Achmat Dangor (1948 – 2020)

Corvus acquires two novels by blogger Katy Cox

Sarah Hodgson, Publishing Director of Atlantic Books’ Corvus imprint, has acquired UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights in two novels from debut author Katy Cox from Katie Fulford of Bell Lomax Moreton. This is Fulford’s first deal for fiction since starting at the agency.

M is for Mummy, a humorous tale of the trials and tribulations of life as a working mum, follows professional freelance musician Lucy Wright as she attempts to juggle returning to work after maternity leave with looking after two young children – while also coming to terms with the realization that her adorable four-year-old son, Stanley, is autistic.

Cox, a professional cellist who has worked with a string of well-known performing artists, including Michael Bublé, based the novel on her own experiences of raising two autistic children whilst continuing to develop her career as a musician.

Corvus will publish M is for Mummy in hardback and eBook in Spring 2022, with a paperback edition to follow later in the year, and the sequel in Spring 2023.

Katy Cox said:

‘I am beyond delighted to be given the opportunity to work with Sarah and her wonderful team at Corvus. M is for Mummy was originally a comic novel about Lucy, a woman on a mission to claw back her showbiz career (and her pelvic floor muscles) after becoming a mum. I later decided that I wanted to incorporate my own experience as a parent of autistic children (and wife to an autistic man) into the novel. I hope that readers will love Stanley, the autistic child in the story. Stanley is funny, intelligent, deeply empathetic and totally adorable, just like my son to whom this novel is my tribute.’

Katie Fulford said:

‘I am so happy to have found the perfect home for Katy’s hilarious and heartfelt debut. I know Sarah and the stellar team at Corvus will do a wonderful job of bringing her work to the widest possible audience.’

Sarah Hodgson said:

‘As the parent of an autistic child myself, I could relate to almost every word of this warm and witty novel. Katy skilfully conveys the joys and complexities of life when your family is not quite the same as others with the lightest of touches. I can’t wait to introduce readers to Lucy and Stan – its’s impossible not to fall in love with them.’

My Sister, the Serial Killer wins ‘Crime Book of the Year’

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite has been awarded ‘Crime Fiction Book of the Year’ at the British Book Awards 2020.

The prize was awarded at the annual British Book Awards last night, which was held virtually and streamed online. Oyinkan Braithwaite is the first black author to have been awarded this prize. Her darkly comic novel about how blood is thicker (and more difficult to get out of the carpet) than water has been an international bestseller, selling over 250,000 copies across all editions, and has been nominated for a huge range of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction, the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year.

Atlantic Books were also ‘Highly Commended’ in the Independent Publisher of the Year award.

Allen & Unwin to publish debut novel for adults by YA author Francesca Haig

Allen & Unwin have acquired UK & Commonwealth (excl. Canada) rights to The Cookbook of Common Prayer, the first novel for adults by Australian author Francesca Haig. Senior Editor Kate Ballard bought the rights from Juliet Mushens at Mushens Entertainment.

The Cookbook of Common Prayer is the story of one Tasmanian family whose lives are turned upside down by the drowning of their eldest child in a caving accident in the UK. Desperate to protect their unwell teenaged daughter from the news, Gabe and Gill decide they must hide the truth from her at all costs – a decision which has ripple effects throughout their family. The Cookbook of Common Prayer explores the things we do for our children, and the things we do to our children, and how it’s possible to find a way forward against all odds. Shot through with hope, it reads like Celeste Ng meets Anne Tyler – this is accessible literary fiction at its very best.

Francesca Haig grew up in Tasmania and is an academic and writer, whose poetry and YA/crossover fantasy have been widely published. She lives in London with her husband and son.

Francesca Haig says:

“From the moment Allen & Unwin read this novel it’s been clear that they ‘get’ it – by which I mean that the aspects that matter to them are the same aspects that matter to me. It’s been a joy to experience A&U’s insightful grasp of what I’m trying to achieve with The Cookbook of Common Prayer, and their enthusiasm for bringing it to readers. I care so deeply about this novel and its characters, and it’s wonderful to know that they’ve found the best possible home.”

Juliet Mushens says:

“Francesca’s prose is striking and beautiful and her portrayal of a family in crisis is gripping and thought-provoking.”

Kate Ballard comments:

“Intrigued by the premise I found myself gripped by Francesca’s storytelling in this exquisite exploration of the ripple effect of the truths we share and the secrets we keep from those we care about most. The way in which Francesca injects hope into a novel revolving around grief thanks to a combination of brilliantly believable characters and their multiple perspectives is impressive and makes for a gripping, heart-in-your mouth read that you want to talk about as soon as you finish the last sentence. I can’t wait to be able to do so when we share The Cookbook of Common Prayer with readers everywhere next summer.”

The Cookbook of Common Prayer will publish in hardback and e-book in June 2021 on the Allen & Unwin imprint of Atlantic Books.

Ideas for Father’s Day

Stuck for ideas for Father’s Day gifts? Well, you’re in luck. We’ve put together a list of books that will appeal to dads with a wide variety of reading tastes, including biography, fiction, politics and history…

Alexander’s Legacy: To The Strongest by Robert Fabbri
The first book in a huge, bloody and brutal new series from Robert Fabbri, set after the death of Alexander the Great. Who will win the fight to control the largest empire the world has ever seen? Let the battles begin…

Survive. Drive. Win. by Nick Fry (with Ed Gorman)
The extraordinary inside story of Brawn GP’s shock 2009 F1 championship win, by the former team CEO.

Original Spin: Misadventures in Cricket by Vic Marks
The much-loved former England player, Guardian cricket correspondent and TMS broadcaster tells the story of his life in cricket for the first time.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens by A. N. Wilson
A brilliant and insightful celebration of the imaginative genius of Charles Dickens, published to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his death.

 

Hammer to Fall by John Lawton
The third Joe Wilderness spy thriller from a master of the genre, moving from icy Finland to tumultuous Cold War Prague, Hammer to Fall is a tale of vodka smuggling and a legendary female Red Army general who is playing a dangerous game.

The Impossible Climb by Mark Synnott
An intimate account of Alex Honnold’s unprecedented, almost unimaginable feat: a 3,000-foot vertical climb up El Capitan in Yosemite, without a rope.

The New Class War by Michael Lind
A maverick thinker who’s drawn the applause of both the left and right offers a bold new framework for understanding the turmoil in the West.

A Bit of a Stretch: The Diaries of a Prisoner by Chris Atkins
A shocking and darkly funny account of the reality of Britain’s prisons.

A Reading List for Pride Month

To help celebrate Pride Month, we’ve put together a reading list of our favourite LGBTQ+ literature, including prizewinning literary fiction, memoir and poetry.

Lot by Bryan Washington
Stories of a young man finding his place among family and community in Houston, from a powerful, emerging American voice.

A Tokyo Romance by Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma’s unflinching account of his journey into the heart of Tokyo’s underground culture as a young man in the 1970s.

Evolution by Eileen Myles
A searing new collection of Eileen Myles’ acclaimed poetry.

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk by Randy Shilts
The definitive biography of Harvey Milk: an emotionally compelling story of the life and death of the first openly gay man to be elected to US political office

 

America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
A giant debut novel about the redemptive, restorative power of love; about trust and fear; hair and makeup; food and sex; it’s about belonging and…not belonging. It’s a soulful literary saga set in the early nineties of San Francisco; a coming-of-age about leaving home and, sometimes, the necessity of turning back.

Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
The sultry, sensual novel of obsession and desire that inspired the Oscar-winning major motion picture.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg
A ‘zingy romp’ (Guardian) and a ‘cunning metafiction’ (New Yorker), Confessions of the Fox is a salty, sweary tale of jailbreaks and queer love

The Ginger Child by Patrick Flanery
A raw and heart-wrenching literary memoir about a queer couple’s attempt to adopt a child.

Christine Dwyer Hickey wins Walter Scott historical fiction prize

Atlantic author Christine Dwyer Hickey has won the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.

Her novel The Narrow Land, in which she explores the marriage of the artists Edward and Jo Hopper, was described by judges as “a masterpiece”.

The winner was announced on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row programme. It is hoped that a special event can be held at Scott’s Borders home Abbotsford later in the year. The book festival has been moved online and will begin next month.

In a joint statement, judges said Ms Hickey had “quietly, inexorably and with pinpoint perception” brought the Hoppers’ story to life.

“With the pull of a shifting sea, The Narrow Land drew the judges back again and again, each reading richer than the one before,” it said.

Christine said:

“Writing a novel takes a big chunk of one’s life – The Narrow Land was six years in the making – which is why I really, really appreciate this recognition.

“I would like to send my thoughts to a grave in a hillside cemetery in Nyack, overlooking the Hudson river, a few miles from New York City, where the artists Edward and Jo Hopper lie, and where I hope they have at last found peace.

I also hope they will forgive me the intrusion.”

The Narrow Land saw off works by Joseph O’Connor, Isabella Hammad, James Meek, Tim Pears, and Marguerite Poland to secure the top spot.

Deirdre Bair (1935 – 2020)

We are sad to announce that Deirdre Bair, the author of Parisian Lives, has died at 84.

She was an unknown writer with no experience in biographies when she wrote to the elusive Samuel Beckett. To her surprise, he wrote back…

Deirdre Bair, who as an unknown writer half a century ago scored a coup by getting the reclusive Samuel Beckett to agree to let her write his biography, then secured the same permission from another towering literary figure, Simone de Beauvoir, died on Friday at her home in New Haven, Conn. She was 84.

Her daughter, Katney Bair, said the cause was heart failure.

Ms. Bair called herself “an accidental biographer, one who had never read a biography before she decided that Samuel Beckett needed one and she was the person to write it.”

She came to that decision somewhat serendipitously. Having received a fellowship to do graduate study at Columbia University, she needed a research subject. After making too-slow progress on a medieval-studies topic, she decided to turn to a 20th-century author instead. She wrote the names of some possibilities on index cards.

“Without thinking about which name might present the best opportunity for original research,” she said years later, “or even which I liked the most, I shuffled them into alphabetical order. There were no A’s, and Beckett came first, before Joseph Conrad and E.M. Forster. Beckett it shall be, I said to myself, and that was how my life in biography began.”

She dove into a study of his novels (“Molloy,” “Malone Dies”) and plays (“Waiting for Godot,” “Happy Days”) and, she said, “reading Beckett’s work made me want answers to a lot of questions, all of which were based on the life from which the work sprang.” Eventually she decided to attempt a biography and, from her home in Connecticut, wrote to Beckett in Paris in July 1971.

“The mail between New Haven and Paris was probably never again as swift as it was during that exchange,” she said. “A week to the day after I mailed my letter, I received his reply.”

To her shock, Beckett said, “Any biographical information I possess is at your disposal,” adding that “if you come to Paris I will see you.”

Years of interviews and other research followed before “Samuel Beckett: A Biography” appeared in 1978. The paperback release won a National Book Award in 1981.

Her biography of Simone de Beauvoir (author of “The Second Sex,” among other books) was also years in the making and written with its subject’s cooperation. It was published in 1990.

“To Ms. Bair’s credit,” Herbert Mitgang wrote in a review in The New York Times, “her book isn’t just a love letter but a fair-minded and often skeptical appraisal of Beauvoir’s life. At the end, I found myself respecting but not always liking Beauvoir and her circle because of the heavy cloak of arrogance they wove around themselves.”

The Times Book Review named it one of the best books of the year.

Ms. Bair later wrote biographies of the writer Anaïs Nin (1995), the psychiatrist Carl Jung (2003), the illustrator Saul Steinberg (2012) and Al Capone (2016), but her first two books remained her calling cards. People asked her about Beckett and Beauvoir so often that she wrote a book about her experiences as their biographer: “Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me,” published last year.

“The original idea was to write something primarily for scholars and writers that would cover all my biographies,” she wrote in that book, “to concentrate on the decisions I made when dealing with structure and content, or how I worked in foreign archives and languages, or how I dealt with reluctant heirs and troublesome estates. Each time I suggested this possible project, even to fellow biographers or academics, the response was always, ‘That’s all very nice, but please just tell us what Beckett and Beauvoir were really like.’”

Deirdre Bartolotta was born on June 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Vincent and Helen (Kruki) Bartolotta, and grew up in nearby Monongahela. In “One Extraordinary Street,” a documentary about the unusual number of prominent people who grew up on or near Park Avenue there, she spoke of being an enthusiastic reader as a girl, so much so that by fifth grade she had become bored with books for young readers.

She tried to check out adult fare from the local library, but the librarian would not let her, prompting her to complain to her father.

“He went down to the library, and he said, ‘You let my daughter read anything she wants,’” she said in the film. “So the next week I came home with ‘Forever Amber,’ which was that generation’s dirty book.”

She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1957 with a degree in English literature and set her sights on a career in print journalism. While her husband, Lavon Bair, whom she had married during her senior year, was serving with the Sixth Fleet, she followed him around the globe and worked as a stringer for Newsweek.

When they later settled in New Haven, she was a reporter for The New Haven Register, raising their two young children and supporting her husband while he was in graduate school. In 1968 it was her turn to go to graduate school; she applied for a writing fellowship, but rather than take it at nearby Yale University, she chose an institution two hours away.

“I thought, ‘I’d better go to Columbia, because what if I fail?’” she said in a recent talk at the Free Library of Philadelphia. “‘I can always say commuting got to be too much for me.’”

She did not fail; she earned a Ph.D. in comparative literature at the university in 1972. By then she had already had her first meeting with Beckett. His initial words to her, she wrote in “Parisian Lives,” were, “So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am.”

They talked for two hours on that occasion, the first of many interviews. Beckett, she wrote, told her near the end of that first session: “I will neither help nor hinder you. My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.”

In the 1980s she was back in Paris interviewing Beauvoir, who, she said, could be mercurial, especially if Ms. Bair’s questions ventured into areas she didn’t want scrutinized. Once, when they had been working together for three years, Beauvoir abruptly stopped the interview and told her to leave.

“She literally shoved me out the door of her apartment,” Ms. Bair said in the Philadelphia talk. “And then I thought: ‘Well, now what do I do? I’ve invested three years in this book.’ Well, I simply went back for the next appointment that we had scheduled as if nothing had happened, and she treated me exactly as if nothing had happened. And that’s how we worked.”

In addition to her other biographies, Ms. Bair wrote “Calling It Quits: Late-Life Divorce and Starting Over” (2007), examining the phenomenon of couples who divorced after decades of marriage. Although she did not dwell on it in the book, her own marriage had ended after 43 years.

In addition to her daughter, Ms. Bair is survived by a son, Vonn Scott Bair; a sister, Linda Rankin; a brother, Vince Bartolotta; and a granddaughter.

Ms. Bair told The Times Union of Albany in 1995 that the only response to her biography she received from Beckett, who died in 1989, was a brief note: “Dear Mrs. Bair: Seems a very handsome looking book.”

Beauvoir died in 1986, before that biography was published. In the book, Ms. Bair recalled what turned out to be her final meeting with Beauvoir. Their other sessions had always ended with a handshake.

“This time,” she wrote, “tiny woman that she was, she reached up out and half embraced me, tall woman that I am, by placing her hands around my upper arms and giving me a brisk shake.”

Corvus acquires ‘The Favour’ by Laura Vaughan

Corvus has acquired rights to The Favour by Laura Vaughan, plus a second novel.

The Favour tells the story of eighteen-year-old Ada Howell, who feels that the gilded life she deserves has been denied to her after she is forced to move from her idyllic country house in Wales to suburban London following the death of her wealthy adoptive father.

When Ada’s eccentric godmother gifts her with an exclusive gap-year art history trip to Italy, she finally finds herself amongst the kind of people she aspires to be: sophisticated, cultured, privileged. Ada does everything in her power to prove she is one of them, and when one of the group dies in suspicious circumstances she spots an opportunity to permanently bind herself to these glamorous new acquaintances by burying a secret. But everything hidden must eventually surface, and when it does, Ada discovers she’s been keeping a far darker secret than she ever imagined…

The author was inspired by her childhood in the Welsh countryside and her own gap-year art-history tour of Italy, although thankfully that trip did not involve any fatalities. She has written eleven novels for children and Young Adults under the name Laura Powell, and The Favour is her first novel for adults. Corvus will publish in hardback and ebook in March 2021, with a paperback to follow.

Corvus Publishing Director Sarah Hodgson said:

‘The Favour is a wonderfully immersive read that grips the reader from the very start with its seductive tale of social climbing set in stunning Italian locations. It will appeal to readers who enjoyed Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, or The Party by Elizabeth Day. Laura is a hugely talented writer, and I’m delighted to welcome her to the Corvus list. The Favour will be a lead title for Corvus in 2021 and we are already working on exciting plans for its publication.’

Laura Vaughan said:

‘I am absolutely thrilled to be joining the Corvus list. It looks like Ada’s social scheming has paid off – she’s found the perfect home.’

‘The Narrow Land’ is shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize

The Narrow Land author Christine Dwyer Hickey is among six writers shortlisted for this year’s £25,000 Walter Scott Historical Fiction Prize.

The Narrow Land is a novel of loneliness and regret, the legacy of World War II and the ever-changing concept of the American Dream, and centres around the marriage of artist Edward Hooper.

This year’s judging panel is chaired by Katie Grant, who succeeds Alistair Moffat in the role, and also comprises  Elizabeth Buccleuch, James Holloway, Elizabeth Laird, James Naughtie and Kirsty Wark. In a joint statement, they said:

“In times of crisis, historical fiction is both reassurance (nothing is completely new) — and escape, so it’s with almost medicinal pleasure that we unveil the eleventh Walter Scott Prize shortlist which offers, we hope, a measure of both.

“Six books from writers as varied as they are talented. Six books to absorb. Six books to fortify. Enjoy them all!’”

The prize-winner is traditionally announced at the Baillie Giffords Borders Book Festival in Melrose, Scotland.