Atlantic Books pre-empts Death and the Midwife

James Roxburgh, Publishing Director for Atlantic Fiction, has pre-empted World English Language rights in Ben Reeves’ debut Death and the Midwife (tbc) from Laura Williams at Greene & Heaton on 26^th February. Atlantic’s Rights Director, Alice Latham with co-agent David Forrer (Inkwell), have subsequently sold US rights at pre-empt to Margo Shickmanter at Avid Reader, and German rights have since been pre-empted by Lucy Harries at DTV. Translation rights remain with Laura Williams.

Travis is Death in the modern world. He lives with his cat in a grey English town and offers people comfort in their final hours of life. He’s stoic, gentle, a little naive, despite what he knows. He’s handsome, he seems young, despite what he is. Each death has a meaning to him; he listens, doesn’t judge and he never tries to change anyone’s fate. Until, that is, Travis meets a young single midwife called Dalia and her boisterous eight-year-old daughter Layla, and the two of them begin to teach him what really is the important stuff of life.

Ben Reeves lives in Peterborough with his wife and two children, and he won the Bath Novel Award 2024 for this novel. When he’s not writing, he paints, makes music, and works as a web designer for a book printing company.

James Roxburgh says,

‘This is just a gorgeous, beautifully turned, singular novel, somewhere near Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, but with a vision and a vital magic that is entirely its own. I fell for Dalia and her family as much as Travis does; I love the insight it takes to write a novel in which the inevitability of death, finally, is revealed as the necessary condition for a meaningful life. It’s inventive, life-affirming, compassionate and profound fiction and, although I’m dark-hearted and possibly as dead as Travis inside, its ending fully undid me – and, so far, it’s undone every one of my teary-eyed colleagues, too.