Adult Spring Rights Guide 2021 United Agents LLP, 12-26 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LE Switchboard: +44 (0) 20 3214 0990 Twitter: @UA_Books Instagram: @unitedagentsbooks Website: www.unitedagents.co.uk Email: [email protected] 1 contents Fiction Literary – New Titles 3 Literary 19 Commercial / Crime & Thriller – New Titles 34 Commercial 50 Crime & Thriller 54 Non-Fiction General 57 Memoir 72 History 81 Illustrated 89 Estates 91 International Representation 92 Agents 93 2 FICTION LITERARY NEW TITLES 3 Christy Edwall (AW) HISTORY KEEPS ME AWAKE AT NIGHT A sharp, smart debut novel about fractured identity and online obsession. Margit is drifting aimlessly from one precarious London job to the next when one day a news story catches her attention. 43 Mexican student teachers have gone missing, their bus ambushed by police and everyone on board disappeared without a trace. So begins Margit’s obsession and her quixotic search for the truth of what happened to the ‘desaparecidos’, as they came to be known in Mexico. Her quest for answers, which is conducted entirely from London, starts taking over her life. As Margit disappears down various rabbit holes into her online Mexican investigation, her London life starts to recede. Her career, her marriage, her friendships all begin to unravel. In an effort to reconnect with her real life, she decides throw a party to celebrate the Day of the Dead, and things come to a head… History Keeps Me Awake At Night is an exciting, intelligent and often funny debut novel which examines the increasingly complicated line between our offline and online selves. UK: on submission Word count: 53,000 Christy Edwall was born in South Africa in 1985. She has a DPhil in English Literature from New College, Oxford. Her short fiction has been published by Granta and the Stinging Fly, and is forthcoming in the Southern Review. She lives in West Sussex. 4 Patrick Gale (CK) MOTHER’S BOY Set in Cornwall between the two wars, Mother’s Boy is the moving story of a young boy and his devoted mother. When Charles’s father dies from TB when he is five, his mother undertakes the hard work of a washerwoman in order to provide a respectable life for them both. The novel follows Charles, who is among, yet apart from his fellows, in thrall to, yet at a distance from his own mother; a man being shaped for a long, remarkable and revered life spent hiding in plain sight. But it is equally the story of the dauntless mother who will continue to shield him long after the dangers of war are past. Closely based on the lives of the great Cornish poet Charles Causley and his washerwoman mother, Laura, Mother’s Boy is a tender, emotional gift of a book, from one of the best writers working today. UK: Tinder Press/ Imogen Taylor Publication: March 2022 Word count: 112,000 Patrick Gale published his first novel, The Aerodynamics Of Pork, at the age of twenty-one and has now published twenty highly acclaimed novels, among them Little Bits Of Baby, Kansas In August, The Facts Of Life and Tree Surgery For Beginners. As well as writing and reviewing fiction, he has published a biography of Armistead Maupin, a short history of the Dorchester Hotel and chapters on Mozart’s piano and mechanical music for H C Robbins Landon’s The Mozart Compendium. Notes From An Exhibition was selected as one of Richard & Judy's Book Club picks for 2008. A Place Called Winter was published to great acclaim in 2015 and his most recent novel, Take Nothing With You, was published by Tinder Press in Spring 2018. 5 Tessa Hadley (CD/SS) FREE LOVE A new novel from “one of the greatest stylists alive”, Free Love is Tessa Hadley writing at her best. On a balmy, late-summer’s evening in Surrey, Phyllis Fischer sits at her dressing table getting ready for a dinner party. Her husband is on his way home from his job at the Foreign Office and her two children are downstairs. The year is 1967. The events of the evening will set in motion a series consquences which none of them could have ever foreseen. Set in final years of the 1960s, Free Love is the story of a woman who abandons the constraints of her suburban family life for London and a relationship with a much younger man. Written in immaculate prose and full of psychological depth, humour, and exquisite attention paid to the small moments that make up life, Free Love has all the hallmarks of the best of Tessa Hadley’s writing. UK: Jonathon Cape/ Michal Shavit; US: HarperCollins/ Jennifer Barth Publication: November 2021 Word count: 86,000 Rights sold: Catalan: 1984; German: Kampa; Italian: Bompiani; Portuguese (Portugal): Infinito Particular; Swedish: Wahlstrom & Widstrand Praise for previous novel Late in the Day: “Tessa Hadley is one of our finest writers. The sensitivity of her psychological insight and understanding is unmatched by anyone writing today.” The Times “With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive… her quietly elegant style and muted wit are triumphs… the everyday tragedies and betrayals of domestic life [are] rendered by Hadley’s prose into something extraordinary.” Washington Post “You know you are in safe hands with Tessa Hadley who, on a sheer sentence-by-sentence level, delivers more enjoyment than almost any other living writer... you'll be hanging on to every word.” Daily Mail Rights sold in previous novel Late in the Day: Catalan: 1984; French: Christian Bourgois; German: Kampa; Greek: Dardanos; Italian: Bompiani; Spanish: Sexto Piso; Swedish: Wahlstrom & Widstrand Tessa Hadley is the author of six highly acclaimed novels and three short-story collections. In 2016 she was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. She teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker, Granta and other magazines. 6 Ben Hinshaw (AW) EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN For fans of A Visit from the Goon Squad and David Szalay comes a beautifuly crafted and intriguing debut about missed opportunites, hidden heartaches and unitended consequences. Exactly What You Mean is a moving collection of linked stories which explores the unforeseen significance of small moments and chance encounters, as well secret yearnings and things left unsaid. Focusing at first on two young brothers, it gradually widens its gaze to include a broad cast of characters whose lives, to quote from its epigraph, become “enigmatically entangled” - whether they know it or not. The stories fan out from Guernsey all the way to the Californian wild fires and the African plains, and thrillingly examine the same set of events through different points of view, often only revealing their true, and sometimes tragic, meaning at a slow burn. UK: Viking/ Mary Mount Publication: 2022 Word count: 55,000 words Ben Hinshaw is a British-American writer whose short fiction has appeared in Harvard Review, Story, the White Review and elsewhere. His writing has been supported by grants and scholarships from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Community of Writers. Ben holds MAs in creative writing and cultural geography. He grew up on the island of Guernsey and has also lived in London, Nottingham and Northern California. 7 Lauren John Joseph (ZR) AT CERTAIN POINTS WE TOUCH A gorgeous, heart-breaking debut, with hints of Olivia Laing and Ocean Vuong. Narrated by a trans writer living in Mexico City and coming to terms with the death of a lover, At Certain Points We Touch is a riotous, razor-sharp bildungsroman which deftly unpicks the story of a doomed loved affair. After their ex lover dies in a tragic accident the book departs from this moment, eventually circling back to it, and explores the way we are dogged through time and space by the ghosts of our past. It’s at once cerebral and poetic, and visceral and vicious. UK: Bloomsbury/ Paul Baggaley/ Allegra Le Fanu Publication: Spring 2022 Word count: 104,000 Rights sold: German: dtv Lauren John Joseph is a British born American-educated artist and writer, who works at the intersection of video, text, and live performance. They have written extensively on contemporary culture, art, performance, pornography, gender theory and the Golden Age of Hollywood, contributing in print and online to publications including iD, the Independent, Sleek, the Guardian, Time Out, Attitude, and Amuse. 8 Sheena Joughin (CD/SS) THE END ROOM Judy and Carla, both artists, rent adjacent rooms from which to work, in a house in 1980s Hammersmith Grove. They break regularly for a drink and a cigarette in the shared kitchen, watched over by their doleful landlord, Mike, and spend long hours in their favourite pub, The Duchess. They share friends, sometimes lovers, a precarious existence which nevertheless feels secure, until impulsive Judy marries a nineteen year old, and then doesn’t behave as a wife should. Amidst the chaos, Mike takes a new lodger - Ralph - and old loyalties begin to be broken apart for new ones. There is something dangerous between them all, and tragedy is the almost inevitable result. But who, if anyone, is to blame? UK: on submission Word count: 65,000 Praise for previous novel Things To Do Indoors: “An exciting new talent.” Sunday Telegraph “Sheena Joughin has an unusual clarity of voice and a crafty duality, something both brooding and light, in her writing. The hurts and nastinesses between her characters are paralleled with a casual persistence of good nature and good humour in this funny, piercing book about lostness, childishness and growing up.” The Times Literary Supplement Sheena Joughin is twice winner of the London Short Story Competition, and a regular reviewer and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.