THE WIFE’S TALE by Lori Lansens 90,000 words / Final manuscript now available

WITH SHARP HUMOUR AND DELICATE GRACE, THE WIFE’S TALE FOLLOWS MARY GOOCH — MORBIDLY OBESE AND LIVING IN DENIAL — AS SHE PURSUES HER HUSBAND ACROSS THE COUNTRY

Mary is fat. Not just fat, but morbidly obese. She knows she’s fat (thank you very much) and lives her life in defensive, deflective blame, isolating herself in the small farming town of Leaford, Ontario, the locale of Lori Lansens’ first two novels. Everyone skirts the subject of her weight, the literal elephant in the room. Mary and her husband Gooch have gradually drifted away from each other. On their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Mary’s husband disappears. Bewildered, Mary abandons her sheltered life in pursuit of him across America, encountering a dazzling array of characters and discovering a boundless supply of human kindness in unexpected places. Runaway children, single mothers, taxi drivers, migrant workers and bitter relatives enter her life in chaotic Photo by Laura Starks fashion. Pounds melt away as she walks, runs, swims, drives and flies in momentous steps from claustrophobic Leaford to the freedom of California, her missing husband a spectre dogging each step. She discovers new worlds in hidden pockets of Los Angeles before she arrives at her final destination, the most unexpected surprise of all. The Wife’s Tale is a vivid exploration of a woman taking small, courageous steps toward her authentic self for the first time in her life. In pursuit of her husband, she finds herself instead. Mary Gooch is as indelible a creation as Sharla Cody and Addy Shadd of Rush Home Road and Rose and Ruby Darlen of The Girls.

RIGHTS SOLD Lori Lansens was a successful screenwriter before she burst onto the literary US: Little, Brown & Co., February 2010 scene in 2002 with her first novelRush Home Road. Published in eleven countries, UK: Virago, February 2010 Rush Home Road received rave reviews around the world. Her follow-up novel, Canada: Knopf, September 2009 The Girls, was an international success as well. Rights were sold in 13 territories Italy: Mondadori and it was featured as a book club pick by Richard & Judy in the UK, selling 300,000 copies. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, Lori Lansens now makes her home OPTION PUBLISHERS in Los Angeles with her husband and two children. IN OTHER TERRITORIES Holland: De Bezige Bij PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF LORI LANSENS Israel: Modan “I promise: you will never forget this extraordinary story...Lori Lansens’ Turkey: Sistem blend of tragedy and comedy will touch you deeply.” ISABEL ALLENDE Germany: Ullstein Poland: MAG “The Girls, by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very Brazil: Editora Globo strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives is a rural corner of Canada...The Girls glides by like a watercolor dream, Taiwan: Commonwealth finding its poetry in dailiness and the universalities of human desire and Sweden: Bra Bocker connection...Lansens, who has a gentle, open way of writing, makes of Serbia: Beobooks these two girls a kind of perfect marriage, harmonious and everlasting.” Czech Republic: BB Art THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Portugal: Casa Das Letras Lithuania: Alma Littera “Extraordinarily moving: joyous, heartbreaking, and shot through with France: Editions de l’Archipel moments of dark humor...The voices of Rose and Ruby cry out to be heard for their glorious celebration of humanity.” VOGUE THE WIFE’S TALE an excerpt

“HAVE YOU GOT SOMETHING to wear for the thing tomorrow night?” Gooch’s voice was erotica. He could arouse Mary with the merest stroke of tenor on her hot inner ear. She wondered why she’d never told him so, and felt sorry it no longer mattered. Frowning, Mary’d tugged at the waistband of her uniform, the largest of the ladies’ plus sizes so she’d have to go into the large men’s sizes now, and Ray Russell Junior, the owner/manager of the drugstore would have to place the order for her. The thought burned her cheeks, since she’d recently overheard Ray and Candace making unfunny comments about her ass — Candace suggesting they take up a collection for gastric by-pass, and Ray remarking that it was so big it should have its own blog. Now she had to clear her throat or cough before entering the staff room. Mary had assured, “I’ll find something.” “What about the green thing you bought?” Gooch had asked carefully. “The zipper was broken,” she lied. “Remember what happened the last time you had to improvise? Buy something if you don’t have anything, Mare. This is important. Find something nice.” Shrunk an inch over the years, standing at the door in his custom-made work shirts and brown corduroy coat and dusty blue jeans from the Big Man’s store, ball cap plunked down on his wavy grey head, complexion worn like a catcher’s mitt, Gooch looked handsome, but weary. Mary wondered if he seemed more or less tired than any forty-four-year-old man in any small town. She cocked her head, asking, “Are you sorry we’re doing this dinner tomorrow, Hon?” He’d paused, with that look on his face, and said, “Twenty-five years, Mrs. Gooch. That’s a hell of a thing. Right?” “It is,” she agreed. “When you gonna be home?” “Ten or so. But don’t wait up.” Gooch said the last after the back door banged shut. It was a hell of a thing to have been married for twenty-five years, but no one ever asked Mary her secret to a long marriage. She might have said, “Don’t call your husband at work.” Of course, throughout the years, Mary would have called Gooch’s pager or cell phone if there’d been an emergency but her life was fairly predictable and her tragedies rarely sudden. She’d nearly called Gooch at work when she’d gotten the news about her father’s passing, but had decided that like everything except her raging hunger, it could wait. She’d thought of calling Gooch at work just recently, the night she tipped the scale over three hundred pounds, but had instead collected the pain medications from the bathroom cabinet, remembering her vow to kill herself. Even as she was shaking tablets from vials at the kitchen table, Mary realized her false intentions and determined that the dosage was not potent enough for her extreme body weight anyway. The door had suddenly opened behind her and Gooch tramped inside, filling the house with his truck-oil scent and strong man vigor, calling, “Hey. You’re still up.” Shaking off his coat, pulling off his boots, he was preoccupied and hadn’t noticed the pills and vials on the table, which Mary swept into a plastic bag and quickly tossed in the trash.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.thebukowskiagency.com DAHANU ROAD by Anosh Irani 80,000 words / Final manuscript coming soon

AN IRREVERENT, EPIC LOVE STORY ABOUT THREE GENERATIONS OF THE IRANI CLAN, ZOROASTRIANS WHO FLED FROM PERSECUTION IN IRAN TO BOMBAY

Zairos is a dissolute young landowner’s son living in the town of Dahanu, just outside Bombay, when his life of careless luxury is brought up short by a mysterious death: the sudden suicide of Ganpat, a tribal worker on his family’s estate. Soon he has fallen in lust with Ganpat’s daughter Kusum, and finds himself defying taboos with their relationship. At the same time his grandfather, Rustom, reveals to him the story of their family and of the land that Zairos stands to inherit. Dahanu Road exposes the history of the relationship between the landowning Irani clan and the Warlis, local tribal people like Ganpat and Kusum who work the land for them. As Zairos’ connection with Kusum deepens, he is drawn further into the mystery of Rustom’s relationship with Ganpat and the other Warlis. Violence and hatred echo through history, and Zairos learns the terrible truth his grandfather has spent a lifetime hiding. With an inimitable mix of earthy humour and searing tragedy, bestselling author Anosh Irani has given us his most ambitious novel yet. Photo by Tushna Shroff

RIGHTS SOLD Anosh Irani was born and brought up in Bombay, India, and moved to Vancouver Canada: Doubleday, spring 2010 in 1998. He is the author of the acclaimed novels The Cripple and His Talismans and Italy: Piemme, 2010 The Song of Kahunsha, which was a CBC Radio 2007 “Canada Reads” selection and a bestseller in Canada and Italy. Irani promoted the book at the Turin Book Fair and at OPTION PUBLISHERS Festival America in Paris. His play Bombay Black was a 2006 Dora Award winner for IN OTHER TERRITORIES Outstanding New Play. He was nominated for the 2007 Governor General’s Award for Spain: Alfaguara Drama for his anthology The Bombay Plays: The Matka King and Bombay Black. France: Editions Philippe Rey Israel: Kinneret PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF ANOSH IRANI Greece: Agyra Portugal: Quetzal “Irani is a gifted storyteller, and [The Song of Kahunsha], Dickensian in its Portugal (book club edition): plot and its vivid prose, is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking.” BOOKLIST Circulo de Leitores “Ultimately, The Song of Kahunsha is a story of hope and resilience in the Brazil: Editora Planeta face of terrible circumstances. Chamdi loses his innocence, but his dreams of a better place — of a Kahunsha — for him and his friends save his soul from the destruction and darkness that surround him...From the perspective of one child, Irani shows the long-lasting harm to individuals and society when different groups fight in the name of God.The Song of Kahunsha contains a damnation of religious violence in a multicultural society and a hope that the next generation, like Chamdi, will find a way to separate from it.” THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “Anosh Irani...reveal[s] the tender heart of human need in his devastating yet surprisingly gentle novel.” Minneapolis Star Tribune DAHANU ROAD an excerpt

AS ZAIROS RODE TOWARDS Anna Purna’s chai stall, he welcomed the sun. Its heat burned away the memories of the morning. A man on a moped who rode alongside Zairos had “Jamaica” written across his T-shirt and whistled into the breeze. The concrete road was a dusty, rocky mess. It had been dug up, and bullock carts, trucks, vans, cars, autos, and cycles weaved through its open flesh, spraying rock debris from underneath their tires. He caught up with a truck that carried schoolchildren in the back. They held on to ropes that hung from the roof of the truck. They were packed closely together, and their white uniforms were picking up dirt. With no enclosure to prevent them from falling out, those near the edge seemed terrified. He passed Alan’s petrol pump with its array of wilted coconut trees, and waved out to Muga-Bera, the Dumb-Deaf owner of the Ahura Mazda chemist store, who, despite his shortcomings, was a favourite with the ladies of Varkun College. He turned left and almost ran over Pinky, a four-year-old orphan with an eternally runny nose, who had perched herself close to Anna Purna’s in the hope of securing her daily dose of Tiger biscuits. Anna, the owner of the chai stall, was an Indian Clark Gable: thin moustache, clean skin, hair always set in the most well behaved manner. No one knew his real name so he was called Anna, the title given to any South Indian man who wore a lungi and ran a chai stall. Anna had an old Hollywood charm, but his wife was quite the opposite — dusky and full enough to be on the cover of Debonair. To the Iranis, Anna’s chai stall was one of Dahanu’s most prized possessions. It was a beloved meeting place — its hard wooden benches had seated many an overweight Irani over the years — a dingy hole beautifully suited to the hirsute features of the men that frequented the joint. At Anna’s, they were like beasts in a cave where they could fart, joke, smoke, abuse, and pontificate. Of course, they did thisanywhere , but Anna’s was the home ground. Each morning, after making a round of their chickoo farms, the Iranis would gather here and drink tea, coffee or Pepsi. Cigarette smoke gave the place an eerie haze, like fog in a cemetery. Yet the place was alive, full of joy and horniness, and credit had to be given to Anna’s steaming chai and his steamy wife. Anna stood under the sharp white glow of tube lights and poured chai from one steel jug into the other to cool it down. It was quite a show, this hot waterfall of milky tea, and Anna was always guaranteed an audience. At its peak, which was from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., Anna’s chai stall offered a heady cocktail of languages. Anna spoke softly in Tamil to his wife and loudly in Hindi to the balloon factory owners; some of the Iranis conversed in Farsi just to remind the ones who didn’t that they were inferior and had been polluted by India, and the inferior Iranis, who spoke Gujarati, spoke it in a lewd and crass manner to make the actual Gujaratis, the Indian ones, feel infuriated that their language was being torn apart and bastardized in the cheapest way. But in the end, if one kept some distance, one could see the beauty of Anna’s, that brothel of languages. All languages knew each other well, slept with each other, were familiar with the twists and turns of each other’s bodies, and were not afraid to inhale the pungent smell of each other’s underarms.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.thebukowskiagency.com THE GOLDEN MEAN by Annabel Lyon 75,000 words / Final manuscript now available

IN THE FRANK, EARTHY, AND ENGAGING VOICE OF ARISTOTLE, THE GOLDEN MEAN BRINGS TO LIFE THE WORLD OF THE ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHER

In 342 BC the philosopher Aristotle was persuaded by his former boyhood chum, King Philip of Macedonia, to serve as tutor to his son, the prince who has come to be known today as Alexander the Great. Along with his teenage wife and nephew, Aristotle remained in the court for seven years, during which time his ambition led him to participate in the ever-more-sinister intrigues of King Philip’s warrior court. But Philip eventually lost interest in him and began to favour others, passing over Aristotle for promotion to more prestigious positions. Prince Alexander, meanwhile, grew from a bright, affectionate boy to an increasingly powerful and ambitious young man, resentful of his father’s bullying and womanizing. Aristotle tried to influence the prince in ethics and right conduct, but he soon realized that his teachings had grown twisted in the young man’s mind. Annabel Lyon’s masterful prose brings us the intimate details of Aristotle’s personality, including his sexuality and his curious malady. His disillusionment with his role in court reaches its nadir at the battle of Chaironea, where Philip’s victory secures Photo by Phillip Chin Macedonian dominion over a number of Greek states, including Athens. Afterwards Aristotle is still not granted a much-coveted foreign assignment, and he feels like a failure. When the king marries a younger wife, threatening to displace Alexander with a new heir, court politics quickly bring The Golden Mean to a murderous climax.

ANNABEL LYON The Golden Mean is PRAISE FOR THE WORK OF ANNABEL LYON Annabel Lyon’s long-awaited first novel. “Lyon [has] established herself as this generation’s answer to Alice Munro. Her story collection Oxygen (2000) and A master of wordplay and storytelling, Lyon takes readers deep into the her collection of novellas, The Best Thing hearts and secret desires of her characters.” THE VANCOUVER SUN for You (2004) were published in Canada “Here is yearning, transgression, lust, and all the consequences. Lyon’s to wide acclaim. Annabel studied music, writing is immaculately clean and driven. These novellas bristle with heat philosophy, and law before she decided to and blood-rushing suspense. Characters wholly unexpected and eerily write full-time. She lives in Vancouver with familiar, sharply felt. Lyon is a dazzling stylist. Here is mastery.” LISA MOORE, her partner and two children. author of Alligator “Annabel Lyon’s writing is fresh, unexpected, and truthful. These three tales explore how we talk to each other and what we notice changing in RIGHTS SOLD those we love. Her delivery is savvy, succinct, and wondrous.” MICHAEL WINTER, Canada: Random House, fall 2009 author of The Big Why “Annabel Lyon is a sharp, funny, and subversive writer who knows how to keep her readers off-balance…What is exhilarating about Lyon’s work is that she has enough confidence in her imagination and her craft so that she can borrow from the best and still create art that is absolutely her own.” QUILL & QUIRE, starred review THE GOLDEN MEAN an excerpt

THE RAIN FALLS IN BLACK cords, lashing my animals, my men, and my wife, Pythias, who last night lay with her legs spread while I took notes on the mouth of her sex, who weeps silent tears of exhaustion now, on this tenth day of our journey. On the ship she seemed comfortable enough, but this last overland stage is beyond all her experience and it shows. Her mare stumbles; she’s let the reins go loose again, allowing the animal to sleepwalk. She rides awkwardly, weighed down by her sodden finery. Earlier I suggested she remain on one of the carts but she resisted, such a rare occurrence that I smiled and she, embarrassed, looked away. Callisthenes, my nephew, offered to walk the last distance, and with some difficulty we helped her onto his big bay. She clutched at the reins the first time the animal shifted beneath her. “Are you steady?” I asked, as around us the caravan began to move. “Of course.” Touching. Men are good with horses where I come from, where we’re returning now, and she knows it. I spent yesterday on the carts myself so I could write, though now I ride bareback, in the manner of my countrymen, a ball-busting proposition for someone who’s been sedentary as long as I have. You can’t stay on a cart while a woman rides, though; and it occurs to me now that this was her intention. I hardly noticed her at first, a pretty, vacant-eyed girl on the fringes of Hermias’ menagerie. Daughter, niece, ward, concubine – the truth slid like silk. “You like her,” old Hermias said. “I see the way you look at her.” Fat, sly, rumoured a money-changer in his youth, later a butcher and a mercenary; a eunuch now supposedly, and a rich man. A politician, too, holding a stubborn satrapy against the barbarians: Hermias of Atarneus. “Bring me my thinkers!” he used to shout. “Great men surround themselves with thinkers! I wish to be surrounded.” And he would laugh and slap at himself while the girl Pythias watched without seeming to blink quite often enough. She became another gift, one of many, for I was a favourite. On our wedding night she arrayed herself in veils, assumed a pose on the bed, and whisked away the sheets before I could see if she had bled. I was thirty-seven then — five years ago, now — she fifteen, and god forgive me but I went at her like a stag in a rut. Stag, hog. “Eh? Eh?” Hermias said the next morning, and laughed. Night after night after night. I tried to make it up to her with kindness. I treated her with great courtliness, gave her money, addressed her softly, spoke to her of my work. She wasn’t stupid; thoughts flickered in her eyes like fish in deep pools. Three years we spent in Atarnaeus, until the Persians breathed too close, too hot. Two years in the pretty town of Mytilene, on the island of Lesvos, where they cobbled the floor of the port so enemy ships couldn’t anchor. Now this journey. Through it all she has an untouchable dignity, even when she lies with her knees apart while I gently probe her for my work on generation. Fish, too, I’m studying, field animals and birds when I can get them. There’s a seed like a pomegranate seed in the centre of the folds, and the hole frilled like an oyster. Sometimes moisture, sometimes dryness. I’ve noted it all.

THE BUKOWSKI AGENCY 14 Prince Arthur Avenue, Suite 202, Toronto, Ontario M5R 1A9 Tel: (416) 928-6728 Fax: (416) 963-9978 e-mail: [email protected] www.thebukowskiagency.com