FOREIGN RIGHTS GUIDE 2017 NEW & UPCOMING RELEASES 2 MEMOIR Agent: Joseph Veltre Editor: Nan Graham Scribner (tk) Territories Sold: North America Format: N/A UNTITLED NOVEL By Lucy Alibar Lucy Alibar is a playwright and Oscar-nominated screenwriter for her 2012 film, BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD. Her debut novel is a funny and heartfelt story of childhood in the American south. A young Pentecostal girl works with her hell-raising, atheist father on pro bono legal cases: the Civil War re-enactor who gives schoolchildren a lesson in Georgia history, a goat that saves Christmas when a murder case goes awry, and a young man with a heart so full of love he sets his ex-wife’s trailer on fire. Through it all, her father tries to save souls and raise his daughter right. 3 LITERARY FICTION Agent: Allison Cohen Editor: Brian Lam Arsenal (May 10, 2016) Territories Sold: North America Format: Book THE MERCY JOURNALS By Claudia Casper Most of us track the various headlines of the day, pondering their impact on our personal lives, but behind those thoughts looms a much darker cloud: we know we are unalterably changing our planet. The sheer scope of this pending drama makes its reality hard to comprehend or personalize. Claudia Casper’s new novel, THE MERCY JOURNALS, is set in that very world we fear is coming. It is March 2014. Allen Quincy is an ex-soldier living in Seattle, who has managed to survive years of serious PTSD by shrinking his life down to the smallest, most banal existence possible. The story opens with Quincy beginning to write a journal in a desperate bid to regain his sanity. His estranged wife has died, and he hasn’t seen his children or brother in years. Into his world strides a woman wearing red heels who rips the lid off his careful and controlled strategy, putting his very life at risk. From the beginning, Casper deftly seeds the possibility of redemption for a man on the edge of his own destruction. **Nominated for 2017 Philip K. Dick Award** 4 YOUNG ADULT FICTION Agent: Allison Cohen Editor: Georgia McBride Month9Books (October 2017) Territories Sold: North America Format: Manuscript TUDOR ROSE By William H. Doyle Writing as W.H. Doyle, children’s author Bill Doyle has developed a proposed historical romance series for young adults. Two teenage best friends in 16th-century England, Sybille and Rose, find themselves on an exciting journey to the Queen’s court in the hope of being named ladies-in-waiting. They aren’t the only girls, however, who have their sights set on attending Her Majesty. Upon arriving to court, the girls realize they are up against more “worldly,” chic girls, among them mean-girl Avis. Soon, the grand hall is more like the hallway of a high school, with girls fighting for the attention of a dashing, young earl, amid parties fueled by drinking and sex. As the tension between Sybille and Avis heats up, the focus on Rose wanes, allowing her to turn her attention to more important matters – like getting close enough to the Queen to learn her secrets. Is she a spy? If so, for whom? Part mystery, part romance, TUDOR ROSE is an exciting new series. 5 FICTION Agent: Joseph Veltre Editor: Karen Kosztolnyik Scout Press (May 2017) Territories Sold: World English France (Sonatine) Poland (Prószyński) Format: Book THE PARTY By Robyn Harding The Party takes us behind the façade of the perfect family, exploring the secrets, betrayals and moral lapses the neighbors don’t see. Sweet sixteen. It’s a coming of age, a milestone, a rite of passage… Of course Jeff and Kim Sanders would throw a party for their daughter, Hannah. She was a good kid with good grades and nice friends. And it wasn’t a big, indulgent affair. It was just four girls coming over for pizza and cake, movies and a sleepover. What could possibly go wrong? But things did go wrong, horrifically wrong. When a tragic accident leaves one of the young guests disfigured, Jeff and Kim’s picture-book life in a wealthy San Francisco suburb begins to unravel. The injured girl’s mother, Lisa, files a lawsuit that turns friends into enemies, reveals dark secrets in the Sanders’ marriage, and exposes the truth about their perfect daughter, Hannah. Lisa’s determination to make the Sanders pay stems from a fierce love for her only child and Lisa’s own dark and damaged past. At school, Hannah must deal with the ugly aftermath as her peers turn on the victim, and she struggles to maintain her social standing while heeding her moral compass. Her popular best friend, Lauren, is losing herself to drugs, alcohol, and a relationship with an inappropriate older man. Then a shocking, horrifying act of desperation rocks their upscale world and brings the legal battle to a halt. And no one’s life will ever be the same… 6 MYSTERY/CRIME Agent: Allison Cohen Editor: Colleen Dunn Bate Prospect Park Books (March 2018) Territories Sold: World English Format: MS due 4/15/17 **Edgar Award-winning Author** HIROSHIMA BOY Book 7 in the Mas Arai Series By Naomi Hirahara The final book in the Edgar Award-winning Mas Arai mystery series, which finds an A-bomb survivor returning to Hiroshima in his old age only to find himself embroiled in in the mysterious death of a teenage boy. 7 NON-FICTION / SCIENCE Agent: Allison Cohen Editor: Tricia Boczkowski Crown Three Rivers (March 2017) Territories Sold: World English Spain (Urano) Germany (Kopp-Verlag) Previous Book Sold: Vietnam (Vietnam Intellectual Cooperati) Romania (Lifestyle Publishing SRL) Serbia (Albion Books) Taiwan (Eco Publishing) SURVIVING DEATH: A Journalist Germany (Kopp Verlang) Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife Bulgaria (Hermes) France (Le Maisnie) By Leslie Kean Brazil (Idea Editora) China (Mediatime Book, Beijing) Leslie Kean’s impeccably researched, page-turning investigation reveals Croatia (Planetopija) stunning and wide-ranging evidence suggesting that consciousness Spain (Urano) survives death. Here she continues her examination of unexplained phenomena that began with her provocative and controversial New York Times bestseller UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Format: Book Go on the Record. Kean explores the most compelling case studies involving young children reporting verifiable details from past lives, **NY Times Bestselling Author** contemporary mediums who seem to defy the boundaries of the brain and the material world, apparitions providing information about their lives on earth, and ordinary people who recount some of the most extraordinary near-death experiences ever recorded. Kean's first book, and her credibility as a seasoned and well-respected journalist, made people take notice of a topic that many considered implausible. This book will do the same—this time enriched by Kean’s reactions to her own perplexing experiences encountered while she probed the universal question concerning all of us: Is there life after death? 8 NON-FICTION Agent: Joseph Veltre Editor: Nancy Miller Bloomsbury (TK) Territories Sold: North America WONDERLAND Format: Proposal By Alexandra Lange Parents obsess over their children’s food, kindergarten curriculum, sports prowess, texting habits, drilling down on daily rituals as if one worksheet, one piano lesson might make all the difference. But the kitchens, classrooms, playing fields and bus stops in which kids eat, learn, run and chat are as important as the activities themselves. For too long, we have been paying attention to the picture and not the frame. From the first moment in children’s lives, environment shapes them. When you pick a wooden toy over a plastic one, enter the school through a primary-colored door, sink into the sandbox, you are making a choice for your children that will affect their behavior, values and health. Since the nineteenth century, designers, educators, sociologists and philosophers have made radical proposals for the materials, colors, dimensions and locations of children’s lives. Those ideas are still circulating today, along with contemporary schemes for wired classrooms, digital blocks and cities made for families. “Wonderland” will be a smart tour through this landscape, from the building block to the metropolis. It will appraise the physical elements of the modern child’s life through the work of teachers, gamers, psychologists and planners, with a historical eye to effects of products, materials, rooms, and paths on the development of the young, as well as how adult forces – war, crime, toxins and employment – create the need for those paths. 9 MEMOIR Agent: Joseph Veltre Editor: Julie Grau Spiegel & Grau (September 20, 2016) HarperCollins Canada Territories Sold: World English Format: Book BASED ON A TRUE STORY By Norm MacDonald Norm MacDonald is perhaps best known for his five seasons as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” (SNL). For three years, MacDonald anchored “Weekend Update,” SNL’s longest running recurring sketch. MacDonald also wrote for the popular ABC sitcom “Roseanne” and starred in “The Norm Show” from 1999 to 2001. Comedy Central named him #83 on the five part miniseries “100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time.” He is also noted as one of Conan O’Brien’s favorite and most frequent guests on his various talk shows. This is the story of his life in show business from his early days travelling the country doing stand-up, to moving to Hollywood to write on “Roseanne,” to his 3 ½ years at SNL and ignominious departure, to writing and starring in the cult classic “Dirty Work,” to having his own sitcom, to his many talk show appearances, to “Roasting Bob Saget.” It’s an outsider’s inside account of show business. 10 YOUNG ADULT Agent: Joseph Veltre Editor: Sara Sargent Simon Pulse (July 4, 2017) Territories Sold: World English Format: Book BOMBSHELL By Rowan Maness Joss is a sixteen-year-old girl Catholic school girl who finds escape from her stifled and traumatic reality by creating multiple online personas, each of whom enchant unsuspecting men.