfurd was born in Salisbury, England, and educated at Cambridge University and
Stanford University in California. A former resident of London and Dublin, Rutherfurd now lives in
New York. His last novel on Dublin was published in two volumes as DUBLIN: FOUNDATION (US
title PRINCES OF IRELAND) and IRELAND AWAKENING (US title REBELS OF IRELAND) and
both of them ere New York Times top ten bestsellers.

Previous title, IRELAND AWAKENING: UK: Century; US: Doubleday (US title: REBELS OF
IRELAND); Brazil: Record; Czech: BB Art; Germany: Blessing Verlag; Hungary: Pecsi; Italy:
Mondadori; Spain: Roca

New title, NEW YORK: UK: Century (pub September 2009); US: Doubleday (pub November 2009)

DEATH ON THE ICE by Robert Ryan (DM)

The story of one of the greatest epic journeys of all time.

January 18, 1912: Captain Robert Falcon Scott's expedition reaches the South Pole. Just a few weeks
later, trapped in one of the worst blizzards Antarctica has ever known, Scott and his four companions
perish in subzero temperatures. How did the icy conditions overwhelm Scott, Captain Oates and their
party on the fateful return journey? Both experienced explorers, neither Scott or Oates were prepared
for the disappointment of losing their polar race against Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Nor could they
have known that the accretion of a few small mistakes would ultimately cost them their lives.
The story of Scott and Oates, their incredible journey and their tragic final days, combines ambition,
national pride and the kind of bravery and dignity most men can only dream of. It is one of the most
captivating and endlessly fascinating tales from the Golden Age of Exploration.

Praise for Robert Ryan: “Ryan has an excellent eye for strong material, as well as the story-telling
flair evident in his contemporary fiction” The Sunday Times
“Excellent...I cannot recommend it too highly...Comparisons may be drawn between EARLY ONE
MORNING and CHARLOTTE GRAY. Ryan’s story is much the stronger.” Daily Telegraph
Praise for previous title, EMPIRE OF SAND: “Stirring, a true epic, Robert Ryan marshals some
engrossing material with skill. The central character is beautifully caught.” Daily Telegraph
“A hugely enjoyable speculative novel” Sunday Times

Robert Ryan is the author of a trilogy of contemporary hard-boiled stories: UNDERDOGS, NINE
MIL, and TRANS AM and a quartet of WW2 thrillers: EARLY ONE MORNING, THE BLUE
NOON, NIGHT CROSSING, AFTER MIDNIGHT. DEATH ON THE ICE and EMPIRE OF SAND
are the first two titles in a new series of novels featuring heroic twentieth-century figures: Scott of
Antarctica and Laurence of Arabia respectively.

Previous title, EMPIRE OF SAND: UK: Headline Review; Portugal: Saida de Emergencia.

New title, DEATH ON THE ICE: UK: Headline (pub April 2009)

26
IN THE ROOMS by Tom Shone (DM)

You meet everyone in the rooms. When British literary agent Patrick Miller gets sober in New York,
the city opens up to him - a place where recovering junkies, pill-poppers and sex addicts rub shoulders
with the reclusive author Patrick’s been aching to sign up months. Then Patrick meets a beautiful girl
with a troubled past from the Hollywood Hills. The only problem is he doesn’t have a problem - not
with alcohol, not with drugs. Just with that small thing they call the ‘truth’.
Tom Shone’s first novel is a warm, sharply-observed comedy about faking and making it, getting clean
and coming clean, making love, and falling in it...

Tom Shone was born in 1967 in Horsham, England, and educated at Oxford University. From 1994 to
1999 he was the film critic of the London Sunday Times. His BLOCKBUSTER: How Hollywood
Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Summer, was published in 2004. He lives in New York.

IN THE ROOMS: UK/US: Hutchinson (pub July 2009)

AUTOMATIC WORLD by Struan Sinclair


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

In this exhilarating debut novel, four strands spanning several generations are woven together through
the fragmented consciousness of a patient in rehabilitation from an accident that leaves him stuck in
present tense. Unable to recall who he is, where he is from, or who he knows, and determined to access
his history, the patient harvests and assembles the narratives of his friends, family, and other witnesses.
Out of this miscellany emerge surprising stories: Merrick, an inventor who dreams of a clockwork
universe; Dory, a girl who commits a mercy-killing at a local hospice; Merle, whose repeated suicide
attempts function to forge a relationship with his estranged son, and, finally, the narrator’s own elusive
past. Between these threads is the story of a train crash and of three minutes lost - three minutes that
will prove a turning point in the lives of all the characters caught in this complicated clockwork.

Advance praise for AUTOMATIC WORLD: “A tour de force of masterfully varied, inventive prose,
dead-on detail, pole-vaulting ideas, wild humour and complex characters, including a buff, pugnacious
wheeled suitcase called the Traveller.” Steven Heighton, author of The Shadow Boxer
“There is a real intelligence at work, however, that goes beyond the usual postmodern cleverness, as
well as a fresh, inventive eye for detail, rendered in a fittingly abrupt, essentialist style. A novel full of
trains that never get where they're going, it announces that Struan Sinclair has arrived.” Toronto Star
“In a totally fresh blueprint for fiction, with shapely sentences and masterful observations, Struan
Sinclair assembles a home for his witty and imaginative characters united across a span of more than
a century. […] A novel where all trains of thought converge only to shatter expectations,
AUTOMATIC WORLD is a masterful and remarkable piece of architecture, an unmistakable work of
art.”
Lee Henderson, author of The Man Game

Struan Sinclair is the author of the acclaimed short story collection EVERYTHING BREATHED
published by Granta (1999). AUTOMATIC WORLD is his first novel.

AUTOMATIC WORLD: Canada: Doubleday Canada (pub March 2009)

THE EINSTEIN GIRL by Philip Sington (PS)

Thirty years after his death, secret correspondence between Albert Einstein and the Serbian
mathematician Mileva Marić was opened to public scrutiny. It revealed for the first time the existence
of a daughter born to the couple a year before their marriage. Elisabeth Einstein was delivered on or
around January 27th 1902, probably in Titel, a village in the then Austro-Hungarian province of
Vojvodina. Her fate remains unknown.

Two months before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, a beautiful young woman is found naked and near
death in the woods outside Berlin. When she finally emerges from a coma, she can remember nothing,
not even her own name.

27
The only clue to her identity is a handbill found nearby, advertising a public lecture by Albert Einstein:
On the Present State of Quantum Theory. The newspapers instantly christen her ‘the Einstein girl’.

Psychiatrist Martin Kirsch little knows that this will be his last case. Determined at any cost to uncover
the truth about ‘Patient E’, he finds professional fascination turning gradually to love. His
investigations lead him to a remote corner of Serbia via a psychiatric hospital in Zürich, where the
inheritor of Einstein’s genius – his youngest son, Eduard – is writing a book that will destroy his
illustrious father and, in the process, change the world.

Intricately researched and relentlessly compelling, THE EINSTEIN GIRL is a mystery about love and
the hunger for knowledge; a dark journey into the psychological hinterland of the 20th century’s
greatest mind, culminating in an astonishing quantum twist.

Praise for previous title, ZOIA’S GOLD: “... a rich novel, marrying fact and fiction seamlessly,
expertly travelling not just between eras but cultures – hugely satisfying, leaving all kinds of thoughts
and questions in its wake.” Margaret Forster
“This is a startlingly original thriller. Sington has done his research, and seamlessly blends extracts
from Zoia’s moving private letters with a contemporary plot about a former art dealer obsessed with
the painter’s life. The book jumps back and forth in time, form the Russian Revolution to 1920s
Bohemian Paris and the art underworld in present-day Sweden. Emotional, riveting and unexpected.”
Easy Living Magazine
“Gripping… Sington pulls the reader into the mystery… weaving together the past and the present,
quoting from Zoia’s actual letters, and deepening the sense of unease, as the horror gradually
emerges” Boston Globe

Philip Sington read history at Trinity College, Cambridge and worked as a journalist and magazine
editor for nine years. He co-authored six thrillers under the joint pseudonym of Patrick Lynch, selling
over a million copies worldwide, and also co-wrote on the stage play Lip Service, which premiered at
the Finborough Theatre, London in 2000. His first solo novel, ZOIA’S GOLD (zoia.mysite.wanadoo-
members.co.uk), was published in 2005. His work has been translated into a total of fifteen foreign
languages. He lives in London.

Previous title, ZOIAS’S GOLD: UK: Atlantic; US: Scribner; Greece: Oceanida; Poland: Muza;
Russia: Eksmo; Serbia: Laguna; Spain: Alfaguara

New title, THE EINSTEIN GIRL: UK: Harvill/Secker (pub September 2009); Brazil: Objetiva;
Bulgaria: Ciela; Germany: DTV; Holland: Luitingh-Sijthoff; Serbia: Laguna; Spain: Alfaguara

AFTER THE BREAK by Penny Smith (DM)

Katie Fisher, one-time presenter of breakfast TV show Hello Britain!, nearly has her life in perfect
order. She's recovered from her humiliating dismissal, improved her relationship with the drinks
cabinet and, most importantly, found a gorgeous new TV producer boyfriend. But her dream job as a
chat show host has come to an end and there doesn't seem to be much work around - she's starting to
get worried.

Then she's offered a place on Celebrity X-treme - the latest celebrity-humiliating reality show. But is a
reality TV programme really a good idea? Will it save her career or be the final blow? And just how
tempting are two weeks in a freezing cabin in Norway, with a group of people no one's quite heard of?
Very tempting - when the pay cheque is that big.

So Katie takes the risk - along with a Page 3 model, an out-of-work soap actor, an old, failed comedian
and some woman who had an affair with a politician. She's soon out of her depth, as scheming
producers do everything in their power to get the show they want - it's going to take all Katie's good
humour and bad puns to bounce back from this one.

28
Praise for previous title, COMING UP NEXT: “Penny Smith’s debut is such wry, sassy fun she
might want to consider giving up the day job” Daily Record
“A comic roller coaster, COMING UP NEXT is exactly the sort of racy summer read you’d expect
from the clever, funny, sharp Miss Smith.” The Daily Mail
“A brilliant darkly comic novel about the fall and rise of a TV presenter. A lot of fun.” Bella

Penny Smith has worked as a journalist and TV presenter. She has presented the GMTV Breakfast
Television News Hour since 1993, and has also worked for Sky News and Classic FM. She also has a
regular newspaper column. COMING UP NEXT, her first novel, reached number 7 on the Sunday
Times bestseller list and has sold over 130,000 copies.

Previous title, COMING UP NEXT: UK: Fourth Estate; Germany: Blanvalet

New title, AFTER THE BREAK: UK: Fourth Estate (June 2009); Germany: Blanvalet

GET ME OUT OF HERE by Henry Sutton (DM)

“GET ME OUT OF HERE reads like Martin Amis before he lost his mojo... A very funny book for
seriously unfunny times, this is the first credit crunch novel, a tale where the laughs are black, bitter,
and laced with blind panic.” Tony Parsons

It’s autumn 2008 and Matt Freeman is having a very bad day. Stuck in Canary Wharf he’s
overwhelmed by empty consumerism, hollow corporations and broken promises. Later that night,
things only get worse when he drops in on his girlfriend, Bobbie, a fashion events’ coordinator and
reality TV show fanatic.

As his London life starts to spiral out of control, Matt seeks out old flames and considers North Korean
business ventures. Sneered at by sales assistants and abused by cabbies, he desperately searches for a
means of escape.

GET ME OUT OF HERE is a novel of comic anger, of success and failure, commerce and culture -
and, fundamentally, belief - in a worn-out city.

Praise for previous title, THONG NATION: "Henry Sutton has always had a knack for squeezing
the national zeitgeist into tight little narratives . . . this is a work of fiction that is dirty, scathing and
hilarious.” Geoff Dyer, author of Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered

Henry Sutton is the author of GORLESTON, BANK HOLIDAY MONDAY, THE HOUSEHUNTER,
FLYING and KID’S STUFF and a collection of short stories, THONG NATION.

New novel, GET ME OUT OF HERE: UK: Harvill/Secker [Random House] (pub January 2010)

THE PLAYERS by Margaret Sweatman


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

It is 1665, and young Lilly Cole must learn to act, to be one of the King’s players – for her it’s a
question of survival.  At the same time, two French explorers arrive in Court to charm two ships from
the English King. Set in the libertine era of Restoration England, THE PLAYERS takes us on a
voyage of discovery. 

This is the Court of King Charles II, a monarch who loved theatre and women, and loathed moralists.
He is impressed by Lilly’s genius on stage; he enjoys her many skills. He also fosters a self-destructive
young playwright, Bartholomew, who is in love with liquor, and with Lilly Cole.

The historical characters – King Charles, Prince Rupert, Radisson, Des Groseilliers – come alive in this
novel’s own fantastical terms: just as they were marvellous figures in their own time.

29
The novel begins in Oxford, moves to London, and then sets sail for Hudson Bay, Canada. The
characters on this journey must learn to apply their skills in survival through all the many
transformations of their environment, from plague-riddled London, to a small ship crossing the
Atlantic, enduring the extreme cold at Rupert’s River in James Bay, and to return, utterly changed, if
they’ve managed to live.

THE PLAYERS suggests that we are all performing our own lives. In this novel, the ability to
perform- in Court, on stage, in private quarters and in the brutal cold of James Bay - might save your
life.  

Margaret Sweatman is a playwright and lyricist; she is the author of three previous novels, SAM AND
ANGIE (1996), FOX (1991) published by Turnstone, and WHEN ALICE LAY DOWN WITH PETER
published by Knopf Canada (2002).

THE PLAYERS: Canada: Goose Lane Editions (pub September 2009)

ILUSTRADO by Miguel Syjuco (PS)


- Winner of the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize and winner of the Palanca Award, the Philippines
highest literary honour.

ILUSTRADO is an exploration of the novel form, in the tradition of Vladimir Nabokov, Roberto
Bolaño and Jonathan Safran Foer.
 
ILUSTRADO begins with Crispin Salvador, lion of Philippine letters, dead in the Hudson River. His
acolyte Miguel investigates the author's demise and the disappearance of a manuscript about the
corruption of Filipino ruling families. To understand the death, Miguel scours the life, charting
Salvador's trajectory via his poetry, stories, interviews, novels, polemics and memoirs.

The literary fragments become patterns become stories become epic: a family saga of four generations
tracing 150 years of Philippine history forged under the Spanish, Americans and Filipinos themselves -
an expanse encompassing revolution, world war, communist struggle, the Marcos dictatorship and a
society now fighting its own worst tendencies. In the end, the story twists, belonging to young Miguel
as much as his lost mentor.
 
Incidentally, the title refers to the Enlightenment in the Philippines, the Ilustrados were the Filipino
elite during the Spanish colonial period in the late 19th century. They were middle-class, educated and
exposed to European and nationalist ideals and sought reform under Spanish tutelage.

Advance praise for ILUSTRADO: "ILUSTRADO seems to us to possess formal ambition, linguistic
inventiveness and sociopolitical insight in the most satisfying measure. Brilliantly conceived, and
stylishly executed, it covers a large and tumultuous historical period with seemingly effortless skill. It
is also ceaselessly entertaining, frequently raunchy, and effervescent with humour.” The panel of 2008
Man Asian Literary Prize judges  

Miguel Syjuco was born in Manila and spent part of his childhood in Vancouver. He has a MFA from
Columbia and is finishing a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, Australia. He
interned at the fiction department of The New Yorker, helping select stories; did research and writing
for Esquire; and was a fiction reader at The Paris Review. In recent years he was an editor at The
Independent Weekly, the Australian affiliate of The Independent of London. He now lives in Montreal
and works as a copy editor at The Montreal Gazette. 

ILUSTRADO: US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux (pub 2010); Canada: Penguin; UK: Picador; Australia:
Random House; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; France: Bourgois: Germany: Klett-Cotta; Holland:
Mouria; Italy: Fazi; Spain: Tusquets; Sweden: Natur och Kultur; Serbia: Geopoetika; Vietnam:
Public Security  

30
GOYA’S DOG by Damian Tarnopolsky
(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

Edward Dacres is an unforgettable anti-hero, a dissolute abstract painter whose fortunes in London
have dwindled to nothing by the autumn of 1939. When a misdirected letter invites him to take part in a
delegation to bring Art to the “Colonies”, Dacres seizes the opportunity to leave England—never mind
that the delegation’s patrons have confused him with a better-known painter of foxes and hounds.

Once in North America, however, a series of mishaps forces Dacres to abandon the troupe and try his
luck in the puritan climate of 1939 Toronto, most of whose citizens have their thoughts on the war, and
don’t care a whit for his painted triangles. Most, that is, with the notable exception of a beautiful
heiress with an eye for art and a willful determination to save Dacres from himself.

GOYA’S DOG is a love story laced with satire, and a historical novel bearing on contemporary truths.
A picaresque tale of gin, cowardice, and artistic paralysis, it toys with our notions of the artist’s role in
times of war and considers the selfishness inherent in our passions—and the self-sacrifice fundamental
to love.

Praise for Damian Tarnopolsky: “Tarnopolsky may capture very real worlds and emotions but he
allows just enough conjecture to make original turns. . .Tarnopolsky writes perfect, twisty sentences. . .
there’s authority, Nabokovian play and bawdiness to these tales . . .” Eye Weekly
“Damian Tarnopolsky often writes like a dazzling fallen angel. . . I listened to Tarnopolsky plucking at
my shopworn critical synapses, and asked why he made them sing in a way several prize contenders
haven't. The answer is that he's a truly new voice, delivered with a rare panache. . . the book worth re-
reading to catch all its clues.” The Globe and Mail
“This is absurdist comedy at its best. . . At turns surreal, serio-comic whimsical and erotic,
Tarnopolsky's stories hurtle headlong into the heart of our myths--about class, gender, freedom. . .
--and reveal that the truth waiting for us is not what we'd expect.” Toronto Star
“Tarnopolsky loves his characters for their flaws, not despite them, and the reader too is
compelled . . . the characters are finely fleshed out, the dialogue is fluid and believable, and the
structures are clever and interesting . . . proof of Tarnopolsky's skill, insight and wit.” Quill & Quire

Damian Tarnopolsky was born in London. He studied literature at the University of Toronto and
Oxford University, and writing with Mavis Gallant at the Humber School for Writers. His first book,
LANZMANN AND OTHER STORIES (2006), was nominated for the ReLit Award. The story
‘Sleepy’ was nominated for the Journey Prize and anthologized and ‘You Guys’ was nominated for the
2007 CBC Literary Award. GOYA’S DOG is his first novel. He lives in Toronto.

GOYA’S DOG: Canada: Hamish Hamilton (Penguin) (pub August 2009); Serbia: Beobook

ASK ALICE by D.J. Taylor (GC)

1904. A pretty young woman travels apprehensively across the American prairies; on a whim she
makes a bold decision, grabbing her future with both hands. A lonely little boy, growing up a world
away between-stairs in an Edwardian country house, has his future decided for him by impending war
and an old woman who parcels him off to her eccentric brother in the flatlands of Norfolk.

A quarter of a century later, in the brightly coloured world of London high life, Alice Keach is queen
among society hostesses. Her face stares from every gossip column. Behind her lie a marriage to a
wealthy landowner, and a career as a celebrated actress. But Alice has a secret, whose roots run five
thousand miles away to that Kansas train-ride, and a chain of connection with the potential to blow her
comfortable existence apart. A half-hearted blackmailer making his way across the Atlantic; a watchful
teenage boy observing the birth of a lucrative new colour in a Norfolk pigpen; a Bright Young woman
coming to terms with an unsatisfactory marriage; a country house party that ends in tragedy; a
sensational murder trial: all these are gathered up in the story of Alice’s rise and fall.

31
Ranging from the Dakota badlands to the drawing rooms of Mayfair, and from the Norfolk back-lanes
to the casting couches of the Edwardian theatre, Ask Alice is a remarkable novel of concealment,
subterfuge and revelation, depth-charged with wit and intrigue, and dominated by its characters’
gradual awareness that the choices which confront them have the capacity to change their lives.

Praise for previous title, KEPT: A VICTORIAN MYSTERY: “A pageturner of the highest order…
a genuine mystery - not a simple whodunnit but a constant revelation of a complex and tight-knit plot”
Philippa Gregory, The Times
“A great read. It intrigues, diverts and delights” Susan Hill, The Guardian

D.J. Taylor was born in Norwich in 1960. He is a novelist, critic and acclaimed biographer. His
ORWELL: The Life (available in Vintage paperback) won the Whitbread Biography of the year for
2003. His most recent books are the Victorian novel KEPT: A Victorian Mystery (a Publishers Weekly
book of the year, also in Vintage paperback) and THE CORINTHIAN SPIRIT: On the Decline of
Amateurism in Sport (Yellow Jersey, 2006). He is married with three children and lives in Norwich.

Previous title, KEPT: UK: Chatto & Windus; US: Harpers; Russia: AST

New title, ASK ALICE: UK: Chatto & Windus (pub April 2009)

THE ESCAPE: A Novel in Five Parts by Adam Thirlwell (PS)

Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain, possessed of more hair than is his
natural right. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married? Or
Jewish? When was he ever attached? There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is
the greatest of them all.

In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner is seeking a
cure, redress, more women, and ignoring the will of his wife. He is there to claim her inheritance: a
villa on the outskirts of a forgotten spa town - which somehow survived the confiscations of the
invading twentieth century, and has now reverted to her family. But Haffner never does what he is told.

On his arrival in the town, Haffner has checked into the spa hotel - and tried to develop two affairs: a
mildly successful affair with a younger woman whose breasts are lavish, and a much less successful
affair with an even younger woman, whose breasts are the smallest he has ever known. And,
intermittently, he has tried to secure the paperwork for the villa he never wanted. But gradually, in the
tribulations of his bureaucracy - which has now lasted for weeks, as Haffner has discovered, rather than
minutes - he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it.

There are two character notes to Haffner: he is an egotist, and he adores women. A mediocre man, but
a man of singular appetite. And so it is that, harried by his family, pursued by his women, menaced by
bureaucrats, negotiating with the mafia, riven by his memory of the dead and of the missing, Haffner
endures his many humiliations, as he tries to orchestrate his final escape, in the forgotten centre of
Europe.

Through the story of his couplings and uncouplings, emerge the stories of Haffner’s Twentieth
Century. How can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history? That has been the
problem of Haffner’s life. How do you remain a libertine?

A novel about the fall of empires, and the beauty of defeat, THE ESCAPE is a swift, sad farce of
sexual mayhem.

32
Praise for previous titles:
POLITICS: “…one of the funniest, most stylish and utterly original debuts to hit the stands in recent
years” The Times
“has a flexibility and muscle that elevates him above most debut novelists...It deserves your immediate
attention” The Independent
“…allusive, barbed, cocky, flamboyant, reckless, obscene and very funny” Time Out
“This is a clever book. This is a fantastically clever book. (...) Out of a doctoral inquisition into the
strangeness of sex comes a funny and strangely insightful romance. A genuinely original book"
Daily Mail

MISS HERBERT: “MISS HERBERT is a thoughtful, and frequently hilarious, study of the nature of
literary translation. It is also a work of art, a new form.” A.S. Byatt
“A scintillating figure-of-eight skate around, inter alia, Sterne, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, Kafka,
Gombrowicz and Nabokov, on the theme of style and translation, a one-off like a novel with everything
cut except the digressions, and an interesting fact on every page” Tom Stoppard, The Guardian
Books of the Year

Adam Thirlwell, described as a ‘prodigy’ by The New York Times, was born in London in 1978. His
first novel, POLITICS, was published in 2003, and translated into seventeen languages. In the same
year, he was placed on Granta’s list of the Best British Novelists under forty. His essay on the novel
and translation, MISS HERBERT, was published in 2007, and won a Somerset Maugham Award. He
writes a column in the Guardian; is a regular contributor to Esquire; and has also written for London
Review of Books, The TLS, The Believer, Le Monde, and The Observer. THE ESCAPE is his second
novel.

Previous titles:
POLITICS (novel): UK: Cape; US: Fourth Estate; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Czech Republic:
Argo; Denmark: Gyldendal; Finland: Tammi; France: L’Olivier; Germany: S. Fischer; Greece:
Patakis; Holland: Arbeiderspers; Israel: Kinneret; Italy: Guanda; Norway: Pax; Poland: Zysk;
Portugal: Dom Quixote; Serbia: Alfa Narodna; Spain: Anagrama (Spanish and Catalan); Sweden:
Tivoli.
MISS HERBERT (non-fiction): UK: Cape; US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; France: L’Olivier;
Germany: S. Fischer; Italy: Guanda; Spain: Anagrama (previously entitled THE DELIGHTED
STATES)

New title, THE ESCAPE: UK: Cape; US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; France: L’Olivier;
Germany: S. Fischer; Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam; Italy: Guanda; Spain: Anagrama; Sweden:
Norstedts.

CURIOSITY by Joan Thomas


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

In 18th century Lyme Regis, Jane Austen’s literary territory, lived an illiterate young working class
woman called Mary Anning. She became, in spite of the crushing pressures of her time, arguably
England’s first paleontologist.

In the face of the scorn of her peers, Mary Anning spent years of her young life walking along the cliffs
of Lyme Regis, collecting, labelling and preserving every tiny bone she found. She was criticized for
the indelicate practice of studying fossil faeces, condemned by the townspeople for working on the
shore on the Sabbath and for walking alone or with men, and accused by the great French anatomist
Georges Cuvier of forgery. When Mary’s discovery was identified as the fossil of the first Jurassic
marine reptile, a heated debate began to rage between the traditional Christian establishment and the
emerging scientific intelligencia. The struggle to reconcile these creatures with Biblical teachings. No
one knew what these stony skeletons were. Dragons? Debris from Noah’s flood? The Creator’s failed
experiments?

33
Only the young geologist Henry de la Beche fully understood Mary, with whom he became entranced
despite the unbridgeable class difference between them. Two hundred years later Mary Anning’s
historical achievement was finally acknowledged by the Natural History Museum, and now Joan
Thomas’ powerful, meticulous and loving novel brings Mary’s monumental achievement, her
courageous struggle, to the full light of our modern day.

Joan Thomas has been a contributing book reviewer for the Globe and Mail since 1993 and for two
years wrote a biweekly feature review, also for the Globe. Her short stories and creative non-fiction
have been published in journals and magazines across the country, and in 1996 she won a National
Magazine Award for Personal Journalism. Thomas was co-editor of TURN OF THE STORY:
Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millenium (House of Anansi Press, 1999), still on the course
list of many universities.

Canada: McClelland & Stewart (pub 2010)

BROOKLYN by Colm Toíbín (PS)


 
Brooklyn is the devastating new novel following on from the majestic collection of stories, MOTHERS
AND SONS. Set in 1950s Dublin and Brooklyn, New York it concerns the life and growth of Eilis
Lacey who will no doubt become one of fiction's most celebrated heroines. Toíbín writes in painfully
brilliant prose which gathers up readers and leaves them dumbfounded. Eilis makes a life-changing
decision to leave behind the safe quiet work environment of a regimented Dublin shop for life in the
brave new world of Brooklyn. But are the ties of her native country and of her mother and sister Rose
too strong for her to be separated from them forever?

In its subtlety, its emotional resonance and its total and utter control, it bears comparisons with some of
the greatest fiction of this or any century.

Praise for previous title, MOTHERS AND SONS: “...Toíbín’s small-scale dramas have an
emotional density that far outweighs their verbal economy” The Sunday Times
“[A] finely wrought collection.” The Times
“Exquisitely written and deeply moving. Toibin unflinchingly unravels the delicate strands” Daily
Express
“Outstanding... A restrained, absorbing collection” The Guardian
“Nine affecting and unpredictable vignettes...This is fiction of formidable power and emotional
range.” The Observer

Colm Toíbín was born in Ireland in 1955 and lives in Dublin. He is the author of five novels including
the Booker-shortlisted THE BLACKWATER LIGHTSHIP, and THE MASTER. His non-fiction
includes THE SIGN OF THE CROSS and LOVE IN A DARK TIME.

Previous titles:
THE MASTER (novel): UK: Picador; US: Scribner; Canada: McClelland & Stewart; Brazil:
Companhia das Letras; Bulgaria: Prozorets; China: Shanghai 99; Denmark: Tiderne Skifter; France:
Laffont; Germany: Hanser; Greece: Oceanida; Holland: De Geus; Israel: Miskal/Babel; Italy: Fazi;
Lithuania: Jotema; Malaysia: Terjemahan Negara; Norway: Tiden Norsk; Poland: Rebis; Portugal:
Dom Quixote; Romania: Polirom; Serbia: Alfa Narodna; Slovenia: Sanje; Spain: Edhasa (Catalan:
La Campana); Sweden: Bonniers; Taiwan: Ten Points/Chiuko; Turkey: Nokta

MOTHERS AND SONS (stories): UK: Picador; US: Scribner; Australia: Pan Macmillan; Canada:
McClelland & Stewart; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; France: Laffont; Germany: Hanser; Holland:
De Geus; Israel: Miskal; Italy: Fazi; Spain: Lumen (Catalan: La Campana); Turkey: Turkuvaz

New title, BROOKLYN: UK: Penguin (pub May 2009); US: Scribner; Canada: McClelland &
Stewart; Australia: Picador; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; China: Shanghai 99; France: Laffont;
Germany: Hanser; Holland: De Geus; Italy: Bompiani; Poland: Rebis; Spain: Lumen (Catalan: Ara
Llibres) [NB: Romanian rights are handled by Simona Kessler International Copyright Agency]

34
FICTION: RECENTLY PUBLISHED

A TALE OF LOVE by Contardo Calligaris (original title: O CONTO DO AMOR)


(in association with Companhia das Letras)

Shortly before his death, a father makes an unusual revelation to his son: in another life he had been the
assistant of the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (known as il Sodoma), author of the frescos at Monte
Oliveto Maggiore Abbey in Italy. Twelve years later, this apparently nonsensical conversation becomes
the point of departure for a complex plot involving a love affair in the midst of the Second World War
and its ramifications from then until now. Written at a thriller’s pace, though retaining the subtleties of
a psychological narrative, A TALE OF LOVE follows the narrator’s journey into his father’s past,
which takes him to Milan, Sienna, Florence, Paris and Monte Oliveto Maggiore and leads in turn to a
probing investigation into his own origins. Along this tortuous path, the protagonist is surprised to find
that his discoveries also point toward the future, where there is still room for passions that could
change his life.

Praise for A TALE OF LOVE:


“This is a mystery novel, a psychological thriller, but above all a historical mystery, of enigmas and
discoveries steeped in some twilight place between the past and the present. It is a narrative clearly
inspired by autobiographical elements but with unmistakably fictional twists and turns, given the sheer
improbability of the solutions. This occasionally dissonant combination of multiple characteristics
makes A TALE OF LOVE an interesting read.” Jornal do Brasil
“The narrative is gripping – the reader feels the need to know what comes next.” Veja

Contardo Calligaris is a psychoanalyst, psychotherapist and essayist who is known for his weekly
column in Folha de Sao Paulo. He is Italian-American, educated in Switzerland and France and has
lived in Brazil for the past twenty years. This is his first novel.

A TALE OF LOVE: Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Germany: Wagenbach; Portugal: Civilicazao.

THE IMMORTALS by Amit Chaudhuri (PS)

This is a novel about music, and the survival of the artist and the traditional arts in modern India. It is
about the intersection between the life of a music teacher, Shyam Lal, in Eighties Bombay, and an
affluent family in the corporate world, the Senguptas. Just as Shyam Lal moves towards embracing the
possibilities of Bombay, his young student, the sixteen-year-old Nirmalya Sengupta, makes a romantic
gesture of denying and rejecting the materialism of that world. The novel explores this tension - at once
plangent and comic - between these different visions of the world and the artist's vocation in it.

Praise for THE IMMORTALS: “Not just a novelist but also a classical singer, academic and critic,
Chaudhuri is one of India's most distinctive literary figures. While lesser writers obsess over the heat
and dust, he charts the by-ways of the Indian soul. [...] Chaudhuri's superb new novel is set in Bombay
during the 1970s and early 1980s. It traces the history of two families, one bathed in corporate
affluence and the other subsisting on its musical tradition. [...] THE IMMORTALS is a memorable
work – capacious, multi-faceted but intimate, it is Indian to the core but universal in its implications.”
Chandak Sengoopta, The Independent
“THE IMMORTALS is finally as seductive – and stubbornly elusive – as a delicate, half-heard tune.” 
The Daily Mail
"The lyrical quality of his writing is striking. Sentences seem to drift like smoke, swirl and hang in the
air. The imagery is vivid, the humour deliciously oblique." The Times
Music provides the communal magic as well as the communal tension in this graceful tale by a writer
whose fiction is as beautiful as a classical ballet. Chaudhuri’s charming fifth novel has all the feel of a
command performance. This is not one of those novels that had to be written. Instead it reads as if he
wrote it because he felt he should, knowing it was wanted – such is the singular allure of Chaudhuri’s
prose. ” Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times

35
Amit Chaudhuri lives in Calcutta, and is the author of four novels, A STRANGE AND SUBLIME
ADDRESS, AFTERNOON RAAG, FREEDOM SONG, and A NEW WORLD, which, between
themselves, have won several prizes, including the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Betty Trask
Prize, the Encore Award, the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction, and the Government of India's
Sahitya Akademi Award. He has also published a book of stories, a critical study of DH Lawrence's
poetry, and edited the VINTAGE BOOK OF MODERN INDIAN LITERATURE. He is now
Professor of Contemporary Literature at UEA. He is also a musician, and has conceptualised an
acclaimed project in crossover music, This Is Not Fusion.

Previous novel, A NEW WORLD: UK: Macmillan; US: Knopf; France: Picquier; Germany:
Blessing; Holland: Bzztoh

New title, THE IMMORTALS: UK: Macmillan; US: Knopf; Germany: Blessing
(previously entitled: JOURNEY OF A RAGA)

THE OTHER HAND by Chris Cleave (PS) (US & Canadian title: LITTLE BEE)
-A number 4 Sunday Times UK Paperback Bestseller

She has nowhere else to run. You have nowhere left to hide.

This is the story of Little Bee, a Nigerian girl who has fled to the UK after her village was burned to the
ground and her family murdered.  When she is released into the British countryside after two years in a
detention centre she seeks out Sarah and Andrew, the couple that saved her life back in Nigeria.
Narrated alternately by Little Bee and Sarah, this is an absolute triumph. Cleave’s writing talents are
prodigious and he keeps getting better - his books are passionate, hilarious, intelligent, topical and
hugely readable.

Praise for THE OTHER HAND: “In a novel that tackles serious and uncomfortable subject matter,
Cleave’s writing makes one laugh and despair in equal measure. (4 stars)” Time Out
“An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian
beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia…Cleave immerses the reader
in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence.” The Guardian
“A powerful piece of art… shocking, exciting and deeply affecting…[a] superb novel… Besides sharp,
witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters’ ethical struggles, THE OTHER
HAND delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.” The Independent
“I felt the same excitement discovering this as I did Marina Lewycka’s A SHORT HISTORY OF
TRACTORS IN UKRAINIAN and Paul Torday’s SALMON FISHING IN THE YEMEN. There is an
urgency here, an inability to put it down and a deep sense of loss once finished. It is a very special
book indeed. Profound, deeply moving and yet light in touch, it explores the nature of loss, hope, love
and identity with atrocity its backdrop. Read it and think deeply.” Sarah Broadhurst, The Bookseller

THE OTHER HAND: UK: Sceptre; US: Simon & Schuster (US title: LITTLE BEE); Canada:
Doubleday (Canadian title: LITTLE BEE); Denmark: Ferdinand; France: Laffont; Holland:
Prometheus; Iceland: Bjartur; Israel: Modan; Korea: offer; Poland: Gruner & Jahr; Portugal: Asa;
Russia: Ripol; Serbia: Beobook; Spain: Maeva.

THE ART OF LOSING by Rebecca Connell (HW)

A young woman, Louise, is haunted by the childhood loss of her mother, and so sets out to find the
man she has always held responsible for her death. In doing so she sets in motion a chain of events far
more dramatic than anything she’d anticipated, and in the process begins to learn that love, desire and
loss can send out far more complicated echoes across our lives than we ever imagine. Told alternately
from the perspective of Louise, and the man she is pursuing, Nicholas, this stunning debut novel is
carefully and compellingly plotted, and by turns sinister and heartbreaking, dark and tender.

36
Praise for THE ART OF LOSING: “the sense of emotional loss and sexual confusion created by
this 29-year-old author grips you to the last page.” Harpers Bazaar
“Connell gets under the skin with this part thriller, part heartfelt examination of betrayal and grief.”
The Guardian
“[…] 29-year-old south Londoner Rebecca Connell knows just what she's about: a tormented young
woman whose mother died long ago after an affair with a married man the daughter sees as "the devil
brought to life"; a plan for vengeance, served very cold; a stalker-style invasion of the culprit's life.
Connell switches between aggrieved Louise's voice and that of the seducer, Nicholas. This
counterpoint adds perspective and sharpens a finely-crafted mood of curdled sensuality and gathering
menace. The truth, of course, is not quite what it seems.” Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
Rebecca Connell is 28 years old and lives in south London. She graduated from Oxford University,
where she read English, in 2001. After working in television for several years, devising and researching
factual entertainment programming, she moved to market research in 2005. She currently works as a
researcher, writing articles and reports on aspects of youth culture and lifestyle. THE ART OF
LOSING is her first novel.
THE ART OF LOSING: UK: Fourth Estate; Greece: Oceanida; Holland: Artemis; Italy: Einaudi
Stile Libero

TUTANKHAMUN by Nick Drake (PS)

Tutankhamun, son of Akhenaten, has inherited an empire that seems to be at the height of its power
and international glory. But the young King, just eighteen years old, is faced with the political and
personal intrigues and conspiracies of the Court, where his godfather Ay, and the General Horemheb
are locked in a bitter struggle for ascendancy. Tutankhamun must steer the empire back from the brink
of disaster and dissent to which his father Akhenaten's rule led the Two Lands of Egypt, and re-assert
the stability and authority of his famous dynasty.

Rahotep, chief detective of the Thebes division, has his own worries - his daughters are growing up in a
changing world of danger and instability, while out on the streets of Thebes things are falling apart;
poverty and dissent are breaking out into a nightmare of violence, gold and corruption seem all-
powerful, and the city's shadowy underworld is itself witnessing mysterious acts of shocking brutality.

Yet when he receives a mysterious invitation to the secret halls of the Royal Palace, he cannot refuse.
What he finds there, and the quest on which he embarks, will change his life, and put everything he
thought he believed, and everything he loves, at risk.

Praise for previous title, NEFERTITI: “An exciting and atmospheric adventure…Full of surprises
from the very first line…Takes the reader on a magical mystery tour through palaces, secret passages,
tombs and torture chambers” The Evening Standard
“A richly written and historically intriguing evocation of Ancient Egypt…A genuinely ripping yarn”
The Times
“His investigation is well plotted, the environment cleverly, credibly evoked and the characters could
have sprung in 3D from their painted sarcophagi” The Literary Review

Praise for TUTANKHAMUN: “In the best tradition of CJ Sansom's Shardlake mysteries, Nick Drake
has woven a bright, luminous tapestry, full of the timeless passions of humanity, and written in a
gloriously poetic prose. As with all the best historical thrillers, he casts light on whom we are now,
through the lens of who we were then, without even losing the integrity of the time. This is a gem of a
book, make sure you read every line.” Manda Scott
“Full of surprises, twists and turns, this is a glorious, riveting historical thriller” Tess Gerritsen
“Drake uses both the dazzling light of the desert and concealing darkness of night to disturbing effect
in his gripping narrative” Daily Express

37
Nick Drake was born in 1961. He is a screenwriter and an award-winning poet. He has been Literary
Associate at the National Theatre and worked with Nicholas Hytner and Nicholas Wright on the stage
version of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. He is the author of one previous novel featuring
Rai Rahotep, NEFERTITI, which was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Best Historical
Crime Novel Prize.

Previous title, NEFERTITI: UK: Transworld; US: Morrow; Brazil: Record; Bulgaria: Bard; Czech:
Domino; Denmark: Aschehoug; France: Plon; Germany: Weltbild; Greece: Taxideftis; Indonesia:
Zahra; Italy: Longanesi; Latvia: Turiba; Romania: Humanitas; Russia: AST; Slovenia: Ucila;
Spain: Grijalbo Mondadori; Sweden: Bonniers

New title, TUTANKHAMUN: UK: Transworld; US: Morrow; Brazil: Record; Bulgaria: Bard;
Czech: Domino; France: Plon; Italy: Longanesi; Russia: AST; Slovenia: Ucila; Spain: Grijalbo
Mondadori; Sweden: Bonniers

COME, THOU TORTOISE by Jessica Grant


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

Rule number one of tortoise ownership: Never assume a tortoise is dead. For Audrey Flowers, this rule
applies to more than tortoises. When her father, an eminent biogerontologist, is felled by a Christmas
tree hanging sideways out of a pickup truck, his death presents an unsolvable puzzle to Audrey.
COME, THOU TORTOISE is the story of her attempt to solve this puzzle, and a few others, in her
own odd way.

Co-narrated by a three-hundred-year-old tortoise and starring a mouse who, by all appearances, is


himself immortal, COME, THOU TORTOISE unfolds in a world that is almost, but not quite, our own.
Tortoises read Shakespeare. Pilots kiss their copilots. And you might just live forever if you can avoid
the dangers: fast-moving Christmas trees, crashing airplanes, faulty Christmas lights, cliffs when you
are lonely, staircases when you are tired.

Praise for COME, THOU TORTOISE: “Jessica Grant's COME, THOU TORTOISE should be
issued with a health warning: you will split your sides laughing, your eyes will leak, your heartrate
will accelerate, and the abundance of wit will rewire the synapses in your brain. This book is
astoundingly unique. A novel about fathers and daughters, love and loss, the wisdom that accumulates
over the ages, and that ancient instinct to come home. Joyful. A tortoise de force.” Lisa Moore,
author of Alligator
“Jessica Grant’s debut novel is one of those rare books that manage to entwine humour – in this case,
even outright silliness – with poignant insight and a captivating plot.” Quill & Quire
“A well structured comic novel with many serious messages and much marvellous insight. It’s
extraordinary, original and simultaneously both deep and lightheartedly charming”. The Globe &
Mail

COME, THOU TORTOISE is a darkly comic but unswervingly optimistic first novel from
Newfoundland writer Jessica Grant. Full of wordplay and hijinks, it sparkles like a brand new set of
retina-burning Christmas lights. A member of Newfoundland's Burning Rock Collective, Grant has
been called "the biggest find in the last decade" by Larry Matthews, Burning Rock's founder and
continuing mentor. COME, THOU TORTOISE, her first novel, is part of Knopf Canada’s New Face of
Fiction program.

COME, THOU TORTOISE: Canada: Knopf Canada; UK: Old Street Publishing; Germany:
Manhattan/Goldmann; Holland: Mistral

38
THE OTHER QUEEN by Philippa Gregory (GC)
- A number 2 Sunday Times Hardback bestseller

Philippa Gregory’s dazzling new novel looks at the captive years of Mary Queen of Scots. Mary, in
flight from rebels in Scotland, has trusted her cousin Elizabeth’s promise of sanctuary; but she finds
herself imprisoned as the enforced guest of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his dominant wife,
Bess of Hardwick.

The newly married couple welcome the doomed queen, certain that serving as her hosts and jailors will
bring them nothing but advantage in the competitive world of Tudor England. To their horror they find
that their home becomes the epicenter of intrigue against Elizabeth and even their own loyalty comes
under suspicion. If their marriage is threatened by George’s hopeless admiration for the beautiful
young queen, they will face ruin. But if his devotion to the Queen of England is compromised by his
love for the Queen of Scots, he will face the gallows.

The English lords conspire with Spain, the Duke of Northumberland and the Northern Earls to free
Mary from imprisonment, a plot that will be the greatest threat Elizabeth had ever faced. But then the
great spy-master Cecil sets the trap to catch them all, setting the Scots queen on the road to her death at
Fotheringhay.

Philippa Gregory brings her tremendous passion for historical accuracy and fresh research to this
aspect of Mary Queen of Scots’ life, which has been neglected by other writers. Here is a story of two
women fighting for one man, of two queens competing for dominance, and of one remarkable woman
who is prepared to die rather than deny her principles or need for freedom.

Praise for Philippa Gregory:


“Philippa Gregory brings the turbulent Tudors to glorious life” The Times
“Gregory serves up some more deliciously sombre moments from a factious Tudor court.”
Independent
“No-one writes popular history as well as Philippa Gregory” Daily Express
”Philippa Gregory truly is the mistress of the historical novel...It would be hard to make history more
entertaining, lively or engaging: the characters truly come alive...This is a reliably breathtaking,
suspenseful and imaginative romp from Gregory. Full of all the colours, sights and sounds of the
Tudor court, it really transports you to the era. A winning formula.” Sunday Express

Philippa Gregory trained as a journalist and is widely acclaimed for her contemporary thrillers and her
historical novels. THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL, which won the 2002 Parker Romantic Novel of the
Year award, was made into a major feature film starring Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman and Eric
Bana.

Previous title, THE BOLEYN INHERITANCE: UK: HarperCollins; US: Touchstone (S&S); Brazil:
Record; Bulgaria: Ednorog; Czech: Al Press; Denmark: Cicero; France: Archipel; Germany:
Lubbe; Hungary: Palatinus; Israel: Opus; Italy: Sperling & Kupfer; Korea: Hyundae Munwha
Center; Lithuania: Media Incognito; Portugal: Civilizaçao; Romania: Polirom; Russia: Inostranka;
Serbia: Laguna; Slovenia: Desk; Spain: Planeta; Sweden: Richters; Thailand: Matichon; Turkey:
Alfa

New title, THE OTHER QUEEN: UK: HarperCollins; US: Touchstone (S&S) Brazil: Record;
Bulgaria: Ednorog; Czech: Al Press; Denmark: Cicero; Italy: Sperling & Kupfer; Portugal:
Civilizacao; Russia: AST; Spain: Planeta

39
THE CORONER by M.R. Hall (ZW)

Newly appointed Coroner, Jenny Cooper, doesn’t quite fit the mould: forty-two, attractive and
struggling to recover from a painful divorce. When she takes over the antiquated office of her recently
deceased predecessor, Harry Marshall, she discovers that his two final cases left many questions
unanswered.

Danny Wills is the youngest child to have died in a juvenile prison. Marshall’s hastily conducted
inquest returned a verdict of suicide, but the jury were denied vital evidence. When Jenny looks again
at the case, she uncovers a disturbing trail of facts connecting the boy’s death to that of a fifteen-year-
old prostitute and a web of political and corporate corruption.

In a story mixing legal suspense and investigative thriller, Jenny is pushed to her limits and beyond in
an uncompromising quest for the truth.

Advance praise for THE CORONER: “A brilliant, original and gripping crime novel - I can't wait
for MR Hall's next one” Sophie Hannah
“This big, well-executed debut novel from screenwriter and producer MR Hall has meaty characters
and a chewy plot in the Lynda La Plante style” The Guardian
“It's a tribute to the author's skill that I read this book supposing it to be autobiographical...He really
gets under the skin of his heroine...good and imaginative writing (and some political implications) to
make an outstandingly interesting first novel” The Literary Review
“Unputdownable debut introducing a fantastic, feisty and convincingly flawed heroine” Woman &
Home magazine
“M R Hall has created a wonderful heroine in a genre we haven’t seen before” Lynda La Plante
“Congratulations to new crime fiction author M. R. Hall who, in a desperately overcrowded market,
has come up with a protagonist who is neither a detective nor a private eye. In the Coroner, we have a
refreshing take on a historic office.  What’s more the coroner in question is a woman….M. R. Hall, a
creator of successful TV dramas, knows her (HIS!) stuff and writes convincingly and compellingly of
the difficulties facing anybody who dares to challenge a crushing and often corrupt system in an
attempt to establish the truth” Daily Mail

M.R. Hall studied law at Oxford and became a criminal barrister at the age of twenty-three. He
practised for several years in London, both prosecuting and defending, but became increasingly
disillusioned with the failure of the criminal justice system to deal with offenders in a humane or
constructive manner. In his late twenties he realised a long-held ambition and became a full time
screenwriter. His work has included episodes of ITV's KAVANAGH QC (starring John Thaw), WING
AND A PRAYER an original series for which he was nominated for a BAFTA in 1998, SCARLET
PIMPERNEL, and several episodes of DALZIEL AND PASCOE for BBC1 (winning a Midlands RTS
award for the latter). In 2005 he co-created and wrote 12 episodes of the BBC1 series NEW STREET
LAW (starring John Hannah), which has been nominated for an RTS award. He is currently creating
and writing a major new series for BBC1 and has recently completed an adaptation of Paul Gallico's
FLOWERS FOR MRS HARRIS for feature film production.

THE CORONER: UK & US: Macmillan; Brazil: Record; Germany: Goldmann; Holland: Bruna;
Italy: Sperling & Kupfer; Poland: Amber; Serbia: Mladinska Knjiga; Sweden: Cappelen Damm.

THE EVIL SEED by Joanne Harris


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

The revised and updated reissue of Joanne Harris's first novel, an absorbing, dark, chilling story.

It’s never easy to face the fact that a man you once loved passionately has found the girl of his dreams,
as Alice discovers when Joe introduces her to his new girlfriend Ginny. Jealous, Alice is repelled by
Ginny – an ethereal beauty with a sinister group of friends.

Then Alice finds an old diary hidden away in Ginny’s room and reads about Daniel Holmes and his
friend Robert and the mysterious woman who bewitched them both – Rosemary Virginia Ashley,
buried in Grantchester churchyard half a century ago – buried but far from forgotten.

40
As the stories intertwine, past and present are merged into one; Alice comes to realize that her
instinctive hatred of Joe’s new girlfriend may not just be due to jealousy as she’s plunged into a
nightmare world of obsession, revenge, seduction – and blood.

Praise for previous title, THE LOLLIPOP SHOES: “A delicious urban fairytale, where killer shoes
and Aztec myths battle it out with true love and the seductive power of chocolate.” Daily Mail
“CHOCOLAT was a hard act to follow but Harris has managed it in style” Daily Express
“Voluptuous helpings of magic, mystery, love and, of course, mouthwatering descriptions of her
favourite chocolates, combine to make a rich, satisfying story that should keep you riveted to your sun
lounger page after page” She Magazine

Joanne Harris (www.joanne-harris.co.uk) is the author of the Whitbread-shortlisted CHOCOLAT


(made into a major film starring Juliette Binoche); THE EVIL SEED; BLACKBERRY WINE; FIVE
QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE; COASTLINERS; HOLY FOOLS; JIGS & REELS, SLEEP PALE
SISTER; GENTLEMEN & PLAYERS; and, with Fran Warde, THE FRENCH KITCHEN: A
COOKBOOK and THE FRENCH COOKBOOK: MORE RECIPES FROM A FRENCH KITCHEN.
She has also just published her first book for younger readers, RUNEMARKS. She lives in
Huddersfield, Yorkshire.

Previous title, THE LOLLIPOP SHOES: UK: Doubleday; US: Morrow; Brazil: Rocco; Bulgaria:
Prozorets; Croatia: Algoritam; Czech: Euromedia; Denmark: Samleren; Finland: Otava; Germany:
Ullstein; Greece: Psichogios; Holland: De Fontein; Israel: Kinneret; Italy: Garzanti; Korea:
Munhakdongne; Lithuania: UAB; Norway: Gyldendal; Poland: Proszynski; Portugal: ASA; Russia:
Eksmo; Serbia: Plato; Slovak: Ikar; Slovenia: Ucila; Spain: Random House; Sweden: Prisma;
Turkey: Altin

Newly reissued title, THE EVIL SEED: UK: Doubleday; Bulgaria: Prozorets; Germany: Ullstein;
Italy: Garzanti; Poland: Proszynski; Russia: Eksmo
- [NB: For Joanne Harris’ adult fiction – the foreign rights are handled as follows: France and Turkey:
Rogers, Coleridge & White; Western Europe (excluding Latin countries and France) and Far East:
Jennifer Luithlen (also author’s children’s agent); Italy, Portugal, Portugal, Spain, South America:
Grandi & Associates] -

THE BELIEVERS by Zoë Heller (GC)


- Sunday Times Hardback bestseller

When New York radical lawyer Joel Litvinoff falls gravely ill, his wife Audrey uncovers a terrible
secret about him. So begins a year filled with revelation and surprise, in the course of which, Audrey,
her two daughters Karla and Rosa and adopted son Lenny, will be forced to examine the limits of their
faith in other people, in political ideas and in God.

A serious, moving and often very funny family novel, THE BELIEVERS will surprise and delight.

Praise for THE BELIEVERS: “… is a darkly buoyant book, full of life and irritation and humour
and aching disappointment. It is, in other words, a book about a family, and a terrific one.” New
York Review of Books
There's a ferocious wit and intelligence at work here and it's a memorable portrait she's drawn...THE
BELIEVERS is quite a piece of work” The Evening Standard
“Zoe Heller has written a tough, wise and funny book about a family that has to grow up all at once -
and that includes the grown-ups. A sustaining, intelligent novel about how the big questions affect and
change all our small lives.” Anne Enright
“One of the outstanding novels of the year", eclipsing even her acclaimed NOTES ON A
SCANDAL..."It's funny and elegant (…) It's never predictable and it's all totally believable. It shows
that Zoe Heller has some pretty substantial abilities.” The Sunday Times
“THE BELIEVERS is an astonishingly well-observed slow burner, its virtuoso prose compressed and
beautiful. Zoë Heller possesses true brilliance as a writer… THE BELIEVERS is the work of a writer
at the top of her game.” The Guardian
“Scratch at the glitz and the family are irritable and messed up like the rest of us, but monstrously so.
Heller portrays their awfulness with enjoyably biting humour.” The Independent

41
“[Heller] is an extraordinarily entertaining writer, and this novel showcases her copious gifts,
including a scathing, Waugh-like wit; an unerring ear for the absurdities of contemporary speech; and
a native-born Brit’s radar for class and status distinctions…combined with her hilarious evocation of
the radical-chic world the Litvinoffs inhabit, her understanding of the Darwinian mathematics of
familial politics…makes the reader look forward to her next foray into fiction.” Michiko Kakutani,
New York Times

Zoe Heller is the author of EVERYTHING YOU KNOW and NOTES ON A SCANDAL, which was
shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2003 and was been turned into an Oscar-nominated film. Born
in London, she now lives in New York.

Previous title, NOTES ON A SCANDAL: UK: Penguin; US: Holt; Brazil: Record; Bulgaria: Intense;
China: Yilin; Croatia: Znanje; Czech Rep: BB Art; Denmark: Lindhardt & Ringhof; Estonia:
Pegasus; France: Calmann Levy; Germany: Goldmann; Greece: Modern Times; Holland:
Arbeiderspers/Archipel; Israel: Matar; Italy: Bompiani; Japan: RH Kodansha; Korea: Random
House; Latvia: AGB; Lithuania: Alma Littera; Norway: Kagge; Poland: Muza; Portugal: Presenca;
Romania: Polirom; Russia: Phantom; Serbia: Laguna; Slovak: Ikar; Spain: Roca; Sweden: Forum;
Taiwan: Commercial; Turkey: GriNet.

New title, THE BELIEVERS: UK: Penguin; US: HarperCollins; Brazil: Record; Holland:
Archipel/Arbeiderspers; Israel: Miskal; Italy: Bompiani; Norway: Vigmostad & Bjorke; Poland:
Muza; Russia: Phantom [Films rights sold to Scott Rudin Productions]

THE MAN GAME by Lee Henderson


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates)
- Shortlisted for the 2008 Writers Trust Award

THE MAN GAME is an utterly original take on the frontier novel, portraying life among the corrupt
city officials, opium-addicted industrialists, lumberjacks and indentured Chinese labourers that made
up the rough outpost of Vancouver in the 19th century. It opens in the present day, when a young man
stumbles upon a secret fighting sport dating back to1886. His discovery unlocks the unlikely trio of
characters who invented the game, Molly Erwagen -a heartbreakingly beautiful vaudeville performer-
who had arrived in the outpost with her crippled husband Samuel to start a new life, and two exiled
lumberjacks allegedly responsible for the fire that destroyed most of Vancouver. From the man game’s
beginnings in the woods where the three meet secretly to practice, it gains widely in popularity among
the outpost’s downtrodden, changing utterly the course of the city’s history.

Lee Henderson's THE MAN GAME crosses the contemporary and historical in a raw, anarchistic
retelling of the early days of a pioneer town on the edge of the known world.

Advance praise for THE MAN GAME: “In its ambition, iconoclasm, and accomplishment THE
MAN GAME is reminiscent of Mordecai Richler's great, ribald epic SOLOMON GUSKY WAS HERE.
Lee Henderson invents a history of Vancouver, Canada, and frontier life that satisfies and defies
expectations as only the best fiction can. THE MAN GAME is an extraordinary book written by a
young writer who possesses remarkable powers of observation, description, and empathy.” David
Bezmozgis, author of NATASHA AND OTHER STORIES
"THE MAN GAME is indeed a historical novel, but one that operates according to its own cracked
logic...Henderson’s tale skips among a myriad of characters, painting an oddly comic, often grotesque
panorama of city life like something out of Bosch – or Pynchon, for that matter. THE MAN GAME is
as brilliant and twisted as a funhouse mirror, and Henderson is a wildly seductive ringmaster.” Quill
& Quire

Lee Henderson is the author of the award-winning collection of short stories, THE BROKEN
RECORD TECHNIQUE. He is a contributing editor to the art magazines Border Crossings and
Contemporary and has published fiction and art criticism in numerous periodicals. His fiction has twice
been featured in the Journey Prize Anthology. THE MAN GAME is his first novel.

THE MAN GAME: Canada: Penguin Canada

42
THE RETURN by Victoria Hislop (DM)
- Entered the Sunday Times hardback bestseller list at number 2 and spent ten weeks on the list.
It has sold almost 200,000 copies in the UK since publication in July 2008.
During her first visit to Granada where she has escaped for a weekend of dancing with a free-spirited
friend, Sonia finds herself drawn to a cafe in the one of the city's picturesque squares. Her interest in a
display of old photographs on the wall leads her into conversation with Miguel, the owner, who tells
the story behind the alluring images of the flamenco dancer, Mercedes, and her brother, Ignacio, a
young torero.
Miguel describes how their lives changed irrevocably in the summer of 1936 and tells Sonia the tale of
a family, who were destroyed by a civil war that scattered them across England, France and the
unmarked graves of Spain. In learning about this devastating conflict in which more than a million
people were killed or exiled, Sonia discovers why the pictures have so mesmerised her.
Victoria Hislop's second novel is as bewitching and as moving as her international best-selling debut,
THE ISLAND.
Praise for THE RETURN: “THE RETURN should be required reading for anyone going to Spain
this year...the historical tale is powerful stuff.” The Daily Mail
“THE RETURN aims to open the eyes, and tug the heartstrings, of readers who mostly won't have read
Orwell, let alone Cercas. (…). These days, the battle of historical memory against forgetting has to be
fought on many fronts. Hislop deserves a medal for opening a breach into the holiday beach-bag.” The
Independent
“THE RETURN may be a beach book, but it also goes inland and rummages around in the cellars”
The Times
“Meticulously researched historical narrative and imaginative stortytelling… brings home the
hardships of war in a way no history book ever could” The Daily Telegraph
“Like a literary Nigella [Lawson], she whips up a cracking historical romance mixed with a dash of
family secrets and a splash of self-discovery… What sets Hislop apart is her ability to put a human
face on the shocking civil conflict that ripped Spain apart for three bloody years between 1936 and
1939… Stirring stuff” Time Out

Victoria Hislop read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and writes travel features for The Sunday
Telegraph, The Mail on Sunday, House & Garden and Woman & Home. Her first novel, the
international sensation, THE ISLAND, was the number 1 bestselling book in the UK for 8 weeks in
2006, and it remained in the Top Ten for a total of six months. Victoria won the 2006 Richard and
Judy Summer Read competition and the Newcomer of the Year Award 2007 at the 2007British Book
Awards.

Previous title, THE ISLAND: UK: Headline; US: Harper Perennial; Brazil: Intrinseca; Bulgaria: Info
Dar; China: Thinkingdom; Croatia: Profil; Czech: Euromedia; Germany: Heyne; Greece: Dioptra;
Holland: De Boekerij; Hungary: Gabo; Israel: Miskal; Italy: Bompiani; Japan: Misuzu; Lithuania:
Jotema; Norway: Schibsteds; Poland: Albatros; Portugal: Civilizacao; Romania: Rao; Russia:
Family Leisure Club; Serbia: Evro Giunti; Slovak: Ikar; Spain: Nabla; Sweden: Norstedts; Taiwan:
Crown; Turkey: Alfa

New title, THE RETURN: UK: Headline Review; US: Harper Perennial; Brazil: Intrinseca; China:
Thinkingdom; Croatia: Profil; Czech: Euromedia; Germany: Heyne; Greece: Dioptra; Holland: De
Boekerij; Israel: Miskal; Italy: Bompiani; Norway: Schibsteds; Poland: Albatros; Portugal:
Civilizacao; Russia: Family Leisure Group; Serbia: Evro Giunti; Spain: RBA; Taiwan: Crown;
Turkey: Alfa

43
ILLUMINATIONS by Eva Hoffman (GC) (US title: APPASSIONATA)

This fiercely lyrical novel explores the place and force of art in a world riven with violence, the
luminous and dark faces of romanticism, and our unspoken need for more than personal meaning.

Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose playing is marked by rare intensity. At the height of
her career, she feels increasingly torn between the expressive musical realm she inhabits, and the
fragmented life she leads as an itinerant artist, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels and
fortuitous, arbitrary encounters.

Isabel then meets Anzor Islikhanov, a political exile from war-torn Chechnya. As their paths cross in
several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences, and their seemingly parallel
passions – until a menacing incident forces her to re-evaluate his actions and her won feelings – and
throws her into a creative crisis.

Praise for ILLUMINATIONS (US title: APPASSIONATA) “Hoffman’s intense novel ebbs and
flows with passion and suppression… [She] is a writer of high intelligence and it is invigorating to
spend time in her company” The Telegraph
“Much of the power of Hoffman's intense, distinctive – and utterly un-English – work comes from her
unselfconscious commitment to dealing with Big Issues like the value of art and the dangers of
romantic nationalism, though without missing any of the ironies”. The Independent
“Intensely focused and cadenced prose. In more casual hands, such a subject might succumb to its
own glamour. Instead, Hoffman shows us how glamour breaks down into components” Financial
Times
“Hoffman’s new novel paints a powerful portrait of the West under threat, from apathy and
materialism within and terrorism without…Hoffman achieves that most difficult feat of conveying the
emotional effect of music in prose… A highly accomplished, edgy and timely novel” The Daily Mail
"Eva Hoffman's APPASSIONATA is a deeply felt, deeply humanitarian examination of a talented
musician's struggle for meaning in a world of suffering and violence. With lucid intelligence, the novel
pits love, art, and beauty against injustice. Its troubled international scene is counterpoint to the
beautifully evoked tenderness of human desire." Lewis Hyde, author of The Gift
"A novel richly imagined, exquisitely written, and completely spellbinding. It's not easy to say how and
why a piece of music touches us, but Hoffman does so with a sensuous clarity that's unforgettable. She
insinuates herself into the psyche and heart of her characters, and explores the human condition, with
a delicate curiosity that turns APPASSIONATA into a seamless blend of mind and music, politics and
love." Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper's Wife
"APPASSIONATA is a book of subtle power and extraordinary beauty, where prose reads like poetry
and words seem to shimmer with the language of music. We are drawn into the interior landscape of a
great pianist, and follow her struggles with a doomed love affair-a relationship that will lead her to
question the very relevancy of the art that is her life. A book that will haunt the reader with its tragic
passion and profound insight." JoAnn Falletta, Conductor
“In her second novel—an exquisite and disquieting story of love, terror, and loss, with geopolitical
resonance and a profound moral calculus—she writes ecstatically about how it feels to bring the
glorious music her protagonist cherishes to life.” Booklist (Starred review)
“As a child, Hoffman studied piano and dreamed of performing professionally until she redirected her
ambition toward writing; here she wields her expertise in both with dazzling success. […] Hoffman's
prose is reliably gorgeous, and while the narrative lends itself nicely to sharp commentary and
observations on politics, power and the role of the United States in a changing world, what's
memorable is the way Hoffman maps the intersection of art, history and man's striving for meaning.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

44
Eva Hoffman grew up in Cracow, Poland, where she studied music intensively before emigrating in her
teens to Canada and then the United States. After receiving her Ph. D. in English and American
literature from Harvard University, she worked as senior editor at The New York Times, serving for a
while as the newspaper’s regular literary critic. She is the author of four books of non-fiction, LOST IN
TRANSLATION, EXIT INTO HISTORY, SHTETL, AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE and a novel,
THE SECRET. She has also written for many journals and periodicals, and has lectured internationally
on issues of exile, memory, Polish-Jewish history, politics and culture. She has taught literature and
creative writing at various universities, including the University of East Anglia, MIT and Columbia.
She has written and presented radio programmes, and has received the Prix Italia for Radio. Her
literary awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award for Writing and an award from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, she was appointed Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature. She currently lives in London, and works as visiting professor at Hunter College.

ILLUMINATIONS: UK: Secker & Warburg; US: The Other Press (US title: APPASSIONATA, pub
May 2009); Romania: Curtea Veche

KIERON SMITH, BOY by James Kelman (GC)


- James Kelman has been nominated for the Man Booker international Prize 2009. 
 
In this warm, funny and occasionally brooding novel, James Kelman has meticulously and generously
recreated both the exterior and the interior worlds of the boy Kieron Smith. Continually rejected by his
brother and largely ignored by his parents, Kieron finds comfort – and endless stories – in the home of
his much-loved grandparents. But when his family move to a new housing scheme on the outskirts of
the city, a world apart from the close community of the tenements, Kieron struggles to adapt to his new
life.
 
KIERON SMITH, BOY is both particular and universal. It is particular in its depiction of a time and
place during a period of profound social change, flourishing sectarianism, yet high hopes for the future.
And it is universal in its portrayal of the unique obsessions of childhood, those imaginative spirals of
thought about everything and nothing. There’s fishing, climbing, fighting, books, brothers, dogs,
ghosts, sex, faces, girls and souls, even censorship and the perils of paid employment. This novel is a
powerfully honest and emotionally resonant evocation of boyhood by one of the most influential
writers at work today.

Praise for KIERON SMITH, BOY: “A masterpiece of boyhood recalled. Kelman has written the
finest book of his life” The Spectator
“Rings true at every turn. It is beautifully done. This coming of age story is exhilaratingly good.” The
Daily Telegraph
“Kieron Smith and Holden Caulfield are hardly twins separated at birth but, in its psychological depth
and emotional reach, I have read no other depiction of the inner life of a boy that comes as close as
this to Salinger's.” The Literary Review
"Scotland's most influential living writer...a pure artist. Kieron Smith is universal...he is every boy"
The Times
“A true original… A real artist… It’s now very difficult to see which of his peers can seriously be
ranked alongside him” Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946. His books include GREYHOUND FOR BREAKFAST,
A DISAFFECTION, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the
Booker Prize, and HOW LATE IT WAS, HOW LATE, which won the 1994 Booker Prize. His more
recent novels are TRANSLATED ACCOUNTS and YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFUL IN THE LAND
OF THE FREE.
 
KIERON SMITH, BOY: UK: Hamish Hamilton; US: Harcourt Brace Inc; Korea: Sapiens21

45
AMERICAN ADULTERER by Jed Mercurio (GC)

“The subject is an American citizen holding high elected office, married, and father to a young
family….”

From its opening line, AMERICAN ADULTERER examines the psychology of a habitual womanizer
in hypnotically clinical prose. Like any successful philanderer, the subject must be circumspect in his
choice of mistresses, and employ careful calculation in their seduction; he must suffer extraordinary
efforts to conceal his affairs from his wife and jealous rivals. But this is no ordinary adulterer. He is the
35th President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

JFK famously confided that, if he went three days without a woman, he suffered severe headaches. Jed
Mercurio takes inspiration from the tantalising details surrounding the President’s sex life to imagine
an intimate perspective on Kennedy’s affairs with Marilyn Monroe, Mafia moll Judith Campbell,
libertine Mary Meyer, and his flings with numerous White House staff, including his tryst with a
nineteen-year-old intern whose unofficial role was to provide sexual release for the man who was
Leader of the Free World during the Cuban Missiles Crisis.

Yet the author never demonises his subject. We receive a moving account of a man not only crippled
by back pain, but enduring numerous hormonal and digestive crises, a man overcoming constant
suffering to serve as a highly effective Commander-in-Chief, dedicated to an idealistic vision of
America. But each affair propels him into increasingly murkier waters. President Kennedy fears losing
the wife and children to whom he’s devoted, and the office to which he’s dedicated.

AMERICAN ADULTERER presents a sympathetic portrait of a virtuous man enslaved by an


uncontrollable vice. Through its study of an important historical figure, the novel poses controversial
questions about society’s evolving fixation on the private lives of public officials, and, ultimately,
ignites a polemic on monogamy, marriage and traditional family values.

Advance praise for new title, AMERICAN ADULTERER: “[Mercurio’s] brilliantly clinical
prose.. lends these stories the air of a confession on a psychotherapist's couch” Metro

Praise for previous title, ASCENT: “storytelling of a high calibre, fully imagined, finely crafted…
Mercurio’s understated empathy, his starkly elegant prose and his instinct for juxtaposition lift it far
above a Boy’s Own adventure” The Guardian
“as impressive a piece of creative writing as you will ever read… riveting” The Daily Telegraph
“Mercurio is a master of precision, armed, like Yeremin, with a razor-sharp eye…fighting-fit,
muscular prose, which carries no dead weight… that rarest of things - a highbrow book that's
vertiginously thrilling.” Observer

Jed Mercurio trained as a doctor and became a full-time writer in 1994 following the success of his
semi-autobiographical BBC medical drama Cardiac Arrest. His first novel, BODIES, was chosen as
one of the five best debuts of 2002 by the Guardian. He adapted it for television and won the Royal
Television Society Award for Best Drama Series of 2005. He published his second novel, ASCENT, in
2007

Previous title, ASCENT: UK: Cape; US: Simon & Schuster; Holland: Mouria; Italy: Mondadori;
Israel: Miskal

New title, AMERICAN ADULTERER: UK: Cape; US: Simon & Schuster (pub October 2009);
Brazil: Record; France: Belfond; Holland: Mouria. Italy: Mondadori; Spain: Anagrama
(previously entitled: DIARY OF A SERIAL ADULTERER / THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AN
AMERICAN ADULTERER)

46
AMERICAN RUST by Philipp Meyer (PS)

In a once-prosperous town in rural Pennsylvania, two young men - one trying to escape the community,
the other sinking slowly into its orbit - are caught up in a terrible act of violence that changes their lives
forever. When a body is discovered and the young men are linked to the crime, one is sent to prison
and the other goes on the run; an epic journey through a beautiful, nearly post-apocalyptic landscape, in
which he is forced to confront his private demons, the existence of God, and his own significance as a
human being. Other townspeople are quickly engulfed by the crisis - the single mother desperate to
protect her son, the sister forced to choose between her family and her new life, the upright police chief
who must make the hardest decision of all. By the book’s end, each person will find himself walking
the thin line that differentiates man from animal, good from evil.

Alternating between the close points of view of each character, AMERICAN RUST describes the
loyalty, courage, and love of good people living in a place abandoned and forgotten by their own
countrymen. It is a classic American story of the individual versus society.

Advance praise for AMERICAN RUST: “Philipp Mayer's AMERICAN RUST is written with
considerable dramatic intensity and pace. It manages an emotional accuracy, a deep and detailed
conviction, in its depiction of character. It also captures a sense of a menacing society, a wider world
in the throes of decay and self-destruction.” Colm Toíbín
“With its strong narrative engine and understated social insight, AMERICAN RUST is reminiscent of
the best of Robert Stone and Russell Banks. Author Philipp Meyer locates the heart of his working
class characters without false sentiment or condescension, and their world is artfully described. An
extraordinary, compelling novel from a major talent.” George Pelecanos
“A novel as splendidly crafted and original as any written in recent decades, AMERICAN RUST is
both darkly disturbing and richly compelling. Philipp Meyer’s first novel signals the arrival of a new
voice in American letters” Patricia Cornwell
“This is strong, clean stuff. Philipp Meyer deserves to be taken seriously” Pete Dexter
“Meyer has a thrilling eye for failed dreams and writes uncommonly tense scenes of violence.. Fans of
Cormac McCarthy or Dennis Lehane will find in Meyer an author worth watching” Publishers
Weekly

Philipp Meyer grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, dropped out of high school at age sixteen. After
spending several years volunteering at a trauma center in downtown Baltimore, he attended Cornell
University, where he studied English. Since graduating, Meyer has worked as a derivatives trader for a
Swiss investment bank, a construction worker, and an emergency medical technician (EMT), among
other jobs. He was one of the first EMT's to reach New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, driving his
own car there and arriving approximately in the middle of the storm. Meyer’s writing has been
published in McSweeney's, The Iowa Review, Salon.com and in NEW STORIES FROM THE SOUTH.
From 2005 to 2008 he was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

AMERICAN RUST: UK: Simon & Schuster; US: Spiegel & Grau; Aus: Allen & Unwin; France:
Denoel; Germany: Tropen/Klett-Cotta; Greece: Kastaniotis; Holland: De Bezige Bij; Israel: Modan;
Italy: Einaudi; Korea: Sapiens21

47
NETHERLAND by Joseph O’Neill (GC)
-Winner of the 2009 PEN Faulkner Award for Fiction; longlisted for the Booker Prize 2008
-Shortlisted Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year, British Book Awards
-Shortlisted for 2009 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award
-Shortlisted for the 2009 RTE Radio 1’s The Tubridy Show Listeners' Choice Award
-Shortlisted for 2009 Cricket Society & MCC Book of the Year Award.

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal.

Hans van den Broek knew Chuck when he too lived in New York, a few years previously – the New
York of 9/11 and the power cut, of anxiety suffusing the city's streets. Those years were difficult for
Hans – his English wife left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and
silences in their marriage, and he spends two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger
evenings with the eccentric residents. On a whim one weekend, he decides to play cricket at one of the
city's desultory grounds, where the game is adapting to its new, American, environment, and where
Chuck cuts an imposing figure as the umpire, his head full of great plans for the transformation of his
adopted homeland…

NETHERLAND is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a
novel of New York seen through the prism of a European in exile; a novel of how much a place can
change you, and how much you can change a place. With it, Joseph O'Neill has taken the anxieties and
uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

Praise for NETHERLAND: “If some of these passages reverberate with echoes of THE GREAT
GATSBY and its vision of New York, the reader can only surmise that they are entirely deliberate for,
like Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, Joseph O’Neill’s stunning new novel, NETHERLAND provides a
resonant meditation on the American Dream.” Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“Despite cricket’s seeming irrelevance to America, the game makes his exquisitely written novel
NETHERLAND a large fictional achievement, and one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I
have ever read…This is attentive, rich prose about New York in crisis that, refreshingly, is not also
prose in crisis ...O’Neill has Naipaul’s gift for creating unforced novelistic connections in a world of
forced ideological connections. Perhaps Joseph O’Neill is the writer this city has been awaiting ... if
his writing has an English ease and classicism, it also has a world-directed curiosity, an interest in
marginal lives...” James Wood, The New Yorker
“New York is not what most people imagine it to be.  Just as marriage, family, friendship and
manhood are not. NETHERLAND is suspenseful, artful, psychologically pitch-perfect, and a
wonderful read. But more than any of that, it's revelatory.  Joseph O'Neill has managed to paint the
most famous city in the world, and the most familiar concept in the world (love) in an entirely new
way.”  Jonathan Safran Foer

Joseph O’Neill was born in Cork in 1964, and brought up in the Netherlands. He studied law at Girton
College, Cambridge, and in 1987 he was called to the Bar. He took a year out in 1989 to write his first
novel, THIS IS THE LIFE, and in 1990 he began practising at the Bar. He is the author of one other
novel, THE BREEZES, and a memoir, BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A FAMILY HISTORY. He lives in
New York.

NETHERLAND: UK: Fourth Estate; US: Pantheon; Brazil: Objetiva; China: Shanghai 99; Croatia:
Profil; Czech: Kniha Zlin; Denmark: Klim; France: L'Olivier; Germany: Rowohlt; Holland: De
Bezige Bij; Israel: Miskal/Simanim; Italy: Rizzoli; Japan: Hayakawa; Korea: Sapiens21; Norway:
Aschehoug; Portugal: Bertrand; Romania: Leda; Spain: El Aleph; Sweden: Brombergs; Thailand:
The Post Publishing House; Turkey: Pegasus. [Film rights sold to Harpo Films and director Sam
Mendes is attached to the project]

48
THE RESCUE MAN by Anthony Quinn (PS)
- Longlisted for the 2009 Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction

Summer 1939. Historian Tom Baines is at work on a study of Liverpool’s architectural past. If war
should come, will the buildings and streets that he documents survive? Then his faltering project gets a
boost when a photographer, Richard Tanqueray, and his wife Bella befriend him and together they
work against the clock of a rapidly contracting peacetime.

A further preoccupation takes hold when he begins to read the journals of a brilliant young Victorian
architect, Peter Eames, who briefly flourished in Liverpool in the 1860s. Through him, Baines comes to
a fuller understanding of the nature of genius, but also the mysterious workings of the human heart.
Eames’s own legacy will have unexpected reverberations seventy years later when war comes and
Baines joins a Heavy Rescue team, retrieving the wounded from bomb-damaged buildings. With the
ordinary rules of life suspended and mortal danger ever-present, he finds his courage tested – and his
conscience troubled as an adulterous lover.  

Praise for THE RESCUE MAN: “A fascinating novel - very moving and beautifully nuanced and
observed - it beguiles with a tremendous slow-burning power.” William Boyd
“THE RESCUE MAN is thoughtful, beautifully observed and utterly compelling, the sort of book that
ought to move his name from prize juries on to prize shortlists” Peter Stanford, The Independent on
Sunday
“An impressive war time drama that resurrects Liverpool’s port-of-empire past from the rubble of the
Blitz…. Quinn like fellow Liverpudlian writers such as Beryl Bainbridge and Linda Grant, is hard-
wired to the emotional history of his home town… An evocative and elegiac period piece. Writing with
the eye and language of a serious novelist, Quinn has reclaimed an intriguing chapter of Liverpool's
history." Emma Hagestadt, The Independent
“Shuttling between two Liverpools, one in its Victorian heyday, the second ravaged by the Blitz, THE
RESCUE MAN is a compellingly double edged read reminiscent of AS Byatt’s Possession” The
Sunday Telegraph
"THE RESCUE MAN does not feel like a first novel. The writing is assured, the characters credible,
the plot solid… a real page-turner." Max Davidson, Mail on Sunday

Anthony Quinn was born in Liverpool in 1964. Since moving to London in 1986 he has written about
film and books for a number of newspapers and magazines, including The Independent, Daily
Telegraph, New York Times and Mail on Sunday. For three years he was the arts editor at Harpers &
Queen. Since 1998 he has been the film critic of The Independent. In 2006 he was one of the judges of
the Man Booker Prize. He is currently the wine correspondent for Esquire magazine.

THE RESCUE MAN: UK: Jonathan Cape

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY by Ross Raisin (PS) (US title: OUT BACKWARD)
- Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2009; winner of a Betty Trask Award;
winner of the Guildford Book Festival First Novel Award; longlisted for the Dylan Thomas
Prize; longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award

‘Ramblers. Daft sods in pink and green hats.  It wasn't even cold.  They moved down the field swing-
swaying like a line of drunks, addled with the air and the land, and the smell of manure.  I watched
them from up top.’

Expelled from the local school for an incident that shadows him still, Marsdyke works the flock of a
remote hill farm on the Yorkshire Moors under the brooding presence of his grum (threatening) father. 
From a distance, the son watches as wide-eyed ramblers march past his farm, and 'towns' move in from
the cities and transform his landscape - buying up local farms as second-homes and filling the valley
with delicatessens and glishy new bars.

49
Then, as he looks down from his rock on the hill at the new family arriving, eager for 'welly weekends
and a postcard view out the bedroom window', he catches sight of the family's young daughter. 
Marsdyke can keep his distance only so long and, what begins as a friendship between (an outcast)/(a
solitary) young farmer and a defiant teenage girl moved away from her old life, soon takes a menacing,
and unsettling, turn.

In a voice that is at once brilliantly comic and darkly terrifying, GOD’S OWN COUNTRY traces a
journey not just across the landscape but into the mind of an unforgettable character - a voice that stays
with you long after you turn the novel's last page and finally release your breath.

Praise for GOD’S OWN COUNTRY: “Here is a novel worth celebrating - it pulsates with life, truth
and the kind of lonely, raging despair that has no choice but to create delusion. (…) If literary prizes
mean anything, they will be wrapped up in fancy paper and be presented with sighs of gratitude to this
rich, full-blooded and vividly voiced account of one lad's life.” The Irish Times
“Raisin is one to watch: controlled, mature and compelling, this is a masterful debut.” The Observer
“Ross Raisin’s story of how a disturbed but basically well-intentioned rural youngster turns into a
malevolent sociopath is both chilling in its effect and convincing in its execution” J. M. Coetzee
“From the first sentence, Ross Raisin's deft (and daft) use of language makes the reader swoon. Soon
enough, though, you start to feel woozy, as if drunk or under a spell, and by the time you realize
exactly what's happening, he and his narrator are holding you close and it's too late to get away. OUT
“An absorbing read… and Raisin [is] a young writer to watch.” Guardian

Ross Raisin graduated with a first from King’s College London in 2002, and completed the creative
writing MA at Goldsmiths in 2004. Having lived for various short periods in Connemara, Grenoble,
Nice, Paris and Bristol, he now lives in London.

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY: UK: Penguin; US: HarperCollins (US title: OUT BACKWARD);
Canada: HarperCollins; France: Payot; Germany: Karl Blessing; Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam; Italy:
Bompiani; Romania: Leda

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Nino Ricci


(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates)
- Winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction; Canadian National
Bestseller; Longlisted for the Giller Prize; Globe 100 Best Book, 2008; National Post Top 10
Book, 2008; Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2009

Nino Ricci is one of Canada’s most renowned writers, and has built his reputation as an adept
interpreter of the human heart. In his latest novel, he explores the continued resonance of Darwin’s
theory of evolution, and the blurred boundaries between the human and animal world.

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is set in Montreal during the 1980s, a decade fraught with the continuing
clashes between French-Canadians and English-Canadians and the ensuing crises of identity.

Thirty-something Alex is plagued by a sense of being a fraud in all aspects of his life, from his
professional ambitions to his romantic involvements. He is by all accounts an unexceptional man, save
for the fact that he is haunted by an extraordinary experience in the Galapagos Islands, the
consequences of which threaten to upend the precarious balance of his ordinary life, and cast into doubt
his responsibilities as a human being.

50
Praise for THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: "In this winner of the Governor-General's Award for fiction,
Alex, a young Italian Canadian in 1980s Montreal, achingly needs to write, to talk, to make order of
his life and of the clutter of information he has accumulated. He also wants a girlfriend. Because Ricci
is a skilled, language-loving writer, Alex's life as a skilled, language-loving writer is a rich journey."
Globe 100 Best Books
“Ricci's prose is simple, yet somehow always unexpected. Each sentence, each word, feels exactly
right, landing in our inner ear just so. The dire intelligence of the work is perhaps driven home most
exquisitely by the fact that, on top of all the thought-inducing social, religious and political critiques, it
is also bitterly, achingly funny... Ricci does more than survive. He triumphs utterly here in rare
achievement.” Toronto Star
“Exhilarating...Ricci’s stylistic range is impressive, spanning the parodic to the tragic. Most
memorable among the novel’s virtuoso set pieces are a stunning heart-of-darkness episode in the
Galapagos and a conjunction of storytelling and evolutionary survival involving the courtship ritual of
the masked booby. Deconstruction is relatively easy, Ricci’s book tells us; what is heroic is our
struggle to construct, to change and evolve, to be loving and compassionate, and to tell each other
stories of hope." Quill & Quire

Nino Ricci's first novel, LIVES OF THE SAINTS, won several prizes, including the Governor
General's Award for Fiction, and was made into a movie starring Sophia Loren. The novel was also a
long-time Canadian national bestseller, and was followed by the highly acclaimed IN A GLASS
HOUSE and WHERE SHE HAS GONE, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. His most recent
book, TESTAMENT, winner of the Trillium Award, is a secular retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. A
winner of the inaugural Alistair MacLeod Award for Literary Achievement, Nino Ricci lives in
Toronto.

Previous title, TESTAMENT: Canada: Doubleday; US: Houghton Mifflin; Bulgaria: Perseus;
Russia: AST; Serbia: Laguna; Sweden: Natur Och Kultur

New title, THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES: Canada: Doubleday Canada; US: Other Press; Thailand: The
Post Publishing House

THE WOLF by Joseph Smith (PS)

In a bleak winter landscape a wolf is starved and weakening. He is the predator, and entering his mind,
seeing the natural world through fierce new eyes, you feel the snow through the pads of your paws,
what it feels like to stare at your prey and offer death, the texture of flesh between your teeth and the
taste of blood in your mouth. But the harshness of nature, the death that stalks all of the wild forest,
begins to challenge his supremacy, and his understanding of himself.

THE WOLF is a novella of singular quality, taking the reader on an unforgettable journey- both with
the wolf through a vividly drawn landscape, and inwards, deep into the mind of a killer. And when the
wolf discovers a predator like himself on the brink of starvation - a competitor he should kill - he
hesitates, and at that moment sets out on a path that will lead him against his will through strange
ordeals, to find that before he can confront his own mortality he must face his greatest challenge - his
own cherished nature.

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Praise for THE WOLF: "Nothing this year approaches the sheer magic of Joseph Smith's daringly
sophisticated first novel, which enters the mind of a starving wolf patrolling the harsh winter
landscape. A strange encounter with a fox results in an uneasy odyssey. Disney it's not. An austere
beauty dictates the lyric, measured prose, which avoids all taint of period pastiche in achieving the
dignified glory of an Anglo-Saxon epic." Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent, The Irish
Times, chosen for The Literary Landmarks of 2008
“a stunning combination of nature writing and imagination…It's elegant, it's beautiful, it's savage,
and there isn't a wasted word.” Bookbag
“A wonderful, understated book that is more than a view of the world as seen through the eyes of a
wolf, but a contemplation on hunger, home, pride and death." Ross Raisin, author of God’s Own
Country
“This is a challenging combination of nature writing and fiction [...]. Smith hits a nerve - there's a
little bit of the wolf in all of us.” TimeOut, London, 4 out of 5 stars
“[...] Smith's prose is as hard as his winter is cold, honestly reflecting the steely heart of his narrator
and the unforgiving environment he inhabits, and demonstrating the author as one with potential." -
Metro
“Smith's writing draws us into the mind of a predator - vicious, pitiless and insatiable, showing his
victims their death in his gaze before they succumb to it. It is a daring novel that achieves that most
elusive of challenges - changing the world a little for the reader.” The Guardian

Joe Smith is 29 and lives in London. This is his first book.

THE WOLF: UK: Cape; Brazil: Editora Objetiva; France: Denoel; Germany: Berlin; Greece:
Ellinika Grammata; Holland: Ambo Anthos; Italy: Bompiani; Spain: Spanish: Random House
Mondadori; Catalan: Ara Llibres

SAGE ISLAND by Samantha Warwick


(in association with Anne McDermid Associates)

Swimming wild, I am a tiny speck in an enormous ocean, haunted with life and fear and fossilized
secrets.

Swimming through the deepest, coldest water, Savanna Mason discovers the place where her spirit is
free and secure. Yet something is beginning to go wrong. At nineteen, she is drowning in a competitive
rivalry with the great champion Trudy Ederle, and obsessed with inner doubts she can barely name. In
search of her own life’s meaning, Savi travels to compete in the famous Wrigley Ocean Marathon—a
twenty-two mile race from Catalina Island to Los Angeles.

Along the way she questions the meaning of defeat and achievement, and begins to discover the
strength of her own mind and heart. An exploration of the carefree 1920s, with vivid glimpses of
Prohibition, class antagonism and the evolving attitudes of the Flapper era, SAGE ISLAND is a
poignant coming-of-age novel about a young woman, diving and surfacing.

Praise for SAGE ISLAND: "SAGE ISLAND weds seamless flapper-era detail with a mesmerizing
story of athletic obsession. Savanna Mason's desperate underwater odyssey is an unforgettable, near-
visceral reading experience.” Lynn Coady, author of Mean Boy
“The art and adrenaline rush of swimming has been poetically and powerfully captured. Warwick
successfully launches you into the depths of heart-thumping history.  You can’t help but dive in and not
surface until the book is completed.” Joanne Malar, World Champion, three-time Olympic
swimmer

Samantha Warwick was born in Montreal. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from the
University of British Columbia in 2003. Her work has been broadcast on CBC Radio and has appeared
in various literary magazines including Geist, Event, Room and echolocation. Samantha Warwick spent
seven years coaching competitive swimming between 1997 and 2004, and has participated in long
distance open-water swim races in British Columbia, California and New York. She now lives and
works in Calgary where she is at work on her second novel.

SAGE ISLAND: Canada: Brindle & Glass

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NEW NON-FICTION

GOD IS: FAITH AND RELIGION IN A SECULAR AGE by David Adams Richards
(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates, Ltd.)

David Adams Richards, one of Canada’s most beloved and celebrated authors, has been wrestling with
questions of faith and religion ever since he was a Catholic child— a struggle that has constantly
informed his work as a writer. Now the man who has been described as “Canada's Tolstoy” sets down
his beliefs in his most personally revealing work.

For David Adams Richards, the presence of God cannot be denied. For him, God is. Richards is
certain that many of those who lazily espouse atheism also know the presence of God, though they
deny it to everyone—including themselves.

The title of his new book is an affirmation of God’s existence but also stands as a reply to Christopher
Hitchens’ assertion that “God is not great.” A polemic and a memoir, GOD IS charts with passion and
subtlety the author’s rocky relationship with his cradle Catholicism, his battle with alcoholism, his
encounters with men who were proud to be murderers, and the many times in his life when he has been
witness to what he unapologetically calls miracles.

The unique voice of David Adams Richards has never been so powerful—or so universal.

Praise for David Adams Richards: “David Adams Richards is perhaps the greatest Canadian writer
alive.” Lynn Coady, author of Mean Boy
“No writer in Canada, with the exception of Alice Munro, is better at capturing the constantly shifting
human dialect of intention and action, conscience and pride, and the ongoing wars between the public
and private self.” Quill & Quire
“David Adams Richards shows himself to be as powerful a writer as any you can name.” The Globe &
Mail

David Adams Richards is one of the few writers to win a Governor General’s award for both fiction
and non-fiction. Among his many novels are THE FRIENDS OF MEAGER FORTUNE, which won a
Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book (Canada and the Caribbean), RIVER OF THE
BROKENHEARTED, MERCY AMONG THE CHILDREN, and THE LOST HIGHWAY. His two
previous non-fiction books are HOCKEY DREAMS and LINES ON THE WATER.

GOD IS…: Canada: Doubleday Canada (pub August 2009, hb, 288 pp.)

THE LOCUST AND THE BIRD: MY MOTHER’S STORY by Hanan al-Shaykh (DR)

My life story is one long revelation.


Only the Locust can capture the Bird.

This extraordinary memoir opens as Hanan al-Shaykh travels through the streets of New York on her
way to her daughter’s wedding. Hanan thinks back to her own secret wedding in the 1960s, and then
begins to reflect on her mother, Kamila, so absent from her childhood that she can count the times she
saw her. For her mother, her wedding day was the day she was sacrificed.

Kamila is brought up in poverty in a village in southern Lebanon with her mother and brother. In 1934,
when Kamila is nine, the family moves to Beirut and two years later, without her knowledge, she is
betrothed to her widowed brother-in-law, Abu-Hussein, a man eighteen years her senior. As a young
Lebanese girl Kamila is expected to be a stone-bearing donkey – to live a life of domestic servitude.
But although illiterate, she longs to go to school and it is the stories and images of poetry and films that
fascinate the young girl. She begins an apprenticeship with Fatme the seamstress, and there, one day,
she looks out of a window and sees a young man, Muhammad, sitting by the edge of a fountain. At the
age of thirteen she falls in love for the first and only time in her life.

53
The following year, to her fury and anguish, Kamila is forced into a wedding dress. She covers herself
in soot, screams and cries: to no avail. Kamila is married to her brother-in-law, and on their wedding
night he forces himself on his child bride. That night she conceives a daughter. Her second daughter,
Hanan, is born three years later. Risking their lives, Kamila and Muhammad continue to see each other
in secret until Kamila can no longer bear to be married to her harsh and bullying husband. This is an
agonising decision, for in order to follow her heart and to lead the life she desires, Kamila will have to
leave her beloved daughters.

Evoking the dusty streets of Beirut and the fabric of life in the Lebanon, this is a remarkable and
intensely moving memoir. Told in a voice that is entirely distinctive and authentic, it is a unique
portrait of the life of one woman that gives us an astonishing insight into the lives of many others in the
Arab world.

Advance praise for THE LOCUST AND THE BIRD: "It is an extraordinarily brave act for a writer
to undertake to inhabit, fully and sympathetically, the life her mother lived before she was born,
particularly when her mother was no jewel of wifely virtue." J.M. Coetzee
Praise for the work of Hanan al-Shaykh: “Should be read by everyone…who cares about the more
enduring, and universal, truths of the heart” Salman Rushdie
“Al-Shaykh has a subtle touch and a mischievous sense of humour” Ahdaf Soueif
“Complex and demanding…breathtakingly frank” Edward Said
“THE LOCUST AND THE BIRD puts to rest, with much gentleness and ease, every stereotype about
the Arab world and its women to which we have long grown attached. In its nakedly truthful and
wonderfully authentic rendition of the life of the ordinary and yet remarkable Kamila, this memoir digs
deep into themes of oppression, marginalisation, poverty, love and survival as Kamila herself lived
them: with humour, wit, extraordinary imaginativeness and barefaced fallibility.” Al-Nahar
Newspaper, Beirut

One of the contemporary Arab world's most acclaimed writers, Hanan al-Shaykh grew up in Beirut.
She is the author of the collection I SWEEP THE SUN OFF THE ROOFTOPS and her novels include
THE STORY OF ZAHRA, WOMEN OF SAND AND MYRRH, BEIRUT BLUES and, most recently,
ONLY IN LONDON, which was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She lives in
London.

Previous title, ONLY IN LONDON (novel): Arabic rights: Dar al-Adab; UK: Bloomsbury; US:
Random House; Denmark: Centrum; Finland: Gummerus; France: Actes Sud; Holland: De Geus;
Norway: Gyldendal; Portugal: Difel; Spain: Planeta.

New title, THE LOCUST AND THE BIRD (non-fiction): Arabic rights: Dar al-Adab; UK:
Bloomsbury (pub May 2009); US: Pantheon; France: Acts Sud; Holland: De Geus; Italy: Piemme;
Norway: Gyldendal

THE CRUSADES by Thomas Asbridge


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

In the eleventh century, a vast Christian army, summoned to holy war by the Pope, rampaged through
the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean, seizing possession of Jerusalem, a city revered by both
faiths. Over the two hundred years that followed this First Crusade, Islam and the West fought for
dominion of the Holy Land, clashing in a succession of chillingly brutal wars, both firm in the belief
that they were at God’s work.

For the first time, this book tells the story of this epic struggle from the perspective of both Christians
and Muslims, reconstructing the experiences and attitudes of those on either side of the conflict.
Mixing pulsing narrative and piercing insight, it exposes the full horror, passion and barbaric grandeur
of the crusading era, leading us into a world of legendary champions, such as Richard the Lionheart
and Saladin, shadowy Assassins, poet-warriors and pious visionaries; across the desert sands of Egypt
to the verdant forests of Lebanon, and through the ancient cities of Constantinople, Cairo and
Damascus.

54
One of the world’s foremost authorities on the subject, Thomas Asbridge offers a vivid and penetrating
history of the crusades, setting a new standard for modern scholarship. Drawing upon painstaking
original research and an intimate knowledge of the Near East, he uncovers what drove Muslims and
Christians alike to embrace the ideals of jihad and crusade, revealing how these holy wars reshaped the
medieval world and why they continue to echo in human memory to this day.

Praise for previous title, THE FIRST CRUSADE: “A taut, clear and exciting narrative, which also
manages to convey the best of modern Crusader scholarship” The Guardian
“A nuanced and sophisticated analysis . . . Exhilarating” The Sunday Telegraph
“The book is enthralling” Allan Massie, The Literary Review
“Outstanding . . . One of the most distinguished books yet launched on the current wave of enthusiasm
for history” Oxford Times

Thomas Asbridge is the author of THE FIRST CRUSADE. Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at
Queen Mary, University of London, he is an acknowledged expert on the history of the crusades and
has travelled extensively in the Near East following the crusade routes.

Previous title, THE FIRST CRUSADE: UK: Simon & Schuster; US: OUP; Poland: Rebis

New title, THE CRUSADES: UK: Simon & Schuster (delivery June 2009, pub January 2010); US:
Ecco/HarperCollins (pub April 2010) Press; Holland: Spektrum

MONTAIGNE – HOW TO LIVE by Sarah Bakewell (ZW)


 
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, the world’s first essayist, was a nobleman, public official and wine-
grower who lived in south-western France from 1533 to 1592.  One might expect him to seem
impossibly remote from us. Yet, today as throughout the centuries since his death, people who pick up
his book have the same reaction his first readers did: “Me too!”, “He’s so modern!” and “How did he
know all that about me?”
 
The secret to Montaigne’s endless modernity lies in the way he writes about himself.  Instead of
formulating philosophical theories, he reflects on everyday experiences: the things he likes to eat and
drink, his cat’s bird-hunting skills, the way his dog’s ears twitch when he dreams, his family quarrels,
the tribulations of his friends and neighbours, dilemmas at work and the daily stresses of the religious
wars which dominate his era.  He writes whatever comes into his head at the time, creating a new
genre: the “essay”, a word meaning a “try”, venture or question.  All his ventures centre on the biggest
question of all: how to live.  That is, how to do the good or honourable thing in any situation life throws
at you, while flourishing and feeling happy.  This is why generations of readers return to Montaigne to
ask their own how to live question, as well as for the sheer pleasure of recognition.

In keeping with Montaigne’s own free-roaming approach, MONTAIGNE: HOW TO LIVE is an


adventurous, richly textured biography which narrates his life by means of this question together with
twenty of his “tries” at an answer.  It sets his personal story alongside those of four centuries’ worth of
readers - culminating in ourselves, the latest to seek twenty-first century wisdom in Montaigne’s
extraordinary book.

Praise for previous title, THE ENGLISH DANE:


" Sarah Bakewell...has followed up her impressive debut, THE SMART, with what looks like another
sure-fire winner, for Jorgensen combined his extraordinarily diverse career with a "Zelig-like"
propensity, as Bakewell puts it, for being present at great events."The Sunday Times
“Sarah Bakewell has a fine story to tell and she is its skilled servant… Her affection for the Great
Dane, Jorgensen, adds grace to this wonderful, intelligently told story.” The Guardian
A terrific book… everything is precise, amusing and intriguing.” The Saturday Telegraph

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Sarah Bakewell was born in the UK, grew up in Australia and now lives in London and Italy. A former
curator of early printed books at London’s Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine, she is the
author of THE ENGLISH DANE, a life of Jorgen Jorgenson (UK: Chatto & Windus; Iceland:
Skrudda)

MONTAIGNE – HOW TO LIVE: UK: Chatto & Windus (pub Jan 2010); Brazil: offer

AN EDUCATION by Lynn Barber (GC)

“One day in l992 I went to work as usual at the Independent on Sunday and the doorman handed me a
message slip and said ‘This man has been phoning all night.’ The message said ‘Ring Alan Green’ and
gave a Jerusalem number. Now, as it happened, Alan Green, the Director of Public Prosecutions, was
front page news that week because he had been caught kerb-crawling prostitutes in the King’s Cross
area. And it is a mark of how crazed with self-importance I was at the time that I immediately thought,
‘Oh good. The DPP wants me to interview him.’ What more natural than that he should want to give an
exclusive to the hottest interviewer in London? I didn’t even pause to wonder why he was in Jerusalem.
So I rang the Jerusalem number and said, ‘Can I speak to Alan Green?’ And this horrible cooing voice
at the other end said ‘Minn! Bubl has been pining for you all these years.’ I dropped the phone like a
burning coal and didn’t speak again all day.

I met Alan Green - my Alan Green, not the Director of Public Prosecutions - in l960 when I was l6 and
he was - he said 27, but probably in his late thirties. I was waiting for a bus home to Twickenham after
a rehearsal at Richmond Little Theatre, when a sleek maroon car drew up and a man with a big cigar in
his mouth leaned over to the passenger window and said, ‘Want a lift?’ Of course my parents had told
me, my teachers had told me, everyone had told me, never to accept lifts from strange men but at that
stage he didn’t seem strange, and I hopped in. I liked the smell of his cigar and the leather seats. He
asked where I wanted to go and I said Clifden Road, and he said Fine. I told him I had never seen a car
like this before, and he said it was a Bristol, and very few were made. He told me lots of facts about
Bristols as we cruised - Bristols always cruised - towards Twickenham.”

So begins the eponymous story of Lynn Barber’s collection of early memoirs, in which she tells how as
a teenager she came to be seduced by an older man and how her parents, rather than protect her, were
in turn seduced by him, spying him as a potential husband for their daughter.

Lynn Barber took a degree in English at Oxford University. Best known for her interviews, she has
written for Penthouse Magazine, The Sunday Express, The Independent on Sunday, Vanity Fair, The
Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Observer. She has won five British press awards. Her
books include two collections of interviews, MOSTLY MEN and DEMON BARBER.

AN EDUCATION: UK: Penguin (pub June 2009)


[Film rights sold to Wildgaze Films and adapted for the screen by Nick Hornby. Film to be
premiered in the UK and US in autumn 2009, distribution by Sony Pictures]

WAKING UP IN TOYTOWN by John Burnside (DM)

In the early 80s, after a decade of drug abuse and borderline mental illness, a man runs away to the
suburbs, to live what he hopes will be a normal life. With the aid of his last remaining friends he finds a
regular job, goes to AA meetings and resolves to 'disappear into the banal' - to escape his addictive
personality and find a 'Surbiton of the mind'- but he can't seem to outrun his own demons and, before
long, he is back where he started.

The suburbs, though, are not quite as normal as he had imagined and, as he relapses into chaos, he
encounters a homicidal office worker who is obsessed with Alfred Hitchcock and Petula Clark, an old
lover, with whom he reprises a troubled, masochistic relationship and, finally, the seemingly flesh-and-
blood embodiments of all his private phantoms - as he drifts further and further into unreality.

56
The sequel to his haunting, celebrated account of a troubled childhood, A LIE ABOUT MY FATHER,
John Burnside's startling new memoir follows his hopeless quest for peace and mental security as the
ghosts and terrors close in and the illusion of Surbiton falls apart. Unsettling, touching, oddly romantic
and unflinchingly honest, this is the story of one man's search for sanity - but it is also, in its own way,
the true story of an impossible, unmanageable love.

Praise for previous title, GLISTER: “In GLISTER, he brings his powers of pared-down narration to
bear on a tale of dereliction, loss and possible redemption” Sunday Times
“... exquisite and haunting...I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year”
Scotland on Sunday
“Baffling, haunting, terrifying, moving, and compulsively readable” Daily Telegraph
“A novel that pierces the heart of evil... Consume it at night... Turn out the lights” Scotsman
“One of the most original and exhilarating reads of the year... an exceptionally rich treasure”
Guardian
“An agglomeration which builds and sticks, like molasses and leaves a long aftertaste. GLISTER is a
powerful, mesmerising experience” Observer
“The emotion this brilliant and disturbing novel leaves you with is like the spooked feeling Leonard
experiences at the sudden intimation of ‘some essence, some hidden principle’ in the world: ‘It takes
your breath away, but you don’t know if that comes from awe or terror.’ THE GLISTER is that kind of
story. It’s terrifying, and it feels like a gift.” The New York Times Book Review

John Burnside has published seven works of fiction, including his most recent novels, THE DEVIL’S
FOOTPRINTS and GLISTER, and ten collections of poetry, including THE ASYLUM DANCE,
which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award and a memoir: A LIE ABOUT MY FATHER, which
won the Saltire Book of the Year Award, the Sundial Biography award in 2006, and the Scottish Arts
Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Previous title, GLISTER: UK: Cape; US: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday (US title: THE GLISTER);
France: Metailie; Germany: Knaus; Italy: Fazi; Spain: Lumen.

New title, WAKING UP IN TOYTOWN: UK: Cape (pub January 2010)

MORE MILES THAN MONEY: Journeys Through American Music by Garth Cartwright
(HW)

Armed with only a greyhound ticket and enough money for his next beer, Garth Cartwright set out to
see whether the American music he loved - blues, country, folk and soul - was still alive in the twenty-
first century. His journey took him to the Mexican cantinas of San Antonio, the Native American
reservations of New Mexico and the last surviving juke joints of Highway 61. Along the way he meets
an exotic mix of surviving legends - from soul diva Mabel John to the queen of Mexican American
song Lydia Mendoza, funk pioneer Charles Wright to country troubadour Billy Joe Shaver - plus a
supporting cast of cowboy poets, down-and-out bluesmen and a feller called Lee who becomes
Cartwright's co-pilot for an epic drive across the desert.

Praise for his previous title, PRINCES AMONGST MEN: “Reminiscent of Jack Kerouac or
Hunter S. Thompson… the prose is carefully written and keenly observed.” New Internationalist
“Excellent survey of Roma musicians in the Balkans… What distinguishes Cartwright is his style, his
verve and his wholehearted engagement with his subject.” Guardian
“Funny, revealing and frequently moving” Observer

Garth Cartwright, New Zealand-born, South London-based, is a poet, photographer and award-winning
journalist. His previous book, PRINCES AMONGST MEN: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians was
published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail and Hannibal Verlag in Germany (and the accompanying CD
from Asphalt Tango Records) and has won the 2009 ITB Book Award.

New title, MORE MILES THAN MONEY: UK: Serpent’s Tail (pub Autumn 2009)

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REBEL LAND by Christopher de Bellaigue (PS)

What is the meaning of love and death in a remote, forgotten, impossibly conflicted part of the world?

In REBEL LAND, the acclaimed author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue journeys to Turkey's
inhospitable eastern provinces to find out. Immersing himself in the achingly beautiful district of Varto,
a place left behind in Turkey's march to modernity, medieval in its attachment to race and religious
sect, he explores the violent history of conflict between Turks, Kurds and Armenians, and the
maelstrom, of emotion and memories, that defines its inhabitants even today.

The result is a compellingly personal account of one man's search into the past, as de Bellaigue,
mistrusted by all he meets, and particularly by the secret agents of the State, applies his investigative
flair and fluent Turkish to unlock jealously-guarded taboos and hold humanity's excesses up to the light
of a very modern sensibility. 

Praise for previous title, IN THE ROSE GARDEN OF THE MARTYRS: “riveting...I was
intrigued and impressed...de Bellaigue has done his research well and reports meticulously” The
Literary Review
“thoughtful and quietly assured...an excellent guide to Iran's troubled recent history” The Evening
Standard
“A mixture of history, reportage and analysis, his book helps to understand ‘enigma inside a puzzle’
that is Iran today...fascinating” The Financial Times
“extremely timely...Tehran resident de Bellaigue gives an illuminating portrait of post-revolution
Iranians.” The Sunday Times
“brilliant...his Iran is...truthful: vibrant, polluted, colourful, deceitful, shockingly diverse and
completely in the present” The Guardian

Christopher de Bellaigue was born in London and has spent the past decade in the Middle East and
South Asia. He has worked as a foreign correspondent for a number of publications including the
Independent, the Financial Times, the Economist, and the New York Review of Books.  He is the author
of IN THE ROSE GARDEN OF THE MARTYRS: A Memoir of Iran, which was shortlisted for the
2004 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, a collection of essays, entitled THE STRUGGLE
FOR IRAN, and wrote an introduction for Penguin’s edition of Kapucinski's SHAH OF SHAHS
(2006).

Previous titles: IN THE ROSE GARDEN OF THE MARTYRS: US: Harper Collins: UK: Harper
Collins; Germany: Beck 
THE STRUGGLE FOR IRAN: US: New York Review of Books 
 
New title, REBEL LAND: UK:  Bloomsbury  (pub April 2009); US: Penguin; Germany: Beck

THE MUSIC ROOM by William Fiennes (DR)

At the end of William Fiennes' startling first book, THE SNOW GEESE, he returns home to his seven
hundred year family house in the heart of Oxfordshire. His new book, THE MUSIC ROOM, is a love
letter to this house, its traditions, its people and its history, woven around a memoir of his beloved elder
brother Richard, an epileptic who died at a tragically young age. Combining wit, humour, pathos and
wisdom. Will observes with great feeling and sensitivity the fabric of the house and the people of the
house; throughout, Rich a lifelong Leeds United fan, barks out sentences that play counterpoint to the
historical tranquillity of the bricks and mortar. Will is fascinated and in awe of his mysterious brother.
In this book he becomes his own surgeon and attempts to understand the medical underpinnings of the
neurological illness that affected his brother. He looks at the experiments of the mid Nineteenth century
onwards. What shines through is the permanence of love in an impermanent world.

THE MUSIC ROOM is as fresh as IN PATAGONIA as moving as AWAKENINGS and as


extraordinary as THE EMIGRANTS. It is, quite simply, astonishing. 

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Praise for THE MUSIC ROOM: “This is an exceptionally honest, beautifully-written and observed
memoir of a strange childhood, touching in its description of a situation about which, while others
might have moaned, appears to have been simply accepted and absorbed, as best it could, into daily
life. This is no misery memoir. It is a memoir full of curiosity and affection.” The Independent
“THE MUSIC ROOM must have been extraordinarily difficult to write, to avoid the pitfalls and the
toes it needs to avoid, but Fiennes pulls it off. It is a beautiful and fortifying book, even a great one.”
Nicholas Shakespeare, Saturday Telegraph
“This is no misery memoir – on the contrary, it is a thoughtful and lyrical account of an extraordinary
childhood – yet reading THE MUSIC ROOM one cannot help but be awed by the depth and
persistence of the love this family feels for their damaged brother and son, and by their ability to live
so fully and so gladly with their burden.” John Burnside, The Guardian

William Fiennes was educated at Oxford. He is the author of THE SNOW GEESE, which won the
Hawthornden Prize and a Somerset Maugham award, was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, and
The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and he has contributed to Granta, the London Review of
Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The Observer, amongst other publications.

Previous title, THE SNOW GEESE: UK: Picador; US: Random House; Canada: Random House;
Denmark: Gyldendal; Germany: Hanser; Holland: Ambo Anthos; Italy: Bompiani; Latvia:
Zvaigzne ABC

New title, THE MUSIC ROOM: UK: Picador (pub April 2009)

FACTS ARE SUBVERSIVE: Political writing from a decade without a name


by Timothy Garton Ash (GC)

"During times of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth becomes a revolutionary
act." For more than thirty years Timothy Garton Ash has travelled among truth tellers and political
charlatans to record, with scalpel-sharp precision, what he has found. This book, which collects his
work on the first turbulent decade of this new millennium, confirms his reputation as our foremost
historian of the present.

FACTS ARE SUBVERSIVE contains Garton Ash's eye-witness accounts of the fats of countries,
including Serbia, Poland and Ukraine, making the transition from dictatorship to democracy, and his
dispatches from places such as Egypt, Burma and Iran, where that transformation has yet to take place.

A recurring these, of the book and the decade, is freedom and its discontents. An encounter with the
drug gangs of Sao Paulo raises disturbing questions about liberal democracy; his examination of
immigration and Islam in Europe challenges the clichés of multiculturalism.

Often humorous mini-essays, selected from his columns in the Guardian, rub shoulders with in-depth
treatments of subjects including Gunter Grass, George Orwell and Isaiah Berlin. FACTS ARE
SUBVERSIVE also includes Garton Ash's most recent reportage on the election of Barack Obama and
its implications for the world.

The rigorous and brilliantly written essays in this book, when taken together, address some of the most
important questions of our time: what happens to people who have endured long dictatorships when
they try and found a theocratic state? How best can freedom from tyranny be won? How are free
expression, equality before the law and equal rights fro men and women sustained in a society of
different faiths and ethnicities? This is history of the present on a scale both panoramic and human:
urgent, exhilarating and necessary.

59
Praise for Timothy Garton Ash: "Garton Ash is, in the most literal sense of the term, a contemporary
historian. He writes primarily as a witness to the events he is treating, and not just as an outside
witness but often s an inside one as well... yet the sense of the historic dimension of the events in
question is never lost. And the quality of the writing places it clearly in the category of good
literature." George F. Kennan, New York Review of Books.
“The quality of his commentary speaks volumes in its own right: it is honest, erudite, philosophical
and civilised in the least trivial sense of the word.” The Sunday Times
“His journalism is that of an elegant essayist and an old-fashioned correspondent... his eye is good,
his pencil sharp.” Times Literary Supplement
“Garton Ash has an uncanny ability to sketch transition through a single encounter or scene... In such
scenes, the author's psychological accuracy rarely errs and he nets political and intellectual shifts.”
The Independent

Timothy Garton Ash is the author of eight books of political writing or 'history of the present' that have
charted the transformation of Europe over the last three decades, including THE POLISH
REVOLUTION, THE USE OF ADVERSITY, HISTORY OF THE PRESENT, and FREE WORLD.
He is Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, Isaiah Berlin Professorial Fellow at St
Anthony's College, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow at Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays
appear regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is widely
syndicated in Europe, Asia and the Americas. He has received many awards for his writing, including
the Somerset Maugham Award and the Orwell Prize.

Previous title, FREE WORLD: UK: Penguin Press; US: Random House; Bulgaria: Obsidian; China:
Oriental Press; France: Gallimard; Czech: Paseka; Germany: Hanser/dtv; Greek: Polis; Italy:
Mondadori; Japan: Fukosha; Poland: Znak; Portugal: Aletheia; Romania: Librom; Serbia: Samizdat
RDP B92; Slovenia: Mladinska; Spain: Tusquets

New title, FACTS ARE SUBVERSIVE: UK: Atlantic (pub June 2009); Brazil: Companhia das Letras;
Germany: Hanser

GANDHI by Ramachandra Guha (GC)

Two stand-alone books, INDIA BEFORE GANDHI followed by GANDHI VERSUS THE RAJ, to be
written by the eminent Indian historian, for which Indian, American, British and Canadian rights have
been bought by major publishers. Each of the books will be special and distinctive, rich in historical
insight and in human drama. Drawing on new material as well as enormous international research,
each book will provide fresh light on an iconic figure who was arguably the most important and
certainly the most interesting person of the twentieth century.

Ramachandra Guha is a historian and biographer based in Bangalore. His books include A CORNER
OF A FOREIGN FIELD (2002), which won the UK Cricket Society's Literary Award; and INDIA
AFTER GANDHI (2007), which was chosen as a Book of the Year by The Economist, the Wall Street
Journal, the Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His other awards include the Leopold-
Hidy Prize of the American Society of Environmental History. He has held Visiting Professorships at
Yale, Stanford, and Oslo. He writes a popular fortnightly columnist for The Hindu of Chennai, and
frequently appears on Indian television, as a commentator on politics and history. His work has been
translated into more than twenty languages. In 2008 he was chosen as one of the world's hundred most
influential public intellectuals by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines. He is a recipient of the
Republic of India's third highest honour, the Padma Bhushan.

Delivery book l (150,000 words): June 2011


Delivery book 2 (250,000 words): June 2014
UK: Penguin Press; USA: Knopf Doubleday; Canada: Random House; India: Penguin Books;
Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam

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THE SECRET LIVES OF SOMERSET MAUGHAM by Selina Hastings (GC)
 
The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century’s most famous writers
 
Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), author of classics such as Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s
Edge, was one of the best-known writers of his time. Yet much was hidden. Predominantly
homosexual, Maugham made a disastrous marriage although deeply in love with a charming but
dissolute young man. It was partly to escape his wife that Maugham undertook the journeys that
inspired so many stories. Moving between London, New York and Hollywood, he entertained lavishly
at his villa in the south of France, and during both world wars he worked for British Intelligence.
Outwardly his life was richly rewarding, but privately he suffered anguish from an unrequited love
affair and a shocking final betrayal.
Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham’s private correspondence and to
family testimony, shedding a fascinating new light on this extraordinary man.
 
Praise for EVELYN WAUGH: “Her style is supremely elegant and her eye for detail brings dazzle
and wit to every page”’ Independent on Sunday
 
Selina Hastings is a writer and literary journalist who worked for the Daily Telegraph for fourteen
years and subsequently became literary editor of Harpers & Queen. She has published biographies of
Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and Rosamond Lehmann. Her biography of Waugh won the Marsh
Biography Prize.

UK: John Murray (pub September 2009); US: Random House (pub summer 2010)

THE ATMOSPHERE OF HEAVEN: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and his Sons of
Genius by Mike Jay (HW)

The stranger-than-fiction story of what happened when medical researchers discovered the unexpected
effects of inhaling nitrous oxide.

At the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England, founded in the closing years of the eighteenth century,
dramatic experiments with gases precipitated not only a revolution in scientific medicine but also in the
history of ideas. Guided by the energy of maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes, the Institution was both
laboratory and hospital - the first example of a modern medical research institution. But when its
members discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, their experiments
devolved into a pioneering exploration of consciousness with far-reaching and unforeseen effects.

This riveting book is the first to tell the story of Dr. Beddoes and the brilliant circle who surrounded
him: Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, who supported his ideas; James
Watt, who designed and built his laboratory; Thomas Wedgwood, who funded it; and his dazzling
young chemistry assistant, Humphrey Davy, who identified (and tested on himself) nitrous oxide.

Medical historian Mike Jay charts the chaotic rise and fall of the Institution in this fast-paced account,
and he reveals its crucial influence…on modern drug culture, attitudes toward objective and subjective
knowledge, the development of anesthetic surgery, and the birth of the Romantic Movement.

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Advance praise for new title, THE ATMOSPHERE OF HEAVEN: “Fans of scientific biography
and history of science, as well as history buffs in general, will be engrossed by Jay's marvelous study
of an unusual man and the political and intellectual ferment of his time.” Publisher’s Weekly

Praise for previous title, THE AIR LOOM GANG: “I have never seen the logic of madness, of a
particular delusion, so clearly and convincingly expressed. THE AIR LOOM GANG is a wonderful
book to read…beautifully written, with all the drama, the rich characterisation, the subtlety, of a fine
novel.” Oliver Sacks
“A magnificent study…beautifully balanced and fiercely energetic, THE AIR LOOM GANG is an
important contribution to the historical debate and a paean to the logic of lunacy.” The Spectator
“Marvellous…free of academic jargon, delicately nuanced but taut with drama, THE AIR LOOM
GANG is one of the most rewarding books on madness and its history that I have ever read.” The
Literary Review
“An exhilarating cloak-and-dagger narrative…Jay brilliantly evokes the torrid atmosphere of 1790s
London and Paris.” The Guardian
“An ambitious, comprehensive and extremely interesting interpretation of Matthews and his delusion,
and of schizophrenia in general…its analysis of mental illness, mad-doctoring and the inner world of
the patient is original and intellectually thrilling.” History of Psychiatry

Mike Jay (www.mikejay.net) writes regularly on scientific and medical topics, and a specialist in the
history of drugs. His best-known book is THE AIR LOOM GANG: The Strange and True Story of
James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness, which won the Ken Book Award 2005. He is also
the editor of MEDICAL LONDON: City of Diseases, City of Cures by Richard Barnett.

THE ATMOSPHERE OF HEAVEN: UK/US: Yale University Press (pub April 2009)

PASHAS: Travellers and Merchants in the Middle East by James Mather


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

Britain’s modern relationship with the Middle East has mostly been one of violence and confrontation. 
Long before they came as occupiers, however, Britons were drawn there by the fabled riches of its
trade and discovered an Islamic world that was alluring, dynamic and diverse.  Instead of planting the
seeds of colonisation, they found themselves fascinated and cowed by someone else’s empire: the
mighty Ottoman dominion which still held sway over large chunks of Asia and Europe. 
 
Ranging across a quarter of a millennium and between the great cities of Istanbul, Aleppo and Cairo,
PASHAS tells the forgotten story of the Levant Company and the encounters it spawned between
Britons and an Islamic empire.  Its commerce brought not just traders, but diplomats and secretaries,
pilgrims and chaplains, families and entourages, aristocratic tourists and roving antiquarians into the
region. 

Lesser-known nowadays than its East India counterpart, this was once the ‘most flourishing company
of any in England.’  Not until the later-eighteenth century, when a fully-fledged territorial British
Empire did appear, was its trade to melt away, together with the mutual respect between Britain and
Islam, which it had nurtured. 
 
Unlike the ‘nabobs’ who gathered their fortunes in Bengal, these Britons fit awkwardly into the
traditional narrative of their nation’s domineering expansion across the globe in past times.  But to
contemporaries they seemed, for a time, no less visible.  They called them the ‘pashas’; and this book
reclaims their place at the forefront of Britain’s encounter with Islam and the wider world. 
 
Drawing on long-neglected sources, James Mather’s book paints a vivid and dramatic picture of the
places where the West and Islam met and prospered. Beautifully written and impeccably researched,
Mather is an exciting new voice in the tradition of William Dalrymple

Advance praise for PASHAS: “An arresting and timely addition to the literature of Western-Islamic
relationships.  The Levant Company has found a worthy historian at last.” Colin Thubron, author of
Shadow of the Silk Road
 

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James Mather studied History at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and as a Kennedy Scholar at
Harvard University.  He lives in London, where he practices as a commercial barrister. 

PASHAS: UK/US: Yale (pub October 2009)

CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED by Richard Miles


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)
 
The city of Carthage is most famous for the brutal manner of its fall to the Romans in 146 BC. This
new history charts the city’s rise over just five centuries from a small Levantine colony on the North
African coast to the Western Mediterranean’s first superpower: a position that would eventually put
Carthage on to a collision course with the emerging might of Rome. Using the latest archaeological
data within a clear narrative historical framework, Richard Miles uncovers one of the Ancient World’s
great ‘lost’ civilisations the memory of which was chillingly erased by those that eventually conquered
it.

This is a story of politics and power, of great battles and generals, and also of the savagery and
brutality of the ancient world where defeat could mean at best a lifetime of slavery and at worst total
annihilation. The clash between the rival empires of Rome and Carthage, between east and west, is a
story that reverberates down the centuries.

Dr Richard Miles is a Lecturer in the Faculty of Classics and Fellow and Director of Studies in Classics
at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University.  A leading scholar of   Roman history, particularly of Carthage,
Richard Miles has written numerous academic papers about the subject and has directed major
excavations there.  He is the editor of CONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY
(Routledge 1999) and has presented Carthage: The Roman Holocaust and Hannibal: The man who
hated Rome for Channel 4 Television.   

CARTHAGE MUST BE DESTROYED: UK: Penguin (pub January 2010); US: Viking; Holland:
De Bezige Bij; Italy: Mondadori; Spain: Debate.
(previously entitled: DELENDA EST CARTHAGO / THE RISE AND FALL OF CARTHAGE)

THE MORBID AGE by Richard Overy (GC)


 
“We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but whenever we applied the
healing knife a new sore appeared”- Arthur Koestler, DARKNESS AT NOON

British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity. The combination of a
relatively liberal, uncensored society and a large educated audience for new ideas made Britain a sort
of laboratory for novel ways to understand the world.

THE MORBID AGE recreates this highly creative but also very strange era – the golden period for
such public intellectuals as Aldous Huxley, H G Wells, Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Cyril Burt and
Marie Stopes. They commanded substantial audiences, introducing concepts such as eugenics,
planetary extinction, planned economies and Utopian living. And although they frequently argued
among themselves, they were united by a crushing belief that they lived at the end of a civilization, that
‘Western man’ was doomed.

What seems startling to us now is that these ideas thrived in a country, which had won the World War
and remained a stable, successful place, insulated from the traumas that racked some parts of Europe.
Disquieting too is that these ideas became common currency before the mid-1930s when Nazi
Germany began to offer a genuine threat. This morbid intellectual environment was to have a profound
effect as the crises over the Spanish Civil War and then Czechoslovakia unfolded.

Richard Overy’s original, entertaining and constantly surprising new book raises a host of questions
both about the strangeness of British society and about the frightening power of ideas in a rapidly
changing world.

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Praise for previous title, THE DICTATORS:
“…an abundance of provocative insights...(Overy) is formidably up to date and presents the material
in accessible prose. This is a book that needed to be written.” The Guardian
“THE DICTATORS is his finest book yet - a masterful, readable, revisionistic and thoughtful
comparison that covers these monstrous regimes thematically…” The Telegraph

Richard Overy is Professor of History at University of Exeter. He has published extensively on the
history of the Second World War including: WHY THE ALLIES WON; THE AIR WAR, 1939-45;
GOERING: THE IRON MAN; THE ROAD TO WAR (with A. Wheatcroft); RUSSIA’S WAR;
INTERROGATIONS; THE DICTATORS, which won the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for
history in 2005.

Previous title, THE DICTATORS: UK: Penguin; US: Norton; Brazil: Jose Olympio; Bulgaria:
Prozorets; Croatia: Ljevak; Czech: Beta; Estonia: Varrak; Germany: DVA; Holland: De Bezige Bij;
Israel: Am Oved; Korea: Gyoyangin; Latvia: Atena; Poland: Dolnoslaskie Portugal: Livraria
Bertrand; Spain: Tusquets; Turkey: Erko

New title, THE MORBID AGE: UK: Penguin (pub May 2009); US: Penguin (pub spring 2010)

TURKMENISCAM by Ken Silverstein


(in association with Melanie Jackson Agency)

"Borat" meets Thank You for Smoking in the true story of a journalist’s undercover expose of the
moral and ethical shadiness of foreign lobbying

Hoping to expose D.C. lobbyists representing some of the world's most oppressive regimes, Harper’s
Washington editor Ken Silverstein posed as an executive with a fictional an energy firm with a stake in
exploiting the natural gas reserves in Turkmenistan, which is led by a dictatorial regime, headed by a
“president for life” whose humanitarian violations are legion. The idea was to improve the regime's
image and spur business development there. With fake business cards and a bogus website, he was
able to land meetings with K Street firms, and get them to lay out their P.R. campaigns for how they
would spin U.S. government officials, journalists and others into drawing favourable policies and news
coverage for the Turkmen regime.
One result was a number absurd-but-true pitches from various lobbying entities. Another was
embarrassment and outrage when the firms learned they’d been had.

Writing with the same insight and narrative verve that made THE RADIOACTIVE BOY SCOUT so
unforgettable, Ken Silverstein also weaves in a whole sleazy history of foreign lobbying (starting with
the Nazi regime's employment of the PR specialist Ivy Lee.) As darkly hilarious as it is shockingly
true, TURKMENISCAM in enlightening, entertaining, and essential read.

Ken Silverstein is the Washington editor of Harper's and has written for the Los Angeles Times,
Mother Jones, The Nation, and The American Prospect, among others, and is the author of THE
RADIOACTIVE BOY SCOUT. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Previous title, THE RADIOACTIVE BOY SCOUT: US: Random House; UK: Fourth Estate

New title, TURKMENISCAM: US: Random House (pub September 2009)

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A GAMBLING MAN: Charles II and The Restoration by Jenny Uglow (DR)

From acclaimed biographer Jenny Uglow, a portrait of Charles II and the first decade of the
Restoration: a time of glamour and gossip, charade and risk.

Charles II was thirty when he crossed the Channel in fine May weather in 1660. His Restoration was
greeted with maypoles and bonfires, like spring after long years of Cromwell’s rule. But there was no
going back, no way he could ‘restore’ the old. Certainty had vanished. The divinity of kingship fled
with his father’s beheading. ‘Honour’ was now a word tossed around in duels. ‘Providence’ could no
longer be trusted. As the country was rocked by plague, fire and war, people searched for new ideas by
which to live. Exactly ten years later Charles would stand again on the shore at Dover, laying the
greatest bet of his life in a secret deal with his cousin, Louis XIV.

The Restoration decade was one of experiment: from the science of the Royal Society to the startling
role of credit and risk, from the shocking licence of the court to the failed attempts at toleration of
different beliefs. Negotiating all these, Charles, the ‘slippery sovereign’, layed odds and took chances,
dissembling and manipulating his followers. The theatres were restored, but the king was the supreme
actor. Yet while his grandeur, his court and his colourful sex life were on display, his true intentions lay
hidden.

A GAMBLING MAN is a portrait of Charles II, exploring his elusive nature through the lens of these
ten vital years - and a portrait of a vibrant, violent, pulsing world, in which the risks the king took
forged the fate of the nation, on the brink of the modern world.

Praise for Jenny Uglow: "The most perfect historian imaginable.” Peter Ackroyd
"The perfect guide, lucid, intelligent, sympathetic and wise.” Miranda Seymour
"One of the most talented of contemporary biographers.” Michael Holroyd
"No one gives us the feel of a past life as she does.” A. S. Byatt

Jenny Uglow is the author of the prize-winning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Hogarth.
THE LUNAR MEN, published in 2002, was described by Richard Holmes as "an extraordinarily
gripping account", while her most recent biography, NATURE'S ENGRAVER: A Life of Thomas
Bewick, won the National Arts Writers Award for 2007. She lives in Canterbury.

UK: Faber (pub October 2009); US: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

THE RISE & FALL OF ANCIENT EGYPT by Toby Wilkinson


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

Ancient Egypt was the greatest and longest-surviving civilization in the history of the world. For 3000
years the People of the Nile dominated the Ancient World and its history and monuments continue to
fascinate and intrigue us today. Whether it be the scale (and possible mystical meaning) of the
pyramids, the unabashed magnificence of the treasures of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the great human
dramas of the pharaohs culminating in the tragic life and death of Cleopatra, the history of Ancient
Egypt has exercised a pull on our imaginations for centuries.

Yet the fascination and awe that Egypt excites have produced a generally uncritical approach to the
history of Ancient Egypt from both popular and academic writers alike. Toby Wilkinson is the leading
Egyptologist of the new generation and in this book he proposes to search behind the mask and in
telling the whole epic story of Egyptian civilization reveal the brutality, the vicious struggles for power,
the hardships imposed on the people of the country through the whole history of pharaonic rule.
Drawing on the latest research, for much of which he is himself responsible, a picture of Egypt emerges
for the first time, which places the grandeur, the achievements, and the epic scale of the story in a
critical perspective.

65
Praise for previous (academic) works by Toby Wilkinson:
“The extraordinary scope and outstanding quality of this synthesis makes it a work of scholarship of
the highest quality and a major contribution to Egyptology. Wilkinson has established a reputation for
himself as a scholar of formidable talent and productivity.” Bruce G. Trigger, Chronique d’ Egypte
“This volume will be a standard reference for years to come.” Jacke Phillips, Journal of African
History
“A most expert and very readable account.” Peter Clayton, author of Minerva
“Incorporating the latest research, this superbly illustrated dictionary is an outstandingly
authoritative reference work.” The History Guild
“Toby Wilkinson’s Dictionary of Ancient Egypt distinguishes itself from the vast number of layperson’s
guides to the archaeology and history of the country.” Archaeological Institute of America

Toby Wilkinson is in his mid-thirties and is a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He is an


internationally respected Egyptologist and a contributor to major reference works including The
Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt and Blackwell’s Companion to Egypt. As sole author, he has
written the critically acclaimed Dictionary of ANCIENT EGYPT and was invited by Routledge to
conceive, commission and edit the forthcoming encyclopedia THE EGYPTIAN WORLD. He is also
the author of (for T&H) GENESIS OF THE PHAROAHS and has broadcast on both radio and
television.

UK: Bloomsbury (delivery July 2009); USA: Random House; Germany: DVA; Holland: Ambo
Anthos; Spain: Random House Mondadori

ARCTIC LABYRINTH: The Quest for the Northwest Passages by Glyn Williams
(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

One of the most dramatic and worrying results of the global warming of recent years has been the
shrinking of Arctic ice to a point where scientists estimate that by 2030 (and perhaps even earlier) there
will be no sea ice at all in the Arctic by the summer’s end. One of the effects of this drastic change is
that for the first time in seafaring history the fantasy of a navigable Northwest Passage will become
reality as a regular northern route between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans opens.

The opening of the Northwest Passage takes us back to the speculations and rumours of earlier
centuries, which prompted many brave seamen to search for a passage. Their names still mark vast
stretches of the Arctic: Davis Strait, Baffin Island and Baffin Bay, Frobisher Bay, Hudson Strait and
Hudson Bay, Foxe Basin, James Bay, McClure Strait, McClintock Channel. Once these names stood
like signposts on the map, hopefully pointing the way to the Passage. Today they serve as tributes to
the courage and endurance of men who battled against overwhelming odds in frozen seas. This book
will tell their story.

Glyn Williams is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of London. He has served as
President of the Hakluyt Society and as General Editor of the records of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In the latter capacity he specialised in the relationship between the Company and the exploration of the
Canadian Arctic and sub-Arctic, publishing several volumes of documents on the subject. With his
colleague William Barr and the help of Parks Canada he investigated the wintering sites of discovery
expeditions searching for a Northwest Passage through Hudson Bay. His most recent books are: THE
PRIZE OF ALL THE OCEANS, VOYAGES OF DELUSION, THE QUEST FOR THE
NORTHWEST PASSAGE, and THE DEATH OF CAPTAIN COOK: Captain Cook: A Hero Made
and Unmade (Profile & Harvard University Press, 2008)

ARCTIC LABYRINTH: UK: Penguin (pub January 2010); Canada: Penguin Canada
(Previously entitled: ARCTIC ILLUSIONS)

66
THE EITINGONS: A Twentieth-Century Family by Mary-Kay Wilmers (PS)

Max Eitingon (1881-1943) was a psychoanalyst, a colleague, friend and protégé of


Freud’s. He was a founder of the free clinic in Berlin and when he emigrated to Palestine in 1933 he set
up the Palestine Institute of Psychoanalysis. He was rich and he was secretive and no one can
understand his relationship with Nadezhda Plevitskaya, ‘the Russian songbird’, who did or didn’t work
for the KGB and who was or wasn’t responsible for the abduction of a white Russian general in Paris in
1937.

Motty Eitingon (1885-1956) was a New York fur dealer whose connections with the Soviet Union
made him the largest dealer in the world. How close were those connections: how did he come by them
and what did the Soviet regime get in return? Imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1918 and questioned by
the FBI in the 1940s, was Motty everybody’s friend or everybody’s enemy?

Leonid Eitingon (1899-1981) was a KGB killer, a Bolshevik of the old sort who dedicated his life to
the Soviet regime. He was in China in the early 192os, in Turkey in the late 1920s, in Spain during the
Civil War, and, crucially, in Mexico when Trotsky was assassinated. ‘As long as I live,’ Stalin had
said, ‘not a hair of his head shall be touched.’ Though it didn’t work out like that.

Who were the Eitingons? And what part did they play in the secret dramas of the 20th century?

Advance Praise for THE EITINGONS: “Mary-Kay Wilmers began looking into aspects of the
history of her family 20 years ago, and in the years since then, when she was rumoured one season to
be researching in Moscow, the next in Mexico – with Leipzig, Pasadena, Galway, China, Paris, New
York, and Belarus in between – the sense of anticipation surrounding her book became a fact of British
literary life. The resulting book is here and is even better than I’d hoped. It will certainly be the most
thrilling non-fiction book of the year, throwing light into the darkest corners of the last century.
Seldom if ever do you find the politics and psychology of a period not only so thoroughly captured but
so beautifully inhabited. At the centre of the entire story stands the author herself – ironic, precise,
searching, and stylish -- wondering not only about where she is from but about who she thinks she is.
THE EITINGONS: A TWNTIETH CENTURY FAMILY is a masterpiece of personal history and
political reportage – it might even change our understanding of secrecy.” Andrew O’Hagan

Mary-Kay Wilmers is the editor of the London Review of Books. She began looking into aspects of the
history of her family 20 years ago. The resulting book will be the most thrilling of the year, throwing
light into the darkest corners of the last century. At the centre of the story stands the author herself -
ironic, precise, searching, and stylish -- wondering not only about where she is from but about who she
thinks she is.

UK: Faber (pub November 2009)

67
NON-FICTION

SICK CITY by Richard Barnett (HW)

For two thousand years, health and sickness have danced across, above and below the city’s streets,
defining London life in the process. SICK CITY charts the many roles that diseases, treatments and
cures have played in the city’s sprawling story, and reveals how London, in turn, has shaped the
professions and practices of modern medicine. In doing so, it guides its readers on their own journey
through the city’s streets and landmarks, and resurrects the vanished traces of its past.

Praise for SICK CITY: “This is London’s real heritage…all human life, and human death, is here”
Peter Ackroyd, The Times
“Beautifully packaged…Barnett and Jay have produced a wonderful history both of Londoners’ lives
and the medical profession.” Observer
“The best book about London in years” Nature
“Elegantly written, beautifully designed…a stunning guide to the maladies and medics of London”
Ben Schott, The Times, Books of the Year
“Like two white-aproned anatomists, Barnett and Jay stand above the still-breathing body of the city.
They unveil a new and thrilling pathology - the city and the patient are one and the same…this book
encourages the reader to enjoy the city to the full” Financial Times
“A box of deadly delights” Matthew Sweet, Independent on Sunday, Books of the Year
“The delight is in the detail…in the best traditions of London writing (such as Moorcock, Ballard or
Ackroyd), the city in SICK CITY seems almost alive” Fortean Times

Richard Barnett studied medicine in London before becoming a historian. He has taught at the
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, and currently teaches in the Department of
History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge. He also received the 2006 Promis prize for poetry.

UK: Strange Attractor Press/Wellcome Collection

A SINGLE SWALLOW by Horatio Clare (GC)

How does the journey of a single swallow unite us, not just as people who watch the skies for signs of
the changing seasons, but as creatures of the same changing earth.

A swallow’s brain is not much bigger than a pea, yet every year these birds travel 7000 miles, at 90
miles a day, from their hunting grounds in the marshlands of South Africa, across the deserts of the
Namib and the Kalahari, to Angola, the coast of the Congo and the Gulf of Guinea, bound for
Morocco, the Mediterranean and finally the belt of hunters which stretches from Spain, across France,
to Italy, across the Pyrenees to Britain, back to the very same nest they built the previous. With only
the sun, the stars and the land as its signposts.

The swallow’s journey, one of the most extraordinary in nature, is also one of our time’s great human
migration routes. Thousands of men, women and children leave sub-Saharan Africa and travel the same
ways, towards Europe and the riches of the north: economic migrants; those displaced by war or
hunger; those searching for other, better lives. For although it is the story of swallows, it is also, as
much if not more, the story of men and women, and also of the land, even the sky that we all share. The
book unfolds through a simple device: it looks at swallows through the eyes of people along their route,
as a way of portraying those people, and it looks at people, and our earth, from the perspective of a
swallow.

Praise for A SINGLE SWALLOW: “Clare has produced an enthusiastic, often elegiac, chronicle of
his encounters with the swallows on his travels…a talented young writer” The Times
“The resulting book, travel writing at its very best, is enthralling, passionate, hair-raising, quirky,
hilarious, informative, occasionally mad and utterly, utterly brilliant. […]Irresistible stuff” Daily Mail

Horatio Clare’s highly acclaimed first volume of biography, RUNNING FOR THE HILLS, was
shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the PEN/Ackerley Prize for

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Memoir, and won the Somerset Maugham Prize, and praised as: “A joy… The prose equivalent of a
collection of poems by Ted Hughes or even Wordsworth” (John Carey, The Sunday Times), “a
marvellous memoir about the blessings and hardness of nature and relationships” (Publishing News).
His second volume of biography, TRUANT, was published last year. When not writing, Clare is a
producer for BBC Radio.

A SINGLE SWALLOW: UK: Chatto; Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam

KEEPERS OF THE KEYS OF HEAVEN by Roger Collins


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)
 
One of the most enduring of all human institutions, the Papacy has also been amongst the most
influential and sometimes most controversial.   Popes have played a role in the history of Europe and of
the wider world unmatched by any other sovereign power, lay or ecclesiastical.  Understanding how
that authority was acquired and the ways in which it has been exercised over this long span of time is to
see how central the role of the popes has been from the decline the Roman Empire to the collapse of
Communism in Eastern Europe in the late twentieth century and beyond.  And this is not just a
European phenomenon.  The Crusades, for example, whose impact on Christian-Muslim relations is
still felt today, were inspired and encouraged for half a millennium by the Papacy, and papal missions
were involved in the opening up of South America and the formation of western links with China.

Over the centuries many major cultural and religious rifts within Europe, including the separation of
the Greek and Latin churches and the Reformation, have centred on disagreements over papal
authority.  Even today crucial debates that may threaten the continuing unity of the many million strong
Catholic Church in the USA and elsewhere, such as abortion, the marriage of the clergy, and the
treatment of cases of child abuse by priests, still revolve around questions of papal authority.  No one
who wants to make sense of modern issues within Christendom, as well as of so many key events in
European and world history can neglect the role played by the Papacy.
 
Papal history is important, both for what it reveals about so many aspects of the European and wider
past, and also for the impact it has on the lives of so many millions of Catholics - and others - today. 

Praise for KEEPERS OF THE KEYS OF HEAVEN:


"Few historians write as engagingly and wittily as Roger Collins. This is a wonderful, magnificent
account of an institution that has touched the lives of millions and still does."
Alexander McCall Smith
“[A] colorful history of all 266 popes of the Catholic Church…. [T]his authoritative volume is really
two books in one: Thumbnail sketches of each of the many men who have held this ecclesiastical office
and a chronological narrative of how the papacy evolved over time and how each pope’s tenure was
influenced by his predecessor and how his, in turn, influenced his successor.” History Wire
“Written with clarity and verve, KEEPERS OF THE KEYS OF HEAVEN is an approachable and
deeply satisfying read on the big History (big H) of Popes that is interwoven with lots of intriguing
behind-the-scenes history (little h).” Wonders and Marvels blog
“Concise, objective, and eminently readable – scholarly but accessible to lay readers. [Collins]
includes the scoundrels as well as the saints but does a fine job of presenting the history without a lot
of editorial commentary, deftly letting the events speak for themselves.” Library Journal
“A useful reference for students and diehard fans of church history.” Kirkus Reviews
“With Pope Benedict XVI often in the news these days, Collins’ wide-ranging history of the Vatican is
timely.” Newsday
 
Roger Collins teaches at the University of Edinburgh and has spent several years researching and
writing what will be a landmark popular history of one of the world’s great institutions.
 
KEEPERS OF THE KEYS OF HEAVEN: UK: Weidenfeld; US: Basic; Holland: Bert Bakker;
Spain: Ariel
(previously entitled THE ROCK OF ST PETER / HISTORY OF THE PAPACY)

KHOMEINI’S GHOST: IRAN SINCE 1979 by Con Coughlin (GC)

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On 1st February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to a tumultuous welcome and the Iranian
revolution that he masterminded has become one of the defining moments of the modern age. Today
the challenge of radical Islam represents the greatest threat to world peace seen since the darkest days
of the Cold War, and the legacy of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution lies at the heart of many of the
world's most intractable conflicts.

KHOMEINI’S GHOST is the definitive biographical account of how an impoverished young student
from a remote area of southern Iran came to be the political and the spiritual leader of his country.

Drawing on a wide variety of Iranian sources, including religious figures who knew and worked with
Khomeini both in exile and in power, Con Coughlin examines in detail the principles of Khomeini's
Islamic Revolution and the impact of his legacy today, whether it is in Iran's support for radical Islamic
groups or Iran's commitment to developing an atom bomb. Frighteningly topical, compellingly
readable and written with authority and profound understanding of the subject, this is political
biography at its best.

Praise for KHOMEINI’S GHOST: “A fluent, masterly narrative of the Iranian tragedy over the past
thirty years ... Con Coughlin has rendered us a great service with his narrative.” The Literary
Review
Iindispensable […] in the clear, authoritative prose of a highly experienced newspaper foreign
correspondent, Con Coughlin lays bare the secrets of modern Iran.” The Mail on Sunday
‘A fast-paced account of the events leading up to, during and following Khomeini’s triumphant return
to Tehran in February 1979. The tale of the revolution and its attendant alliances, betrayals, terrors
and exultation is a narrative gift and Coughlin handles it deftly” Sunday Telegraph

Con Coughlin is an award-winning journalist who has written about the Middle East for twenty years.
He reported on both the Iran-Iraq war and the Gulf War, and was one of the first British journalists to
enter Kuwait City after its liberation from Saddam’s forces. He is the author of four critically
acclaimed books: HOSTAGE, which told the story of the Beirut hostages, A GOLDEN BASIN FULL
OF SCORPIONS, which explored the dilemma facing Jerusalem; SADDAM: THE SECRET LIFE;
and AMERICAN ALLY: Tony Blair and the War on Terror. He is the Executive Editor of The Sunday
Telegraph and lives in London.

Previous titles, SADDAM: UK: Macmillan; US: Harper Ecco; Czech: BB Art; Germany: List;
Holland: Spectrum; Japan: Gentosha; Spain: Planeta; Arabic: Al-Kamel; Vietnam: Public Security
AMERICAN ALLY: US: Harper Ecco

New title, KHOMEINI’S GHOST: UK: Macmillan; US: Harper Ecco

HOW TO REALLY TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ by Henry Hitchings (PS)

Ever wondered how some people seem to have an opinion on every book ever published? Nowadays,
there are so many books: how can anyone to be well read anymore? Well, help is at hand. Let Henry
Hitchings educate you in the invaluable skill of literary bluffing in this survivors guide to talking about
books you haven’t read. With tips on how to bluff with confidence using quotable insights and
invaluable trivia, Henry Hitchings covers all the great books you ought to have read but haven’t got
round to yet. If you want to be able to hold your own in a debate about Stephen Hawking or Philip
Roth or perhaps you find Shakespeare or Dostoevsky intimidating, then look no further. Including
literary heavyweights such as ULYSSES, BLEAK HOUSE and WAR AND PEACE, this guide will
equip you with all the bookish information you need to bluff your way through any scenario, be it a
vital exam, an in-depth conversation at the pub or chatting up the potential love of your life. Its
contents includes, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Henry James, James Joyce, Proust, Homer, Virgil,
Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, various contemporary writers, THE BIBLE, THE KORAN, fairy tales,
select bestsellers and some poetry.

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Praise for HOW TO REALLY TALK ABOUT BOOKS YOU HAVEN’T READ: “How to Talk
About Books You Haven't Read is an amusing disquisition on what is required to establish cultural
literacy in a comfortable way. Lightly laced with irony, the book nonetheless raises such serious
questions as: What are our true motives for reading? Is there an objective way to read a book? What
do we retain from the books we've read?" Wall Street Journal 
“Witty and charming and often fun.” New York Magazine

Praise for previous title, THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS: “Hitchings has teased out the stories
lurking behind the language to provide a most satisfying whole” Publishing News
“Hitchings’ excavations are a treat. He presents the best gleanings of academia in a winning,
conversational style. Almost every spadeful yields an etymological nugget . . . elegantly and
entertainingly written” The Financial Times
“A fascinating exploration of the rich borrowings, exchanges and couplings of the language” The
Times
“Quite how Hitchings has managed to wrestle this dizzying mountain of dense information into such
an elegant narrative . . . is a feat almost as admirable as that of the great lexicographer. His book is
painstakingly detailed, closely argued and suffused with a contagious enthusiasm for the secrets woven
into the fabric of our words” The Daily Telegraph

Henry Hitchings was born in 1974. Educated at Christ Church Oxford and University College London,
he wrote his PhD thesis on Samuel Johnson. He is the author of DR JOHNSON’S DICTIONARY: The
Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World, which won the Modern Language
Association's prize for the best publication by an independent scholar in 2005. His second book, THE
SECRET LIFE OF WORDS, was published by John Murray in April 2008, and won the John
Llewellyn Rhys Prize and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 2009.

New title, HOW TO REALLY TALK ABOUT BOOKS… UK: John Murray; Spain: Planeta;
Taiwan: Common Master Press

WELCOME TO MARS: Fantasies of Science in the American Century 1947-1959


by Ken Hollings (HW)

“WELCOME TO MARS is a map of the post-war Zone, a non-fiction GRAVITY’S RAINBOW that
follows the arc of Germany’s V2 rocket to the end of the rainbow – to America.”
From the foreword by Erik Davis

WELCOME TO MARS draws upon newspaper accounts, advertising campaigns, declassified


government archives, old movies and newsreels from this unique period when the future first took on a
tangible presence. Ken Hollings depicts an unsettled time in which the layout of Suburbia reflected
atomic bombing strategies, bankers and movie stars experimented with hallucinogens, brainwashing
was just another form of interior decoration and strange lights in the sky were taken very seriously
indeed.

Praise for WELCOME TO MARS: “Ken Hollings shows brilliantly how the extraordinary web of
technologies that drove the Cold War have shaped not just our culture but the very way we think of
ourselves as human beings. WELCOME TO MARS offers a rare and fascinating glimpse of the roots
of the strange humanoid culture we live in today” Adam Curtis
“Ken Hollings has placed his critical focus at the precise point where the high technologies of
information control and social manipulation intersect the passionate search for scientific ways to probe
the human mind. WELCOME TO MARS is a searingly accurate and deeply disturbing expose of the
fantasies of American modernism that have inspired the many nightmares and the few hopeful visions
of our new Millennium.” Dr Jacques Vallée

71
Ken Hollings is a writer based in London. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals and
publications, including The Wire, Sight and Sound, Strange Attractor Journal, Frieze, Blast and Nude,
and in the anthologies THE LAST SEX, DIGITAL DELIRIUM, UNDERCURRENTS and LONDON
NOIR. He has written and presented shows for BBC Radio, NPS in Holland and ABC Australia. His
novel DESTROY ALL MONSTERS was hailed by The Scotsman as “a mighty slab of trippy, cult, out-
there fiction, mind-bending reading.” He has lectured and presented widely, including at the ICA, the
Royal Institution, the Hayward Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Transmediale in Berlin, the
Zurich Kunsthaus, and the Nederlands Film Museum.

UK: Strange Attractor Press

DARWIN’S ISLAND by Steve Jones


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES is the most famous book in science but its stature tends to obscure the
genius of Charles Darwin's other works. The Beagle voyage, too, occupied only five of the fifty years
of his career. He spent only five weeks on the Galapagos and on his return never left Britain again.
Darwin wrote six million words, in nineteen books and innumerable letters, on topics as different as
dogs, barnacles, insect-eating plants, orchids, earthworms, apes and human emotion. Together, they
laid the foundations of modern biology.

In this beautifully written, witty and illuminating book, Steve Jones explores the domestic Darwin, the
sage of Kent, and brings his work up to date. Great Britain was Charles Darwin's other island, its
countryside as much, or more, a place of discovery than had been the Galapagos. It traces the great
naturalist's second journey across its modest landscape: a voyage not of the body but of the mind.

Praise for DARWIN’S ISLAND: “Accessible and Informative” Daily Express


“‘The delight in reading Jones's book is the zest with which he explores facts and sets them together to
yield more than anyone could have expected, in true Darwinian style” The Guardian
“If you were to read one new book on Darwin this year, this should be it” Daily Mail
“Besides disclosing the beautiful ingenuities of Darwin's thought, Jones updates Darwin's science.
With dazzling versatility he traverses the field of modern genetics...[Darwin’s Island is] a world of
wonders” The Times
“Jones draws out beautifully the rich material in Darwin’s lesser known books.” Financial Times

Steve Jones is Professor of Genetics at University College London and has worked at universities in the
USA, Australia and Africa. He gave the BBC Reith lectures in 1991, and presented a BBC TV series
on human genetics and evolution in 1996. He is a regular columnist for the Daily Telegraph and
frequently appears on radio and television. In 1997 he won the Royal Society Faraday Medal for the
Public Understanding of Science.

New title, DARWIN’S ISLAND: UK: Little, Brown; US: Harvard University Press; Brazil: Record;
Germany: Piper; Holland: Ambo Anthos (previously entitled: DARWIN’S GARDEN)

SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER by Thomas Keneally (DR)

In 1980 Thomas Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where the
film of his book, THE CHANT OF JIMMY BLACKSMITH had been showing. Looking for a new
briefcase, Tom met the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page, aka Poldek, and his life for the next
few years was taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wanted to share. "It's a
story for you, I swear," he said to Tom. The story is of course that of "The all-drinking, all-screwing,
all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler". And Poldek shared with
Tom the story of SCHINDLER'S ARK, which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to
become the Oscar award-winning film SCHINDLER'S LIST.

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Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealed to the ex-
seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the
world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would. Oskar
and his Jews reduced the Holocaust - an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation - to an
understandable human scale.

SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER is very much Tom's journey, he reflects on his early days as a writer
with quite a bit of success - but no confidence - and how this book, the people he met, and the film it
became, changed his life. From his Sydney home, he tracked down the main player's in Poldek and
Schindler's story. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland
interviewing survivors and discovering extraordinary stories.

SCHINDLER'S ARK took a huge toll on Tom, and his family, he had never been so overwhelmed by
the writing of a story. It forced him to think about Australians and their attitudes to the Holocaust, to
think about the Israel / Palestine situation and about families. Not ready to give up the story of
Schindler and his Jews after the enormous success of the book, Tom was there for the film adaptation
and on set for the filming. Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph
Fiennes and many other well-known and strong characters SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER gives
Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that
he is.

Praise for SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER: “Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book. This
memoir, listed as his 38th publication, is no exception” Sydney Morning Herald
“In this touching and often humorous memoir, [Keneally] recounts months traveling to Germany,
Israel, Austria, the U.S. and Poland with Poldek to interview 'Schindlerjuden' - the survivors rescued
by Schindler…. Keneally engages the reader with tales about himself as well. He writes about
becoming a novelist, his creative anxieties that fueled the writing process, his experiences with
publishers and the toll writing the book took on him and his family. Hollywood anecdotes about
Spielberg and the film's stars, including Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, provide a
fascinating insider view of how movies are made. What's hard to fathom is that before Keneally walked
into Poldek's shop nearly three decades ago, Schindler was hardly known. This is the story of how that
changed forever.” USA Today
“An essential companion to the original novel.” Kirkus Reviews
“Keneally provides some interesting insights into the process of turning a series of decades-old
remembrances into a great book. The strength of this work, however, are the stories of the survivors
and their efforts to live with a degree of normalcy.” Booklist
“Had I read SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER before making the film, I may have made it an hour
longer. I owe you so much. The world owes you more” Steven Spielberg
“I stayed up until 4 in the morning, reading [Tom's memoir]. It is a wonderful book, as usual Thomas
writing is beautiful. It also brought back many memories of 'Schindler years', as well as a glimpse into
other parts of Tom's life. I am sure that you know that Thomas has a very special place in the hearts of
our family. Besides being such a great writer, he is also a wonderful and caring human being.” Mila
Page and family

Thomas Keneally was educated at St Patrick's College, Strathfield, where a writing prize is named after
him. He entered the seminary to train as a Catholic priest, but left before his ordination. He then
worked as a schoolteacher in Sydney, before his success as a novelist, and was a lecturer at the
University of New England (1968-70). His last novel, THE WIDOW AND HER HERO was
shortlisted in the inaugural Australian Prime Minister's Literary Awards and longlisted for the
2008 Miles Franklin award. He has also written screenplays, memoirs, and non-fiction books.

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SCHINDLER’S ARK: UK: Sceptre; US: Simon & Schuster; Brazil: Record; Bulgaria: Abagar;
China: Chinese Times; Czech: MHT Koulova; Denmark: Per Kofod; Finland: Gummerus; France:
Lafffont; Germany: Knaus/ Bertelsmann; Greece: NEA Synora; Holland: Luitingh/Sijthoff;
Hungary: Europa; Israel: Keter/Domino; Italy: Frassinelli; Japan: Shinchosha; Korea: Christian
World; Norway: Hjemmets; Poland: Proszynski; Romania: Orizonturi; Russia: Erika; Slovak:
Jaspis; Spain: Spanish: Edhasa; Catalan: Columba; Sweden: Norstedts
[NB: Foreign rights are controlled by Simon & Schuster US)

New title, SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER: Australia: Random House; UK: Hodder; US:
Doubleday; Brazil: Record; Italy: Frassinelli

OUT OF STEPPE: THE LOST PEOPLE'S OF CENTRAL ASIA by Daniel Metcalfe (HW)

Central Asia is the huge landmass crossed by the famed Silk Road for almost two thousand years.
Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and Stalin are just some of the invaders that have
redrawn its shifting borders. Nestling between Iran, China, Siberia and Afghanistan, the region is
enormously diverse. Steppe, desert, glacial mountains and orchard bearing oases, this half-continent
has been uniquely shaped by streams of settlers.

Travelling by foot, bus and mule, Daniel Metcalfe spent five months tracking down and getting to
know some of Central Asia's least known – and most fascinating peoples. From the Karakalpaks of
Uzbekistan, a formerly nomadic community whose life has been changed irrevocably by the
disappearance of the Aral Sea; and the Jews of Bukhara, once renowned for their polygamy (unique
amongst Jews); to the Germans of Kazakhstan, who first arrived in Russia at the invitation of Catherine
the Great in 1763.

From the northern steppes, Metcalfe travels to the peaks of Tajikistan, where he meets the Yaghnobis,
the final descendants of the fire-worshipping Soghdians; and overland to Afghanistan to meet the
Hazaras, a long-marginalised Shiite group, whose local giant Buddha rock-carvings were dynamited by
the Taliban in 2001.

Finally he visits the Kalashas of the Hindu Kush, the only non-Muslim group in Pakistan, who follow
an ancient Shamanic religion and are thought by some to be descendents of Alexander the Great's
army. Told with wit, warmth, and great insight, OUT OF STEPPE takes us into the hidden heart of this
mysterious region.

Praise for OUT OF STEPPE: “… Daniel Metcalfe goes in search of what he calls the 'lost peoples
of central Asia': the inhabitants of the vast land mass between Iran, China, Siberia and Afghanistan.
It's an area suffering from a profound identity crisis - many republics within it were only given
independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 - but it's also steeped in myth and history, from Genghis
Khan to the famous Silk Road. Metcalfe is entertaining company as he meets the many tribal people
caught up in the turbulence of post-Soviet politics; plus he has a seasoned attitude towards the absurd
levels of bureaucracy that can make travelling in the area a nightmare.” Metro
“This book has many virtues, the greatest of which are courage and a keen eye for detail, plus an
ability to convey the essence of a place through the briefest of anecdotes.” The Independent
“This is a book of great warmth and immense scholarship, in the best tradition of travel writing. It
opens up a region about which most of us are vague. It is fascinating reading.” Irish Times
“This is an important book: a first hand account from an adventurous traveller who has dared to
explore the fulcrum of Asian geopolitics. Read this and you will understand why we need to care about
Central Asia. Metcalfe has reminded us of why travel-writing matters.” Nick Crane

Daniel Metcalfe read Classics at Oxford University. Graduating in 2002, he spent six months doing odd
jobs before deciding to teach himself Persian and then heading off to Tehran, where he lived for a year.
A passionate traveller, Metcalfe has roamed extensively across Asia and Eastern Europe and to over
fifty countries across the globe. He currently lives in London. He speaks Russian, Persian, Swedish
and Portuguese, and never travels without his mandolin. This is his first book.

UK: Hutchinson

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THE LOST CHILD: A True Story by Julie Myerson (GC)

One bleak, late winter’s day, Julie Myerson finds herself in a Suffolk graveyard, looking for traces of a
young woman who died nearly two centuries before. As a child in Regency England, Mary Yelloly
painted an exquisite album of watercolours that uniquely reflected the world she lived in. But Mary
died at the age of twenty-one, and when Julie comes across this album, she is haunted by the potential
never realised, the barely-lived life cut short.

And most of all, she is reminded of her own child. Because only days earlier, Julie and her husband
locked their eldest son out of the family home. He was just seventeen. How could it have come to this?
After a happy growing-up, it had taken only a matter of months for this bright, sweet, good-humoured
boy to completely lose his way and propel his family into daily chaos. He had discovered cannabis and
nothing they could say or do, no help they could offer, seemed to reach him. And Julie – whose
emotionally fragile relationship with her own father had left her determined to love her children better
– had to accept that she was, for the moment at least, powerless to bring back the boy she had known.

Honest, warm and often profoundly upsetting, this is the parallel story of a girl and a boy separated by
centuries. The circumstances are very different, but the questions remain terrifyingly the same. What
happens when a child disappears from a family? What will survive of any of us in memory or in
history? And how is a mother to cope when love – however absolute, however unconditional – is not
enough to save her child?

Praise for LOST CHILD: “The most controversial book in Britain” Jeremy Paxman
“A campaigning book … Anyone who reads it will struggle not to be profoundly moved” Independent
“Urgent and vivid … A serious, writerly, self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love
and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still
eerily, painfully familiar) is lost to you. Which is not the same thing as saying that it is the complete
truth. Art can only ever hope to present a version of the truth. And this is what Julie Myerson has
done” Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph
“On the page, Julie spells out her pain in prose that’s so pure, so literal and so terribly engrossing it
makes you weep. And she doesn’t flinch from revealing everything - including her own insecurities and
inadequacies as a mother … by the end of this excruciatingly sad book, it is very clear that she didn’t
do this for art, but for love” Daily Mirror
“Myerson’s motivation is anything but base. She could have disguised her material in a novel, but she
wanted to make sense of reality, to understand the chaos that has taken over her family. She wanted to
help others, herself and her son … Any family for whom cannabis has been a wrecker, even if they
would not dream of exposing their situation in the same way Myerson has, will be grateful to her for
having done so. She may have been rash, but she has also been courageous. She has tried to write
honestly about a nightmarish situation and a subject that never seems to get the attention it deserves”
Kate Kellaway, Observer
“An aching, empty-nest memoir: a mother mourning for her uncomplicated little children, now grown,
whom she could care for, write about without comeback, love – and control” The Times
“Honest, affecting and noble … Tender and gentle in its account of the child, it justifies the dedication:
‘He knows who he is and I love him.’ … As a reflection of Myerson’s inability at the time of
composition to write about the past without the present jumping in, the double time-structure creates
powerful cross-echoes. Seeking release in research in a Norfolk graveyard, she encounters a 19 th
century tombstone inscribed to an ‘amiable and beloved son’, subtly underlining the constant, nagging
connection between the two narratives: the terror of her own lost child, like his 200-year-old shadow,
will also die young, still beloved though far from amiable … The elegance and thoughtfulness of this
book – and its warning of a fate that may overtake many parents – should not be lost in the extra-
literary frenzy” Mark Lawson, Guardian
“Lures the reader into its intimate, dark heart… There’s also another narrative in the book, the place
where this story started: Myerson’s quest to explore a gifted artist, Mary Yelloly, who died at 21 in
1838 … Yelloly, however ephemeral, fulfils a function – she is a lost girl, one who cannot be revived,
from a family ravaged by that Victorian scourge, consumption. And Myerson’s real, parallel lament is
for a child who falls victim to our modern version of consumption – the slow ruination of a much-loved
child through drugs … gripping” Financial Times

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Julie Myerson was born in Nottingham in 1960 and worked as a publicist at the National Theatre and
for Walker Books before winning the Elle Magazine Talent Contest and becoming a full time writer.
She is the author of SLEEPWALKING, which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, THE
TOUCH, ME AND THE FAT MAN, LAURA BLUNDY, THE STORY OF YOU and SOMETHING
MIGHT HAPPEN, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and OUT OF BREATH. Julie
appears regularly on BBC2's Newsnight Review and lives in South London with her partner, the
award-winning writer and director Jonathan Myerson, and their three children.

Previous title, OUT OF BREATH (novel): UK: Cape; Holland: Archipel; Germany: Bloomsbury;
Italy: Einaudi Stile Libero

New title, THE LOST CHILD (non-fiction): UK: Bloomsbury; US: Bloomsbury; Italy: Einaudi Stile
Libero

THE BOLTER by Frances Osborne (GC)


-Number 1 Sunday Times Non-Fiction Paperback bestseller
-Shortlisted Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year, British Book Awards 2009

Idina Sackville was an inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s character The Bolter. Painted by William
Orpen, and photographed by Cecil Beaton, she went on to divorce a total of five times, yet died with a
picture of her first love by her bed.

Sackville’s life was so scandalous that it was kept a secret from her great-granddaughter Frances
Osborne. Now Osborne tells the moving tale of betrayal and heartbreak behind the scandal, painting a
dazzling portrait of high society in the early twentieth century.

Praise for THE BOLTER: “The pace is fast, the story gripping and, as for the Bolter, well, the more
one reads the more of a monster she seems. The chilling reality is that she was a woman who broke the
last taboo- she left her children” The Literary Review
"At heart, THE BOLTER is a work of family exorcism by the great-granddaughter of a scandalous
Edwardian woman, Idina Sackville. Like all such family reckonings, it contains both less, and more,
than meets the eye. Perhaps nothing is more seductive than the fascinated contemplation of distant
shames.” The Guardian

THE BOLTER: UK: Virago; US: Knopf

AMERICA, EMPIRE OF LIBERTY by David Reynolds


(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

It was Thomas Jefferson who envisioned the United States as a great ‘empire of liberty.’ In the first
new one-volume history in two decades, David Reynolds takes Jefferson’s phrase as a key to the saga
of America – helping unlock both its grandeur and its paradoxes. He examines how the anti-empire of
1776 became the greatest superpower the world has seen, how the country that offered liberty and
opportunity on a scale unmatched in Europe nevertheless founded its prosperity on the labour of black
slaves and the dispossession of the Native Americans.

Reynolds explains how these tensions between empire and liberty have often been resolved by faith –
both the evangelical Protestantism that has energized U.S. politics since the foundation of the nation
and the larger faith in American righteousness that has impelled the country’s expansion. Reynolds’
account is driven by a compelling argument, which illuminates our contemporary world.

This is also a book in which the voices of the past speak out strongly for themselves. Not just
presidents from Washington to Bush, but ordinary men and women – settlers and Indians, slaves and
immigrants, factory workers and farmers, baseball players and suburban housewives. Reynolds
celebrates America’s technological achievements – the plough, the skyscraper and the personal
computer.

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Reynolds paints vivid pictures of the battlefield of Gettysburg, the stockyards of Chicago, and the bus
boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. But he also asks hard questions about the cost of greatness, from
the Indian ‘Trail of Tears’ to the Civil War and the War on Terror. Reynolds depicts a country that has
derived much of its energy – even its identity – from a perpetual struggle against enemies, real or
imagined.

Written with verve, insight and humour by a prize-winning historian, AMERICA, EMPIRE OF
LIBERTY is a new history for a new presidency.

Praise for AMERICA, EMPIRE OF LIBERTY: “David Reynolds, Professor of International


History at Cambridge, probably knows more about America than any other British writer…His
admiration for American achievement is undiminished by the clear-sightedness with which he dispels
its historical myths, chronicles its failures and remarks on its ruthlessness … Part of the pleasure in
Reynolds’s book are its moments of serendipity. He handles the big political set pieces superbly, but
also offers many whimsical vignettes … The author stands beside Simon Schama as a populariser of
history whose work also represents the widest knowledge and highest scholarship. This is the best
single-volume account of the world’s greatest society in years” Max Hastings, Sunday Times
“Reynolds has a keen eye for paradox, and the rich ironies that attend the great themes of American
history post-independence - in his view, empire, liberty and faith - form the leitmotifs of his book …
there is no better place to start than David Reynolds’s impressively broad-ranging, yet beautifully
succinct book” John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph
“It is to Reynolds’s great credit that this book helps make sense not just of America but of the Bushes.
Now is a good time to read it” Edward Luce, Financial Times
“It is to Reynolds’s credit that the book of the series stands alone on its own merits. More than that,
AMERICA, EMPIRE OF LIBERTY supersedes Hugh Brogan’s ‘Penguin History of the United States’
as the most outstanding popular history of America written by a non-American … Reynolds tells the
ups and downs of this great narrative with tremendous verve and imagination” Richard Aldous, Irish
Times
“From the very cover of his book - a handsome Edward Curtis photograph of horses and riders
dwarfed by the western landscape - Reynolds signals a different approach … Reynolds is very good on
the complex and conflicted role of religion in American life … Unlike, say, Simon Schama, Reynolds
writes without a trace of a sneer, promising a ‘history that is rarely simple, often messy and sometimes
appalling; yet also full of surprises, frequently epic and, on occasion, wonderfully uplifting’ … he
notices things American eyes might miss” D.D. Guttenplan, Guardian

David Reynolds is the Professor of International History at Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s
College, where he has taught American history for more than thirty years.  A regular visitor to the USA
since first going there as a graduate student in 1973, he has held visiting posts at Harvard, Nebraska
and Oklahoma, as well as at Nihon University in Tokyo.  He was elected a Fellow of the British
Academy in 2005.  He is the author of nine previous books, including SUMMITS: Six Meetings that
Shaped the Twentieth Century, and two-prize winning studies of Anglo-American relations in World
War Two: THE CREATION OF THE ANGLO AMERICAN ALLIANCE, 1937-1941 and RICH
RELATIONS: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-1945.  IN COMMAND OF HISTORY:
Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World War won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize.
David Reynolds’ latest book, AMERICA, EMPIRE OF LIBERTY has developed from a commission
for a major series of 90 programmes on the history of America (www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/america) that he
is presenting for BBC Radio 4 in September and October 2008.
 
Previous title, SUMMITS: UK: Penguin; US: Basic; Brazil: Record; Italy: Corbaccio; Spain: Ariel;
Korea: Cum Libro

New title, AMERICA, EMPIRE OF LIBERTY: UK: Penguin; US: Basic

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HENRY: Virtuous Prince by David Starkey
(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)

The first instalment of the highly anticipated biography of Henry VIII, written by one of the UK's most
popular, established and exciting historians. Published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of
Henry's accession to the throne, HENRY: Virtuous Prince is a radical re-evaluation of the monarchy's
most enduring icon. Henry VIII was Britain's most powerful monarch, yet he was not born to rule.
Thrust into the limelight after the sudden death of his elder brother, Prince Arthur, Henry ascended the
throne in 1509, marking the beginning of a reign that altered the course of English history. In his youth
Henry was highly intelligent, athletic and musically talented. He excelled in Latin and Mathematics
and was an accomplished musician. On his accession to the throne, aged just seventeen, after the
tumultuous rule of his father, he provided England with hope of a new beginning.

Nobody could have foreseen how radical Henry's rule would prove to be. Often overshadowed by the
bloody saga of his six marriages, his reign has left a lasting legacy. An absolute monarch, Henry's quest
for fame was as obsessive as any modern celebrity. His fierce battles against Papal authority mark one
of the most dramatic and defining moments in the history of Britain.

Yet his early life was insecure. The Tudor regime was viewed by many as rule by usurpers and the dark
shadows of the Wars of the Roses often threatened to tear England apart once more. The culmination of
a lifetime's research, David Starkey gives a radical and unforgettable portrait of the man behind the
icon; the Renaissance prince turned tyrant, who continues to tower over history.

Praise for David Starkey: “Starkey is a wonderfully lucid writer.” The Independent
“Starkey has the mind of an historian but the eye of a court painter.” Peter Ackroyd, The Times

Praise for HENRY: Virtuous Prince: “The most careful...most colourful study of the young Henry
for a long time, and perhaps of all time.” Independent on Sunday
“The book is full of delicious detail.” Evening Standard
”This book...demonstrates his scholarship, supremely confident grasp of the period and authorial
panache...fascinating.” Daily Mail

David Starkey is an Honorary Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and the author of many
books, including ELIZABETH: The Struggle for the Throne; SIX WIVES: The Queens of Henry VIII
and MONARCHY: England and Her Rulers from the Tudors to the Windsors. He is a winner of the
W. H. Smith Prize and the Norton Medlicott Medal for Services to History presented by Britain's
Historical Association. Well-known as a television and radio broadcaster, David Starkey was made a
CBE in 2007. His 4-part series on the life of Henry VIII will be broadcast by Channel 4 Television in
2009. He lives in London.

Previous titles: ELIZABETH: UK: Chatto; US: HarperCollins; Hungary: Gabo; Japan: Hara Shobo;
Russia: Russitch
MONARCHY: UK: HarperCollins; US: HarperCollins

New title, HENRY: Virtuous Prince (Vol. I): UK: Harper Press; US: HarperCollins

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THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER by Kate Summerscale (DM)
- Winner of 2009 British Book of the Year Award
- Winner of the 2009 British Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award
- Winner of the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize
- shortlisted for the 2008 CWA Gold Dagger Award for Non-fiction
- shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe Award (Edgar) 2009
- A number 1 Sunday Times Paperback Bestseller and a number 2 Sunday Times hardback
bestseller. Total English-language sales since April 2008 of approximately 500,000 copies

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat
slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection, ironically
destroying, in the process, the career of perhaps the greatest detective in Victorian England.

At the time, a detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight in all of England and
rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best
man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher. Whicher quickly believed the unbelievable-that
someone within the family was responsible for the murder of young boy. Without sufficient evidence
or a confession, his case was circumstantial, the accused found not guilty and he returned to London a
broken man. Though he would be vindicated five years later, the real legacy of Jonathan Whicher lives
on in fiction: the tough, quirky, knowing, and all-seeing detective that we know and love today - from
the cryptic Sgt. Cuff in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone to Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander.

THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER is a provocative work of non-fiction that reads like a thriller,
and in it Kate Summerscale has fashioned a brilliant, multi-layered narrative that is as cleverly
constructed as it is beautifully written.

Praise for THE SUSPICIONS OF MR WHICHER: “Summerscale has constructed nothing less
than a masterpiece… The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is at one and the same time a crime thriller, a
sociological history, a biography and a fascinating essay on the nature of investigation…. My shelves
are stacked with books about crime, but none more satisfying than this.” The Mail on Sunday
“It is a beautiful piece, written with great lucidity and respect for the reader, and with immaculate
restraint. A classic, to my mind, of the finest documentary writing.” John le Carré
“Summerscale smartly uses an energetic narrative voice and a suspenseful pace, among other
novelistic devices, to make her factual material read with the urgency of a work of fiction. What she
has constructed, specifically, is a traditional country-house mystery, more brutal than cozy, but
presenting the same kind of intellectual puzzle as her fictional models and adorned, as such books once
were, with wonderfully old-fashioned maps, diagrams, engravings, courtroom sketches and other
illustrations…More important, Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother
to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in
historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society…The
author's startling final twist both vindicates her fallen hero and advances an 'aggressive' attack on
moral hypocrisy in his day and ours.” The New York Times Book Review
“More novelistic than a work of fiction and more original than an essay. Like Truman Capote in his
time with IN COLD BLOOD, could it be that Kate Summerscale has also invented a new literary
genre?” Elle (France)
 
UK: Bloomsbury, US: Walker; Brazil: Companhia das Letras; Denmark: Loxodonta; France:
Bourgois; Germany: Bloomsbury; Greece: Patakis; Holland: Nieuw Amsterdam; Israel: Modan;
Italy: Einaudi; Norway: Gyldendal; Portugal: Bertrand; Russia: AST; Spain: Lumen; Taiwan:
Goodness Publishing House; Thailand: Post Publishing House
[TV rights optioned to Hatrick for ITV 1]

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SACRED SIERRA by Jason Webster
(in association with Robinson Literary Agency)
 
This is a romantic, utterly alluring leap into Spanish sunshine, remote mountains and rural life. Jason
Webster had lived in Spain for several years before he and his partner, the flamenco dancer Salud,
decided to buy a deserted farmhouse clinging to the side of a steep valley in the eastern province of
Castellon, near the sacred peak of Penaglosa. With help from local farmers - and from a twelfth century
Moorish book on gardening - Jason set about creating his dream.

He had never farmed before, and knew nothing of plants, but slowly he and Salud cleared the land,
planted and harvested their olives, raised the healing herbs they learned about from local people, set up
bee-hives and nurtured precious, expensive truffles, the black gold of the region. And beyond all this
they started to fulfill another vision, bringing the native trees back to the cliffs ravaged by fire. At the
same time they became drawn into the life of the valley: this is a book rich with characters as well as
plants. It follows the people of the village from the winter rains to baking summer heat, from the
flowering of the almond trees in spring to the hilarious, fiery festivals and ancient pilgrimages, and tells
the history of the region through folk-songs and stories of the Cathar and Templar past. Jason and
Salud lived through storms that destroyed their roof and fire that swept across their valley, but as the
year passed and his farm flourished Jason found himself increasingly in tune with the ancient, mystical
life of the sierra, a place that will haunt your imagination and raise your spirits, as it did his.

Praise for Jason Webster: “The result is a charming, honest and fascinating account of a tough but
enjoyable tussle with a hardscrabble Spanish mountain farm, in which the author and Mother Nature
come off about equal. Webster belongs to the last generation who will be able to write this sort of
account.[…] Millions of us in this cramped, over-regulated island dream of this sort of adventure;
Webster has succeeded triumphantly in his.” Rober Carver, The Daily Mail
“In response to readers becoming better travelled, travel writing has become more autobiographical.
In turn parts of the travel market are now aspirational, rather than inspirational, meaning that readers
aspire to do as the writer: to walk alone in the Hindu Kush, to discover that secret, deserted Thai
beach, to buy a beautiful ruin in Provence. In SACRED SIERRA, Webster satisfies both dreamers and
(re)doers, creating a book that is entertaining, accessible and sincere […] Readers and travellers alike
- whether stranded in their comfy chair at home or already abroad and determined never to return to
these shores - should pick up this gentle and moving guide to the discovery of an enviably unspoilt
paradise.” Rory MacLean, The Guardian
It is an inspiring account of a young couple learning to deal with the vicissitudes of their rural idyll.
[…] The author has no hesitation in laying bare his weaknesses, and for that you come to admire him
and to enjoy his book.” Chris Stewart, The Telegraph

Jason Webster was born near San Francisco in 1970 and brought up in England and Germany. After
spells in Italy and Egypt, he moved to Spain. Duende! A Journey in Search of Flamenco (2003) was
described as “a great book” (Guardian), and 'one of the best books ever written on Spain' (Literary
Review). Andalus: Unlocking the Secrets of Moorish Spain (2005) also got rave reviews – “Essential
reading” (Daily Mail), 'Fast paced and exciting' (Independent) - while Guerra: Living in the Shadows
of the Spanish Civil War (2006) was called “moving and succinct... generous and humane” (Sunday
Telegraph) and “Written with considerable power and beauty” (Sunday Times). Jason has appeared in
several TV documentaries on Spain, and writes for The Observer, Sunday Times, Guardian and New
Statesman. His wife, Salud, is an actress and flamenco dancer from Valencia: their wedding is the
climax of the current book's narrative. 

UK: Chatto & Windus; Spain: Los Libros del Lince

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THE RIVERBONES: Stumbling After Eden in the Jungles of Suriname by Andrew Westoll
(in association with Anne McDermid and Associates)

Perched above Brazil on the shoulder of South America, Suriname, a former Dutch colony, might
legitimately be called the Last Eden. A land of myth, magic, and great natural beauty, it is home to the
largest tract of pristine rainforest on earth—and to a sparse population of Maroons, the descendents of
rebellious slaves. Andrew Westoll first fell under its spell during a year he spent there as a
primatologist of 23, and five years later, he could no longer resist the urge to go back to Suriname, a
place that may represent our last chance to save what remains of South America’s once-sprawling
forests.

THE RIVERBONES describes the author's five-month odyssey-of-return through the untouched
rainforests of Suriname. Through wondrous photography and gripping adventures - such as his
adoption by the Saramakan royal family, his perilous friendship with a bodyguard of the former
military dictator, his compulsive search for the rare and beautiful blue frog called okopipi - Westoll
maps the natural and human geography of this exotic. By spinning a spellbinding story of survival,
heartbreak, mystery and murder, he illustrates how the modern struggles for human rights and
ecological preservation can often vie, with tragic consequences, with the economic needs of a proud
people.

Praise for THE RIVERBONES: “ A fascinating journey through a landscape thick with tragedy, rot,
mystery and searing beauty. Westoll moves with a poet's eye and an adventurer's hunger.” Charles
Montgomery, author of THE LAST HEATHEN
“Suriname, an almost secret place: very few people know this is the cradle of many famous football
players, and almost nobody knows that these sport stars are the historical heirs of the Maroon slaves
who once defeated Dutch colonialism. Westoll went deep inside the jungle, looking for a sacred, tiny,
shining, blue frog, and discovered that perhaps hell and heaven have the same address.” Eduardo
Galeano
"Among the questions our future hangs on is this: Can we begin to care about the world's forgotten
corners? Westoll finds an answer in the jungles of Suriname, which in his fevered words contains every
threatened treasure, every blood-stained secret, and every possible last chance. Great writing is borne
of obsession, and THE RIVERBONES is the pure stuff--a headlong plunge into darkness in search of
the light.” J.B. MacKinnon, author of Dead Man in Paradise and co-author of THE 100-MILE
DIET
"A freewheeling and vividly written essay on the mysteries and longings of what it is to be human in a
world of cynicism and loss -- and more significantly, what it is to be hopeful, to persevere, in the
search redemption and beauty.” The Globe & Mail
"The visions it conjured to me of the country, of the landscape, of the heat and misery and beauty, was
overwhelming, like a fever dream. Absolutely breathtaking." Carolyn Smart, author of Hooked

Andrew Westoll is a former biologist and primatologist. He received an MFA from the prestigious
UBC Creative Writing program and now works as a freelance journalist specializing in travel, science,
conservation and culture. He writes regularly for many of Canada's premier venues, such as Explore,
The Walrus, Outpost and the Globe and Mail, and is a past Fellow of the Literary Journalism Program
at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Andrew won the gold medal at the 2008 National Magazine Awards
for his travel piece ‘Somewhere Up a Jungle River’, an adapted excerpt from THE RIVERBONES,
which is his first book.

THE RIVERBONES: Canada: McClelland & Stewart; UK: Old Street Publishing (UK title:
SURINAM); Australia: UQP

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