Our London Book Fair guide is now up - head to Rights Guides on the top menu to download it.
We have some exciting new acquisitions:
HOW TO CURATE: Museum Know-How for All / Hans Ulrich Obrist - world rights bought by Helen Conford from Kevin Conroy Scott at Tibor Jones Assocs. Publication September 2011, Allen Lane
Hans Ulrich Obrist is currently ranked by Art Review as the most powerful person in the Contemporary Art world. This will be Obrist's first mainstream book and will change the reader's vision of the world. The book tracks the evolution of Hans Ulrich's own understanding of curation, opening out from his kitchen into museums, then into the world, and the intimate spaces of every reader's life. At its heart is the question, how can the idea of curation help us enrich our lives and our work? What avenues open up if we think about curating the food we eat, or the clothes we wear? How might our sense of our work expand? It is these questions - and Hans Ulrich's serious, funny, surprising, aphoristic answers, that lie at the centre of the book. In the way that John Berger's Ways of Seeing changed our understanding of visual culture and its effect on us, so this book will give all of us tools we can use to help us live.
All rights available.
THE OCEAN OF LIFE / Callum Roberts - world rights bought by Will Goodlad from Patrick Walsh at Conville & Walsh. Publication January 2012, Allen Lane
The oceans are an extraordinary paradox, they remain the most wondrously mysterious place on earth and yet we take them completely for granted. Callum Roberts uses his lifetime of experience working with the oceans to show us why this. In The Ocean of Life we get the whole story, a panoramic tour beneath the seas: Why do currents circulate the way do? And, for that matter, where exactly do they go? How has the chemistry of the oceans changed over the years? Just how polluted are we making them? Above all, Roberts reveals the amazing richness and complexity of life in the oceans, and how it has changed over the centuries. Not only does Roberts show how we are fishing our oceans to extinction, crucially, he explains how what is happening in the oceans also directly affects our lives on the land. This book urgently persuades us, the oceans are the most fundamental element of the world's ecosystem, and the life they support is now in the balance.
Rights sold in the US (Viking) and Germany (DVA). All other rights available.
22 BRITANNIA ROAD / Amanda Hodgkinson - world rights bought by Juliet Annan from Rachel Calder at The Sayle Literary Agency. Publication April 2011, Fig Tree
With echoes of Small Island and Sophie’s Choice 22 Britannia Road is a powerful novel of acceptance, survival and love. Polish émigrés Silvana and Janusz make a home for themselves in post war Britain with their son Aurek. Separated for six years throughout the war, Silvana and Aurek have spent the duration hiding in the forests of Poland, while Janusz' story is even more chequered. Each of the three have secrets, and in order to learn to live together again, they will have to accept what happened to them and the choices that war forced upon them in Poland. At the heart of the story is Silvana and Janusz's desperate desire to make a new home for their wild, woodland boy.
Rights sold in the US (Pam Dorman Books), Germany (DTV), Netherlands (Bruna), Italy (Sperling), France (Belfond), Spain (Ediciones B), Greece (Patakis) and Israel (Modan). All other rights available.
PUB WALKS IN UNDERHILL COUNTRY / Nat Segnit - world rights bought by Juliet Annan from Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown. Publication February 2011, Fig Tree
Nat Segnit’s brilliant, hilarious and heartrending debut novel takes the form of a very practical guide for walkers. The novel opens with a breathless introduction by our author as he describes the exciting discovery of a series of Pub walks by Graham Underhill, an environmental officer at Herefordshire council, who has recently gone missing but left the world these guides. Our author is convinced that Underhill is “without too much exaggeration, one of the best writers of prose in the country”. Although Underhill’s sudden disappearance remains a mystery, he gives the reader many clues to his increasingly disturbed private life as we join him on the 15 walks that make up the chapters of the book. What unravels is a dazzlingly written narration by a tragic-comic anti-hero to rival John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier.
All rights available.
CONQUEST / Stewart Binns - world rights bought by Alex Clarke from Jim Gill at United Agents. Publication March 2011, Michael Joseph
Debut historical novel to rival the likes of Ken Follett and Bernard Cornwell. 1066, William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy defeats Harold Godwinson, King Harold II of England - in what will become known as the Battle of Hastings. The battle is hard fought and bloody, the victor emerging only as the October light fades and the lives of thousands have been spent on the field, including that of King Harold. But, despite the onslaught of brutality that the newly crowned William unleashed on the nation, England was not conquered on that day. There was one man who united the resistance – whose heroic deeds were nearly lost to legend. His name was Hereward of Bourne, the champion of the English. His honour, bravery and skill at arms would change the future of European history. His is the legacy of the noble outlaw. This is his story.
All rights available.