foreign rights

London Book Fair 2018

www.thegernertco.com

fiction Bryan Camp, THE CITY OF LOST FORTUNES

The fate of New Orleans rests in the hands of a wayward grifter in this story of loss and re-birth after Hurricane Katrina.

Urban fantasy

Publisher: John Joseph Adams/HMH – April 17, 2018 Editor: John Joseph Adams Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Advanced Reader’s Copies

Pre-empted by John Joseph Adams for his eponymous imprint • UK rights snapped up by Titan Books

• Camp fashions a supernatural word barely hidden on the fringe of society in his debut novel. There isn’t a dull page… Anne Rice fans will enjoy this fresh view of supernatural life in New Orleans, while fans of Kim Harrison’s urban fantasy will have a new author to watch.” —Booklist ( Starred review) • "Camp’s fantasy reads like jazz, with multiple chaotic-seeming threads of deities, mortals, and destiny playing in harmony. This game of souls and fate is full of snarky dialogue, taut suspense, and characters whose glitter hides sharp fangs. […] Any reader who likes fantasy with a dash of the bizarre will enjoy this trip to the Crescent City."—Publishers Weekly • "Take a walk down wild card shark streets into a world of gods, lost souls, murder, and deep, dark magic. You might not come back from The City of Lost Fortunes, but you’ll enjoy the trip."—Richard Kadrey, bestselling author of the Sandman Slim series • “A deft and expansive fantasy imbued with real magic and wild plot turns.” —Kelly Link, the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy Award-winning author of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Get In Trouble

The post–Katrina New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes is a place haunted by its history and by the hurricane’s destruction, a place that is hoping to survive the rebuilding of its present long enough to ensure that it has a future. Street magician Jude Dubuisson is likewise burdened by his past and by the consequences of the storm, because he has a secret: the magical ability to find lost things, a gift passed down to him by the father he has never known—a father who just happens to be more than human. Jude has been lying low since the storm, which caused so many things to be lost that it played havoc with his magic, and he is hiding from his own power, his divine former employer, and a debt owed to the Fortune god of New Orleans. But his six-year retirement ends abruptly when the Fortune god is murdered and Jude is drawn back into the world he tried so desperately to leave behind. A world where he must find out who is responsible for the Fortune god’s death, uncover the plot that threatens the city’s soul, and discover what his talent for lost things has always been trying to show him: what it means to be his father’s son.

Bryan Camp is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop and the University of New Orleans’s MFA program. He started his first novel, The City of Lost Fortunes, in the back seat of his parents’ car as they evacuated the Crescent City during Hurricane Katrina.

• Sold to: Titan Books (UK & British Commonwealth)

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Juliet Grames, THE SEVEN OR EIGHT DEATHS OF STELLA FORTUNA

A warm-hearted and epic novel that lays bare the costs of migration and the iron fist of the patriarchy—but also of the love and devotion that can sustain a family through its generations.

Upmarket women’s fiction

Publisher: Ecco (US) – Spring 2019 / Hodder (UK&BC) – Spring 2019 Editor: Megan Lynch Agent: Sarah Burnes Material: Edited manuscript Spring 2018

Sold in a major deal in the US to Ecco at auction • Auctions in the UK, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Russia

Hundred-year-old Stella Fortuna sits alone in her house in Wethersfield, Connecticut, crocheting blankets and angrily ignoring her sister, Tina, who lives across the street. The sisters, once the best of friends, have not spoken for thirty years, not since The Accident—the eighth time Stella nearly died. But what unspeakable betrayal made Stella turn on her sister? Born in a mountaintop village in southern Italy, Stella and Tina had grown up in abject poverty in the years between the two World Wars, abandoned by their father, who had left to seek his fortune in L’America, and forced to drop out of school after first grade to work in the olive groves. Tough, vivacious, and fiercely loyal, the inseparable sisters were foils for each other, Stella precocious and charismatic, Tina obedient and hard-working. But as Stella suffered ever more serious near-death experiences—beginning in their childhood with the time she was burned by frying oil (“the eggplant attack”)—the girls’ beloved mother, Assunta, became convinced her eldest daughter was cursed, a victim of the Evil Eye or a malevolent ghost. But what was really trying to kill Stella Fortuna, eight (or maybe seven) different times?

Now, after a century of trauma, Stella has turned on those who she once thought loved her most. It is up to the family historian to unravel the life and deaths of Stella Fortuna and to connect the inexplicable dots in her dramatic story—to suggest, finally, a redemption of the battle-scarred and misunderstood woman known now to the family as “crazy Stella.”

Juliet Grames is Associate Publisher at Soho Press, where she also acquires and edits the critically acclaimed Soho Crime imprint. She has written for Words Without Borders and Anderbro, which published her story “Monologue,” winner of the Glass Woman Prize, runner-up for the OpenCity Trophy, and storySouth Million Writers Notable Story. She was born outside Hartford, Connecticut, into a tight- knit Italian-American family.

• Sold to: Hodder (UK & BC), Droemer (Germany), Luitingh-Sijthoff (Netherlands), Eksmo (Russia), HarperCollins (Italy), Otwarte (Poland), Alianza de Novelas (World Spanish), Alma Littera (Lithuania)

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Alex Grecian, THE SAINT OF WOLVES AND BUTCHERS

From the best-selling author of The Yard, a chilling contemporary thriller about an enigmatic hunter on the trail of a Nazi who has secretly continued his devilish work in America.

Contemporary thriller

Publisher: Putnam (US) – April 17, 2018 / Michael Joseph (UK&BC) – April 17, 2018 Editor: Mark Tavani Agent: Seth Fishman Materials: Advanced Reader’s Copies

The new standalone thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Yard

• “With his artistry of painting a sense of place and time, Grecian delivers a compelling, twisty story driven by fascinating characters. The Saint of Wolves and Butchers makes breathless, gripping, up-all-night reading.” —Nora Roberts • “Alex Grecian is a consummate storyteller, and The Saint of Wolves and Butchers may be his finest work to date. Diabolical plotting, compelling characters, and razor-honed prose drive this thriller of old secrets and high stakes across eras and a beautifully rendered American landscape. Don't miss it.” —Michael Koryta • "With Alex Grecian, you're in the hands of a professional. Deft prose, a steady drip of suspense, a blood-soaked secret from another time: The Saint of Wolves and Butchers has what you want in a Grecian thriller. My prescription? Purchase and consume immediately." —Gregg Hurwitz, New York Times bestselling author of Hellbent and Orphan X • “The Saints of Wolves and Butchers has it all—a vicious old Nazi hiding out in rural America; a tracker hard on his trail; and a State Trooper and single mom with a lot to lose, willing to put it all on the line. Add a hot-engine plot, dialogue that would make Elmore Leonard smile, and some Fast and Furious action and you have the perfect storm of a story: a can't-put-it-down-until-I find-out-what-happens-next thriller.” —Lorenzo Carcaterra, New York Times bestselling author of Sleepers

Travis Roan and his dog Bear are hunters: they travel the world pursuing evildoers in order to bring them to justice. They have now come to Kansas on the trail of Rudolph Bormann, a Nazi doctor and concentration camp administrator who snuck into the US under the name Rudy Goodman in the 1950s and has at last been identified. Travis quickly learns that Goodman has powerful friends who will go to any length to protect the Nazi; what he doesn't know is that Goodman has furtively continued his diabolical work, amassing a congregation of followers who believe he possesses God-like powers. Caught between these men is Kansas State Trooper Skottie Foster, an African American woman and a good cop who must find a way to keep peace in her district--until she realizes the struggle between Roan and Bormann will put her and her family in grave peril.

Alex Grecian is the nationally bestselling author of The Yard, The Black Country, The Devil's Workshop, The Harvest Man, Lost and Gone Forever, and The Saint of Wolves and Butchers, as well as the critically acclaimed graphic novels Proof and Rasputin. Grecian lives in Kansas, with his wife and son.

• Sold to: Michael Joseph (UK & BC)

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Lisa Halliday, ASYMMETRY

A singularly inventive and unforgettable debut novel about love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art

Literary fiction

Publisher: Simon & Schuster (US) – February 6, 2018 / Granta (UK&BC) – March 1, 2018 Editor: Ira Silverberg / Bella Lacey Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb Material: Finished books

UK & BC rights to Granta at auction • Halliday is a 2017 Whiting Award winner • Chosen by The Observer as a “new face of fiction for 2018” • Major NYT author profile starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist

• “Halliday’s prose is so strange and startlingly smart that its mere existence seems like commentary on the state of fiction... Halliday has written, somehow all at once, a transgressive roman a clef, a novel of ideas and a politically engaged work of metafiction.” —The New York Times Book Review • "Exquisite...The moment “Asymmetry” reaches its perfect ending, it’s all the reader can do to return to the beginning in awe, to discover how Halliday upturned the story again and again." —Washington Post • “A brilliant and complex examination of power dynamics in love and war.” —Wall Street Journal • "Striking... A sharp examination of the unequal power dynamic between men and women, innocence and experience, fame and aspiration... That it leaves the reader wondering is a mark of its success." — Guardian (UK)

Told in three distinct and uniquely compelling sections, Asymmetry explores the imbalances that spark and sustain many of our most dramatic human relations: inequities in age, power, talent, wealth, fame, geography, and justice. “Folly,” tells the story of Alice, a young American editor, and her relationship with the famous and much older writer Ezra Blazer. By contrast, “Madness” is narrated by Amar, an Iraqi-American man who, on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, is detained by immigration officers and spends the last weekend of 2008 in a holding room in Heathrow. These two seemingly disparate stories gain resonance as their perspectives interact and overlap, with yet new implications for their relationship revealed in an unexpected coda. A stunning debut from a rising literary star, Asymmetry is truly original work that poses arresting questions about the very nature of fiction itself.

Lisa Halliday has worked as a freelance editor and translator in Milan, where she lives with her husband. Her short story 'Stump Louie' appeared in The Paris Review in 2005, and she received a Whiting Award for Fiction in 2017. Asymmetry is her first novel.

• Sold to: Granta (UK & BC), Gallimard (France), Atlas-Contact (Netherlands), Hanser (Germany), Feltrinelli (Italy), Alfaguara (Spain), Politikens Forlag (Denmark), Domingo (Turkey), Norstedts (Sweden)

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Michael Harvey, PULSE

A superhero origin story draws on mysteries of the universe to investigate a murder that defies all expectations

Metaphysical thriller

Publisher: Ecco US / Bloomsbury UK – October 23, 2018 Editor: Zack Wagman Agent: David Gernert Material: 1st pass pages

Optioned for film by 21 Laps, the company behind Strangers Things and Arrival

Boston, 1976. In a small apartment above Kenmore Square, sixteen-year-old Daniel Fitzsimmons is listening to his landlord describe a seemingly insane theory about invisible pulses of light and energy that can be harnessed by the human mind. He longs to laugh with his brother Harry about it, but Harry doesn’t know he’s there—he would never approve of Daniel living on his own. None of that matters, though, because the next night Harry, a Harvard football star, is murdered in an alley.

Detectives “Bark” Jones and Tommy Dillon are assigned to the case. The veteran partners thought they’d seen it all, but they are stunned when Daniel wanders into the crime scene. Even stranger, Daniel claims to have known the details of his brother’s murder before it ever happened. The subsequent investigation leads the detectives deep into the Fitzsimmons brothers’ past. They find heartbreaking loss, sordid characters, and metaphysical conspiracies. Even on the rough streets of 1970s Boston, Jones and Dillon have never had a case like this.

Pulse is a novel laced with real danger and otherworldly twists—a master class by an endlessly gifted writer.

Michael Harvey is the author of seven previous novels, including Brighton and The Chicago Way. He’s also a journalist and documentarian whose work has won multiple News & Documentary Emmys, two Primetime Emmy nominations, and an Academy Award nomination. Raised in Boston, he now lives in Chicago.

• Sold to: Bloomsbury (UK & BC), Nutrimenti (Italy) • Option publishers: Czarna Owca (Poland), QingDao (China), Gabo (Hungary), WeLearn (Thailand)

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Maria Dahvana Headley, THE MERE WIFE

From the New York Times bestselling author comes a modern retelling of the literary classic Beowulf, set in American suburbia as two mothers―a house wife and a battle-hardened veteran―fight to protect those they love

Literary allegory

Publisher: MCD (Farrar Straus & Giroux) – July 17, 2018 Editor: Sean McDonald Agent: Stephanie Cabot Material: Advanced readers copies

For many people, the suburb of Herot Hall is paradise. Picket fences divide buildings―high and gabled―and the community is entirely self-sustaining. Each house has its own fireplace, each fireplace is fitted with a container of lighter fluid, and wildflowers seed themselves in neat rows. But for those who live surreptitiously along Herot Hall’s periphery, the subdivision is a fortress guarded by an intense network of gates, surveillance cameras, and motion-activated lights.

For Willa—the wife of Roger Herot, heir of Herot Hall—life moves at a charmingly slow pace. She flits between mommy groups, playdates, cocktail hour, and dinner parties, always with her son, Dylan, in tow. Meanwhile, in a cave in the mountains just beyond the limits of Herot Hall lives young Gren and his mother, Dana, a former soldier who gave birth as if by chance. Dana didn’t want Gren, didn’t plan Gren, and doesn’t know how she got Gren, but when she returned from war, there he was. When Gren, unaware of the borders erected to keep him at bay, ventures into Herot Hall and runs off with Dylan, Dana’s and Willa’s worlds collide.

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author & editor, most recently of the novels Magonia, Aerie, Queen of Kings, and the memoir The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of this book was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn. www.mariadahvanaheadley.com.

• Sold to: Scribe (UK & BC), Keter Publishing (Israel)

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John Larison, WHISKEY WHEN WE’RE DRY

From a blazing new voice in fiction, a gritty and lyrical American epic about a young woman who disguises herself as a boy and heads west

Literary western

Publisher: Viking – August 21, 2018 Editor: Andrea Schulz Agent: David Gernert & Ellen Coughtrey Material: Advanced Reader’s Copies

"An orphan girl straight out of a Gillian Welch song, betrayed in every way imaginable by the brutality that 'won the West,' is left no way to hew a family or honor but to become a virtuoso cross-dressed killer of Manifest Destiny's men. As Jessilyn Harney takes on the great lies and liars with lyrical violence, her voice takes flight, becoming a sustained, forlornly beautiful, mind- bending aria for our age." – David James Duncan, author of The River Why

In the spring of 1885, seventeen-year-old Jessilyn Harney finds herself orphaned and alone on her family's homestead. Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess's quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah—dead or alive.

Wrestling with her brother's outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.

Told in Jess's wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We're Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself--and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.

John Larison earned an MFA from Oregon State University in 2007. During the eight years he was writing Whiskey When We're Dry, he worked as a fly-fishing guide, a college writing instructor, and a freelance contributor to outdoor magazines. He lives with his family in rural Oregon.

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Amy Meyerson, THE BOOKSHOP OF YESTERDAYS

A tenderhearted debut about a young woman who inherits her late uncle’s bookshop—and a scavenger hunt of literary clues hidden in the shelves that reveal a dark family secret

Women’s fiction

Publisher: Park Row Books (Harlequin/HarperCollins) – June 12, 2018 Editor: Erika Imranyi Agent: Stephanie Cabot Material: Advanced Reader’s Copies

• “This delightful, propulsive debut is part cozy literary mystery, part family drama, and 100% heart. [A] page- turner in the best sense; book lovers…will be delighted.” —J. Ryan Stradal, New York Times bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest • “The Bookshop of Yesterdays captivates with its emotional honesty, fully realized characters, and precision of detail. The notion of a family’s loss, love, and healing gets an astute exploration; the deftly handled plot keeps the pages turning. Amy Meyerson is a writer to watch.” —Diane McKinney-Whetstone, bestselling author of Tumbling and Lazaretto • “A wistful story of how the world of books can weave itself into the tapestry of our lives, Meyerson’s beautiful debut is about love, family, and secrets, and a reminder that the one thing we can never escape is the past. Her affection for all things literary pours forth on every page and through a cast of characters every book lover will embrace.” —Charlie Lovett, New York Times bestselling author of The Bookman’s Tale and The Lost Book of the Grail

Miranda Brooks grew up in the stacks of her eccentric Uncle Billy’s bookstore solving the fun scavenger hunts he created just for her. But on Miranda’s 12th birthday, Billy has a mysterious falling-out with her mother, and Miranda doesn’t hear from him again until 16 years later when she receives unexpected news: Billy has died and left her Prospero Books, which is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.

When Miranda returns home to Los Angeles and Prospero Books—now as its owner—she finds clues that Billy has hidden for her inside novels on the store’s shelves, in locked drawers, in mailed packages. Miranda finds herself drawn into one final scavenger hunt meeting people from Billy’s past, people whose stories reveal the terrible secret that tore her family apart.

The Bookshop of Yesterdays is a lyrical story about family, love, and the healing power of community. It’s a love letter to reading and bookstores, and a testament to how our histories shape who we become.

Amy Meyerson lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at the University of Southern California, where she completed her graduate work. This is her first novel.

• Sold to: HarperCollins (Germany), Casa Editrice Nord (Italy), Laguna (Serbia)

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Jennifer Miller & Jason Feifer, MR. NICE GUY

A deliciously entertaining battle of the sexes set in the glossy magazine world of New York City

Commercial Women’s Fiction

Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin – October 16, 2018 Editor: Leslie Gelbman Agent: Libby McGuire Material: Advanced Reader’s Copies

• "Mr. Nice Guy is The Devil Wears Prada meets Sex and the City—a page-turner that's part diary, part coming-of-age story. I tore through it in one weekend!" —Carolyn Kylstra, Editor-in-Chief, Self • "In Mr. Nice Guy, one brave couple does what most of us would never dare: give brutally honest feedback about last night's sex. The result is an incredibly funny, fiendishly smart, deliciously NSFW romp you won't be able to put down."—Sascha de Gersdorff, Executive Editor, Cosmopolitan • "An addictively entertaining and deliciously sexy debut, it will win you over from the very first page. One of the best of the year!" —Julie Garwood, New York Times bestselling author • "This pitch-perfect take on modern romance is far more than a guilty pleasure. It's also a timely battle of the sexes, taking aim at deep-seated assumptions about who wields the power—in the corner office, and in the bedroom." —Stacy London

With dreams of becoming a famous writer, small-town guy Lucas Callahan moves to New York and snags an entry- level job at Empire magazine. One night at a bar, he meets a gorgeous brunette who takes him home...

Carmen Kelly wanted to be a hard-hitting journalist, only to find herself cast in the role of Empire's sex columnist thanks to the boys' club mentality of Manhattan magazines. Her latest piece is about an unsatisfying encounter with an awkward guy, who was handsome enough but horribly inexperienced in bed.

Lucas only discovers that he’s slept with the infamous Carmen Kelly when he reads her printed take-down. Humiliated and furious, he pens a rebuttal and signs it, "Nice Guy." Empire publishes it, and the pair of columns go viral. So the magazine makes an arrangement: Each week, Carmen and Lucas will sleep together...and write dueling accounts of their sexual exploits. It’s the most provocative sexual relationship any couple has had, but the columnist-lovers are soon engaging in more than a war of words: they become seduced by the city’s rich and powerful, tempted by fame, and more attracted to each other than they’re willing to admit. In the end, they will have to choose between ambition, love, and the consequences of total honesty.

Jennifer Miller is the author of three books. Her debut novel, The Year of the Gadfly (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), was called “a darkly comic romp” by the Washington Post and “entirely addictive” by Glamour. Jason Feifer is editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine. His humor writing has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney’s, The Awl, and Shape. They are married and live in Brooklyn.

• Sold to: Le Cherche-Midi (France), Longanesi (Italy), Editora Intrinseca (Brazil)

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Sam Miller, BLACKFISH CITY

A remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—SciFi novel about political corruption, organized crime, and technology run amok from a Shirley Jackson Award winner.

Science Fiction

Publisher: Ecco (US) – April 17, 2018 / Orbit (UK) – April 19, 2018 Editor: Zack Wagman Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Advanced Reader’s Copies

• “An ambitious, imaginative, and big-hearted dystopian ensemble… Miller has crafted a thriller that unflinchingly examines the ills of urban capitalism… Rendered in poetic interludes.”—Publisher’s Weekly starred review • “A floating Arctic city; nano-bonded orcas and polar bears; an Earth violently reshaped by the mistakes we’re making right now… I haven’t been this swept away by imagination and worldbuilding since Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. A gorgeous, queer, muscular novel.” –Carmen Maria Machado, National Book Award finalist for Her Body and Other Parties • “Miller gives us an incisive and beautifully written story of love, revenge, and the power (and failure) of family in a scarily plausible future. Blackfish City simmers with menace and heartache, suspense and wonder.” – Ann Leckie, New York Times bestselling author and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards • “Miller draws a fascinating post-collapse future, mixing low-life and high concept SF to create something very different.” – Adrian Tchaikovsky, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author • “A marvelously intricate mosaic of human stories and survival in a city afloat in the wreckage of the anthropocene.” – Paul McAuley, Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning author

After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges: crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population. When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves.

Blackfish City powerfully explores the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

Sam Miller’s work has been nominated for the Nebula Award and Theodore Sturgeon Award and he has won the Shirley Jackson Award. He is a graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop and the author of the highly-acclaimed Young Adult novel The Art of Starving (HarperCollins).

• Sold to: Orbit (UK&BC), Dobrovsky (Czech Republic)

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Liz Moore, LONG BRIGHT RIVER

A mix of Lush Life by Richard Price, Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell, and the work of Tana French – a novel that is as suspenseful as it is emotionally powerful.

Upmarket fiction

Publisher: Riverhead - 2019 Editor: Sarah McGrath Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Manuscript

North American rights sold in 13-way auction resulting in a seven-figure deal • • Riverhead will launch as a super lead title in Autumn 2019 • Moore has won the Medici Book Club Prize, Philadelphia's Athenaeum Literary Award, the 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, and was nominated for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Set in contemporary Philadelphia, where the author has lived for nine years, the novel tells the haunting story of two sisters: one is suffering from an addiction to heroin and opioids, has turned to sex work to fund her addiction, and has recently gone missing at the same time that a string of connected homicides is occurring in her neighborhood. The other is a police officer who is struggling as a single parent of a young child while simultaneously searching for her sister, both on and off the job.

Liz Moore's own family has a long, multigenerational struggle with addiction so this has been a topic of conversation in her life since she understood what addiction was. In 2009, a seed for this novel was planted not long after she moved to Philadelphia where she teamed up with a photographer making portraits of the residents of a Philly neighborhood that has been identified as a center of heroin and opioid use in the US. Liz's interviews and writing about the people in this community has made an indelible mark on her which is evident in this powerful new novel.

Liz Moore's short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in venues such as Tin House, The New York Times, and Narrative Magazine. She is the winner of the Medici Book Club Prize and Philadelphia's Athenaeum Literary Award. After winning a 2014 Rome Prize in Literature, she spent 2014-15 at the American Academy in Rome, completing her third novel. She is the author of Heft and The Unseen World, both recipients of high acclaim.

• Sold to: Eksmo (Russia) • Option publishers: Windmill (UK & British Commonwealth), Carmot Press (World Spanish), Albatros Media (Czech Republic), Soso Books (Korea) and Guangxi (Simplified Chinese).

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Sylvain Neuvel, ONLY HUMAN

World War Z meets The Martian in this explosive SciFi thriller that completes Sylvain Neuvel’s acclaimed Themis Files trilogy.

SciFi thriller

Publisher: Del Rey (US) – May 1, 2018 / Michael Joseph (UK) – May 3, 2018 Editor: Mark Tavani Agent: Seth Fishman Material: 2nd pass pages

North American rights sold in a strong six-figure deal • More than 100,000 copies sold of The Themis Files series • 20 foreign publishers for the series • ONLY HUMAN completes the trilogy

Praise for Sylvain Neuvel’s previous novels: • “One of the most promising series kickoffs in recent memory"—NPR • "Pure, unadulterated literary escapism"—Kirkus Reviews • “A luminous conspiracy yarn that shoots for (and lands among) the stars.” –Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Red Rising trilogy

In her childhood, Rose Franklin accidentally discovered a giant metal hand buried beneath the ground outside Deadwood, South Dakota. As an adult, Dr. Rose Franklin led the team that uncovered the rest of the body parts which together form Themis: a powerful robot of mysterious alien origin. She, along with linguist Vincent, pilot Kara, and the unnamed Interviewer, protected the Earth from geopolitical conflict and alien invasion alike. Now, after nearly ten years on another world, Rose returns to find her old alliances forfeit and the planet in shambles. And she must pick up the pieces of the Earth Defense Corps as her own friends turn against each other.

Sylvain Neuvel is the author of Sleeping Giants and Waking Gods. He is a linguist and translator based in Montreal. He is at work on an R2-D2 replica and his next novel. www.neuvel.net

• Sold to: Michael Joseph (UK & BC), Heyne (Germany), Le Livre de Poche (France), Brombergs (Sweden), Euromedia (Czech), LIKE Publishing (Finland), Beijing Huaxia (China), Companhia das Letras (Brazil) • Option publishers: Stella Maris (Spain), Pegasus (Turkey), Moonye (Korea), Muza (Poland), Art Grup Editorial (Romania), Karakter (Netherlands), Agave (Hungary), Tokyo Sogensha (Japan), Editorial Presenca (Portugal), WeLearn (Thailand), Paikese Kirjastus (Estonia), Eksmo (Russia), Ikar (Slovak)

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Charles Soule, THE ORACLE YEAR

A fast-paced debut about a man who wakes to 108 visions of specific predictions of the future, and monetizes those predictions to become the most famous person in the world —perfect for fans of Joe Hill and Brad Meltzer.

Thriller

Publisher: Harper Perennial – April 3, 2018 Editor: Sara Nelson Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Finished books

Amazon Debut Pick for April 2018 • Indie Next Pick • Lead title for Harper Perennial • Nine foreign sales • TV deal with Tomorrow Studios (Snowpiercer)

• “Wildly entertaining… The relentless pacing, richly developed characters, and brilliant ending make this apocalyptic speculative thriller an undeniable page-turner.” –Publishers Weekly • “Here’s my prediction: this book will seep into your soul. The Oracle Year is about knowing the future—and what you do with that knowledge. As you meet Will Dando, you can’t help but reevaluate yourself. Get ready for the best kind of fun.”—Brad Meltzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Inner Circle • “It’s a wonderfully mysterious thriller that proves Soule is as much a master of prose as he is of comic book script.”—Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Invasive and Blackbirds

When an unassuming Manhattan bassist named Will Dando awakens from a dream one morning with 108 predictions about the future in his head, he rapidly finds himself the most powerful man in the world. Protecting his anonymity by calling himself the Oracle, he sets up a heavily guarded website with the help of his friend Hamza to selectively announce his revelations. In no time, global corporations are offering him millions for exclusive access, eager to profit from his prophecies. But Will’s also making a lot of enemies. Legions of cyber spies are unleashed to hack the Site, and the best man-hunters money can buy are deployed not only to unmask the Oracle but to take him out of the game entirely. It’s all Will can do to survive, elude exposure, and protect those he loves long enough to use his knowledge to save the world.

Delivering fast-paced adventure on a global scale as well as sharp-witted satire on our concepts of power and faith, Marvel writer Charles Soule's audacious debut novel takes readers on a rollicking ride where it's impossible to predict what will happen next.

Charles Soule is a New York Times bestselling author of novels, comics, screenplays and stories of all types. Learn more at www.charlessoule.com.

• Sold to: Goldmann (Germany), Grijalbo (Spain), Editrice Nord (Italy), Editora Record (Brazil), AST (Russia), Euromedia (Czech Republic), Ikar (Slovak Republic), KM Book Group (Ukraine), April (Turkey)

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Olen Steinhauer, THE MIDDLEMAN

From the master of suspense, this stunning standalone follows the mysterious rise of a domestic terrorist group—and the secrets left in the wake of their dramatic fall

Espionage thriller

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – August 7, 2018 Editor: Kelley Ragland Agent: Stephanie Cabot Material: Advanced Readers Copies

The newest espionage novel by New York Times bestselling author of The Tourist

Olen Steinhauer's latest gripping novel traces the rise and fall of a domestic left-wing terrorist group, the Massive Brigade.

It begins with the disappearances: hundreds—mostly young people—who cut their credit cards, toss out their cell phones, and abandon jobs, homes, and loved ones. Then come the rumors: that the disappeared have gone underground and joined the Massive Brigade, a left-wing group led by two revolutionaries who are forming The Resistance against the elitist, capitalist powers of America. And then comes the war—but not quite the war the Brigade expects.

Told from the individual perspectives of an FBI agent, an undercover agent within the group, a convert to the terrorist organization, and a writer on the edges of the whole affair, this is another tightly wound thriller, and an intimate exploration of the people behind the politics.

Olen Steinhauer, the New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including The Middleman, All the Old Knives, and The Cairo Affair, is a Dashiell Hammett Award winner, a two-time Edgar award finalist, and has also been shortlisted for the Anthony, the Macavity, the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and the Barry awards. Raised in Virginia, he lives in New York and Budapest, Hungary.

• Sold to: Karl Blessing Verlag (Germany), Piemme (Italy), Tchelet (Israel) • Option publishers: Editora Record (Brazil), Euromedia (Czech Republic), Ambo/Anthos (Netherlands), Presses de la Cité (France), Iwanami Shoten (Japan), Random House (South Korea), Czarna Owca (Poland), Bertrand (Portugal), WeLearn (Thailand)

www.thegernertco.com 15 non-fiction

David Auerbach, BITWISE: A Life in Code

An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument demonstrating how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and who we are.

Memoir

Publisher: Pantheon – August 14, 2018 Editor: Dan Frank Agent: Sarah Burnes Material: 1st pass pages

A timely look at how algorithms and computers are coarsening human life from a National Magazine Award-nominated writer and software engineer.

• "Very attractive (in all senses). The sentences resemble...something both plain and clear, like a Shaker desk--a kind of generous transparency, and about things that are not transparent at all." —John Crowley • "David Auerbach's Bitwise is a book like no other--a profound memoir, a manifesto, and warning about the digital world he had a hand in making, and which is now remaking us in turn.” —Jordan Ellenberg, author of How Not to Be Wrong • “Bitwise is a delightful journey through the history of personal computing. It succeeds brilliantly at conveying what it's like to be a coder and exploding common stereotypes. I couldn't stop reading.” — Scott Aaronson

As we engineer ever-more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies--precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbach's thoughtful ode to the computer codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child, and a reflection of how he's both experienced and written the algorithms that have come to taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior — and compel us to do the same. With a philosopher's sense of inquiry and an engineer's eye, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his schooling as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and then to software built to sift through Google's data stores. His unsettling conclusion — that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives — is inescapable.

David Auerbach is a National Magazine Award-nominated writer and software engineer. He previously worked for Google and Microsoft. He has contributed to The Daily Beast, Slate, The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, n+1, Bookforum, the MIT Technology Review, and many other publications. He lives in New York and blogs at waggish.org.

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Judy Batalion, DAUGHTERS OF THE RESISTANCE: Valor, Fury and the Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos

This propulsive and timely narrative history of female resistance during World War II is an unforgettable story about feminism, female friendship and revolt.

History

Publisher: Morrow US / Virago UK - 2020 Editor: Rachel Kahan / Lennie Goodings Agent: Alia Hanna Habib Material: Proposal

Film rights pre-empted by Steven Spielberg • North American rights pre-empted by Morrow • Rights sold in 14 foreign deals either via pre-empt or multi-party auctions.

While doing research in the British Library, Judy Batalion, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, discovered an extraordinary book. Written in Yiddish and published in 1946 though now long out of print, Women in the Ghettos contained the lost accounts of dozens of young Jewish women who fought in the resistance against the Nazis. The “ghetto girls” paid off Gestapo guards, hid revolvers in loaves of bread and jars of marmalade, helped build systems of underground bunkers. They flirted with Nazis, bought them off with wine, whiskey and home cooking, and shot and killed them. They helped the sick and taught the kids, they bombed German train lines and blew up Vilna’s water supply. While Judy grew up surrounded by stories from the Holocaust, she’d never read stories like these. She’s not alone in that: the tale of Jewish women who fought the Nazis is virtually unknown and the role of women in the original “resistance” is still widely under reported.

There has been no book in the English language that brings together the incredible and integral stories of Jewish female resistance fighters. A propulsive narrative history Daughters of the Resistance will at last tell the true story of these incredible women.

Judy Batalion is the author of White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess In Between. She has written for the New York Times, Vogue, the Washington Post and many other publications. Prior to her writing career, she was an academic and is fluent in both Yiddish and Hebrew.

• Sold to: Virago (UK & BC), Piper (Germany), Les Arénes (France), Ambo/Anthos (The Netherlands), Mondadori (Italy), Seix Barral, (World Spanish), Natur & Kultur (Sweden), Gummerus (Finland), Record (Brazil), Planeta (Portugal), Znak (Poland), Yedioth (Israel), Libri (Hungary), AST (Russia)

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Merve Emre, THE PERSONALITY BROKERS: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing

An unprecedented history of the personality test conceived a century ago by a mother and her daughter – fiction writers with no formal training in psychology – and how it insinuated itself into boardrooms, classroom and beyond around the world.

History / Psychology

Publisher: Doubleday US / William Collins UK – September 11, 2018 Editor: Yaniv Soha Agent: Alia Hanna Habib Material: Awaiting 1st pass pages

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 100 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types--extraverts vs. introverts, thinkers vs. feelers--has inspired television shows, online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. And yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results--no less account for its success. How did Myers-Briggs, a homegrown multiple choice questionnaire, infiltrate our workplaces, our relationships, our Internet, our lives?

First conceived in the 1920s by the mother-daughter team of Katherine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, a pair of devoted homemakers, novelists, and amateur psychoanalysts, Myers-Briggs was designed to bring the gospel of Carl Jung to the masses. But it would take on a life entirely its own, reaching from the smoke-filled boardrooms of mid-century New York to Berkeley, California, where it was administered to some of the twentieth century's greatest creative minds. It would travel across the world to London, Paris, Rome Berlin, Moscow, Mumbai and Tokyo, until it could be found just as easily in elementary schools, nunneries, and wellness retreats as in the closed-door corporate training sessions of today.

Drawing from original reporting and never-before-published documents, The Personality Brokers takes a critical look at the personality indicator that became a cultural icon and examines our attempts to grasp, categorize, and quantify our personalities. Surprising and absorbing, the book, like the test at its heart, considers the timeless question: What makes you you?

Merve Emre is Associate Professor of English at Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.

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Sarah Kessler, GIGGED: The Gig Economy, the End of the Job and the Future of Work

How a generation of web-based freelancers is revolutionizing the world of work.

Business

Publisher: St. Martins Press / RH Business Books UK – June 12, 2018 Editor: Tim Bartlett Agent: Alia Hanna Habib Material: 1st pass pages

• "With deep reporting and graceful storytelling, her analysis is both astute and nuanced, making GIGGED essential reading for anyone interested in the future of work." ―Daniel H. Pink, author of When and Drive • "Sarah Kessler's wonderful book offers unprecedented illumination of the promise, and the peril, of the gig economy by taking a deep and intimate dive into the day-to-day lives of the workers who rely on it. The resulting insights are important and often troubling." ―Martin Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future • “In the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, Sarah Kessler goes behind the statistics to tell the stories of people making a living (sometimes just scraping by) as gig economy workers. Kessler writes like a dream. If you want to know how work is changing and how you too must change to keep up, you must read this book." ―Dan Lyons, New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted

Over the past five years, digital technology has created a revolutionary new way to work – one that might just make traditional jobs obsolete. A generation of freelancers are building their working lives around small tasks sourced online: from driving taxis to cleaning houses, developing software to consulting for investment banks. They are at the front line of the gig economy. Gigged uncovers a world of dizzying contrasts, where the best-off have unprecedented professional freedom, while the worst-off lose out on job security, holidays and benefits. It might just change the way you think about the future of work.

Sarah Kessler is a reporter at Quartz, where she writes about the future of work. Before joining Quartz in 2016, she covered the gig economy as a senior writer at Fast Company and managed startup coverage at Mashable. Her reporting has been cited by The Washington Post, New York Magazine, and NPR.

• Sold to: Random House Business Books (UK & BC)

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Porochista Khakpour, SICK: A Memoir

An honest, beautifully rendered memoir of chronic illness, misdiagnosis, addiction, and the myth of full recovery.

Memoir

Publisher: HarperPerennial – June 5, 2018 Editor: Laura Brown Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Advanced Readers Copies

Featured on 10+ “most anticipated reads of 2018” lists including Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, The Rumpus, The Millions and more.

• “Humane, searching, and unapologetic, Sick is about the thin lines and vast distances between illness and wellness, healing and suffering, the body and the self. Khakpour takes us all the way in on her struggle toward health with an intelligence and intimacy that moved, informed, and astonished me.” —Cheryl Strayed, bestselling author of Wild • “This is a story of towering frustrations written so beautifully that through the weird alchemy of art it ends up lifting the reader’s spirits. To the list of brilliant fiction writers penning timeless memoirs— Nabokov, McBride, Wright, Styron, Ward, Gay, both Wolffs, to name a few—we now indelibly add the name Khakpour.” —Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves

For as long as writer Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. Several drug addictions, three major hospitalizations, and over $100,000 later, she finally had a diagnosis: late-stage Lyme disease. Sick is Khakpour's arduous, emotional journey—as a woman, a writer, and a lifelong sufferer of undiagnosed health problems—through the chronic illness that perpetually left her a victim of anxiety, living a life stymied by an unknown condition. Khakpour guides the reader through her illness by way of the locations that changed her course—New York, LA, New Mexico, and Germany—as she meditates on both the physical and psychological impacts of uncertainty, and the eventual challenge of accepting the diagnosis she had searched for over the course of her adult life. Sick is a candid, illuminating narrative of hope and uncertainty, boldly examining the deep impact of illness on one woman's life.

Porochista Khakpour is the author of the Sick as well as the novels The Last Illusion (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Sons and Other Flammable Objects (Grove, 2007). Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, Al Jazeera America, Bookforum, Slate, Salon, Spin, CNN, The Daily Beast, Elle, and many other publications around the world. Born in Tehran and raised in the Los Angeles area, she lives in New York City’s Harlem.

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Annie Lowrey, GIVE PEOPLE MONEY: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World

A brilliantly reported, global look at Universal Basic Income—a stipend given to every citizen, no strings attached—and why it might be the answer for our age of rising inequality.

Economics

Publisher: Crown (US) – July 10, 2018 / WH Allen (UK) – July 12, 2018 Editor: Amanda Cook Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb Material: Advanced Readers Copies

Sold to Crown for six-figures at auction • UK deal with WH Allen • Deals in China and Taiwan

Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with no strings attached and nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and discussed policy ideas of our time. The founder of Facebook, President Obama’s chief economist, Canada and Finland’s governments, conservative and labor movements’ leading intellectual lights—all are seriously debating versions of a UBI.

In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey looks at the global UBI movement. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor. Lowrey also examines the challenges the movement faces: contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing.

The UBI movement calls into question our deepest intuitions about what we owe each other yet as Lowrey persuasively shows, giving people money is not just a solution to problems, but a better foundation for society in this age of marvels.

Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor for The Atlantic, where she covers economic policy. She is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and NPR. She is a former writer for the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and Slate, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she lives in Washington D.C. with her husband, Ezra Klein.

• Sold to: WH Allen (UK & BC), China CITIC (China), Business Week Publications (Taiwan)

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David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, ROOM TO DREAM: A Life

The extraordinary, highly anticipated memoir from visionary filmmaker David Lynch

Autobiography/memoir

Publisher: Random House (US) / Canongate (UK) – June 12, 2018 Editor: Ben Greenberg Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb Material: Designed pages expected Spring 2018

North American rights to Random House in a major deal • UK & BC rights pre-empted by Canongate for six figures • New Twin Peaks series premiered in 2017 • 20 foreign deals • Jacket and title lettering designed by David Lynch • 40 black & white photographs chosen by David Lynch from his personal collection

An unprecedented look into the personal and creative life of David Lynch—the visionary filmmaker, artist, and creator of Twin Peaks—through his words and those of his colleagues, friends, and family.

In this unique hybrid of biography and memoir that’s as unusual as the man himself, Lynch opens up for the first time about a life lived in pursuit of his incredibly singular vision and the many heartaches and struggles he’s faced to bring his unorthodox projects to fruition—sometimes successful, sometimes not. Lynch’s lyrical, intensely intimate, and wholly unfiltered personal reflections riff off of preceding biographical sections, written by close collaborator Kristine McKenna and based on more than one hundred new interviews with surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields who all have their own take on what happened. This landmark book will offer a one-time, all-access pass into the mind of one of our most press-shy, enigmatic, and utterly original living artists.

David Lynch is the one of the most influential directors of the past 50 years. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, and is the winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. The French government awarded him the Legion of Honor.

Kristine McKenna is a journalist, critic, and art curator, and the author of two collections of interviews: The Book of Changes and Talk to Her.

• Sold to: Canongate (UK & BC), Heyne (Germany), Mondadori (Italy), Gads Forlag (Denmark), LIKE (Finland), Paseka (Czech Republic), Lattes (France), PRH Grupo Editorial (Spain), ROPI (Greece), Record (Brazil), 20/20 Editora (Portugal), Beijing Imaginist (China), OpenHouse (Korea), Eksmo (Russia), China Times (Taiwan), Polaris (Sweden), Colibri (Bulgaria), Dereta (Serbia), Athenaeum (Hungary), Zhupansky (Ukraine)

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Ryan North, HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

A fun, deeply researched history of the key technologies that made each stage of human civilization possible, from the NYT bestselling author of ROMEO AND/OR JULIET

Fun non-fiction/popular science

Publisher: Riverhead (US) / Ebury (UK) – September 18, 2018 Editor: Courtney Young Agent: Seth Fishman Material: Awaiting designed pages

NYT bestselling author of ROMEO AND/OR JULIET • Six-figure advance with Riverhead (NA rights only) • UK rights to Ebury at auction

Get ready to make history. . . better. What would you do if you had a time machine that took you hundreds or thousands of years into the past . . . and then broke? How would you survive? Could you improve on civilization's original timeline? And how hard would it be to domesticate a giant wombat?

In How to Invent Everything, bestselling author and time-travel enthusiast Ryan North answers all these questions so you don't have to. This guide contains all the science, engineering, mathematics, art, music, philosophy, facts, and figures required for even the most clueless stranded time traveler to build a civilization from the ground up.

How to Invent Everything is a deeply researched history of the key technologies that made each stage of human civilization possible (from writing and farming to buttons and birth control), but it's as entertaining as a good time-travel novel. It will make you smarter, more competent, and completely prepared either to be hurled back in time or to make fascinating cocktail-party small talk with a complete stranger. www.howtoinventeverything.com

Ryan North is the New York Times-bestselling author of two chooseable-path Shakespeare books, Romeo and/or Juliet and To Be or Not to Be. He's the creator of Dinosaur Comics and the Eisner Award-winning writer of Adventure Time, Jughead, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl for Marvel Comics. He lives in Toronto with his wife, Jenn, and their dog, Noam Chompsky.

• Sold to: Ebury (UK & BC) • Option publisher: China CITIC (China)

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Hana Schank & Elizabeth Wallace, THE AMBITION DECISIONS: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life

A big idea self-help book about the decisions that shape women's lives, in the vein of Designing Your Life

Advice

Publisher: Viking – June 19, 2018 Editor: Laura Tisdel Agent: Libby McGuire Material: Edited manuscript

• “These are the know your value conversations that we need to have. These women -- their challenges, choices and successes — are all of us.” –Mika Brzezinski, author of Knowing your Value and co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe • “The Ambition Decisions is willing to confront the possibility that perhaps the shape and sum of female ambition offers a better road-map for all human beings, men as well as women.” –Anne-Marie Slaughter, New York Times bestselling author of Unfinished Business • “Hana Schank and Elizabeth Wallace take readers on a heartfelt journey to discover whether and how it’s possible for women to meaningfully combine work and life in our demanding 21st century lives without losing our sanity, our health or our souls. This is uncharted territory.” --Brigid Schulte, New York Times bestselling author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love & Play when No One Has the Time • “Every woman who feels paralyzed by her life decisions should read this honest, insightful, and surprising book that explores the challenges of ‘working while female’—and provides helpful advice on how to craft the life you want. “ –Jancee Dunn, author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids

What happens to women's ambition in the years after university? The essays which were the catalyst for this book began as a series for the Atlantic, a project between two friends who had attended Northwestern University together in the early 1990s. What became of all the brilliant, hardworking women from their college days, they wondered as they shared work and family woes and triumphs over a glass of wine one evening. Tackling topics like the changing meaning of ambition, the near-lethal combination of modern parenting and a 24/7 work culture, and what sexism in the workplace does and doesn't look like, the issues here are perennially topical. A love letter to a new generation of working women or anyone at a crossroads, from women who set out to rule the world and stumbled into various permutations of their best lives, The Ambition Decisions pinpoints the variables that push women toward making big decisions, and make those decisions easier.

Hana Schank is a Public Interest Technology Fellow at New America, a think and action tank led by Anne- Marie Slaughter, and a frequent contributor to the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post. She is the author of The Edge of Normal and the memoir A More Perfect Union. Elizabeth Wallace worked for fifteen years in print magazines, including Vogue, Nylon, Seventeen, Us Weekly, and Lucky, and is now a freelance writer. She has been published recently in Domino, Architectural Digest, Man Repeller, Healthline, Parenting, and Redbook.

www.thegernertco.com 24 more opportunities in… literary fiction

Garth Risk Hallberg, CITY ON FIRE

Publisher: Knopf, October 2015 Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb

International Bestseller in France, Germany, Denmark, Greece & Italy • New York Times Bestseller • 18 foreign sales • Dramatic rights optioned by Scott Rudin in a six-figure pre-empt

• “A novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times • “A remarkably assured, multivalent tale…At times the novel feels like a meta-fictional tribute to America’s finest doorstop manufacturers, circa 1970 to the present: Price (street-wise cops), Wolfe (top-tier wealth), Franzen (busted families), Wallace (the seductions of drugs and pop culture), and DeLillo (the unseen forces behind everything).” — Kirkus (starred review) • “The kind of exuberant, zeitgeisty New York novel, like Bonfire of the Vanities or The Goldfinch, that you’ll either love, hate, or pretend to have read.” —Vogue • “A soaring debut. … [a] magisterial epic.” —Vanity Fair • “Garth Risk Hallberg has written the kind of debut novel that only comes around once every 20 years or so—one that everyone who’s read it roots for.” —Elle magazine • “Dickensian, massively entertaining, as close to a great American novel as this century has produced.” — Stephen King

Garth Risk Hallberg was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and, most frequently, The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

• Sold to: Jonathan Cape (UK & BC), S. Fischer Verlag (Germany), Mondadori (Italy), Feux Croises (France), Literatura Random House (World Spanish), Atlas Contact (Netherlands), Lindhardt & Ringhof (Denmark), Cappelen Damm (Norway), Companhia das Letras (Brazil), Modan (Israel), Dom Quixote (Portugal), Kedros (Greece), Nakladatelstvi Prah (Czech Republic), Brombergs Bokforlag (Sweden), Europa Kiado (Hungary), Pegasus Yayinlari (Turkey), Znak (Poland), United Sky (China)

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Chad Harbach, THE ART OF FIELDING

Publisher: Little, Brown, September 2011 Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb

** INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ** After weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List, more than 500,000 US copies sold • Amazon’s #1 pick of 2011 • UK and Dutch bestseller • Chosen for 30 Best Of lists • Television rights under development with SundanceTV and Todd Field (In the Bedroom) producing

• "A magical, melancholy story about friendship and coming of age that marks the debut of an immensely talented writer." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times • “The Novel of the Year” — GQ • Rave reviews in The New York Times, Booklist, NPR, The Chicago Tribune, Vogue, The New Yorker, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and many more. • Quotes from Jonathan Franzen, John Irving, Jay McInerney, Benjamin Kunkel, Tea Obreht and more.

At Westish College, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Written with boundless intelligence and filled with the tenderness of youth, this is an unforgettable debut.

Chad Harbach grew up in Wisconsin and was educated at Harvard and the University of Virginia. He is a cofounder and coeditor of n+1.

• Sold to: Fourth Estate (UK & BC), De Bezige Bij (the Netherlands), Hayakawa (Japan), Dumont (Germany), Rizzoli (Italy), Lattes (France), Salamandra (World Spanish), Columna Edicions (Catalan), Sigongsa (Korean), Civilização Editora (Portugal), Intrinseca (Brazil), Norstedts (Sweden), Cartaphilus (Hungary), Gyldendal (Norway), Mozaik (Croatia), China Times (Taiwan), Politikens (Denmark), Otava (Finland), Mladinska Knjiga Zalozba (Slovene), Kinneret (Israel)

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Téa Obreht, THE TIGER’S WIFE

Publisher: Random House, March 2011 Agent: Seth Fishman

International Bestseller More than 1.5 million copies in print

The youngest of New Yorker’s Top 20 Under 40 • A National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 • One of Waterstones’ 11 best debut novels of 2011 • Cover of the New York Times Book Review • #1 Indie Bestseller • New York Times Hardcover & Paperback Bestseller • 2011 Orange Prize Winner

Set in present day in a Balkan country ravaged by years of conflict, Natalia, a young doctor, receives word of her beloved grandfather’s death under strange circumstances. As she searches for the truth behind his death, she stumbles across the extraordinary story of the tiger’s wife. An involving mystery, an emotionally riveting family story, and a wondrous evocation of an unfamiliar world, THE TIGER’S WIFE is a brilliant novel.

Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in the former Yugoslavia in 1985 and has lived in the United States since the age of twelve. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and is forthcoming in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading.

• Sold to: Weidenfeld & Nicholson (UK&BC), RHM (Spanish), Kinneret (Israel), Presença (Portugal) Signatuur (the Netherlands), Leya (Brazil), Hyundae Munhak (Korea), Rowohlt (Germany), Rizzoli (Italy), Bonniers (Sweden), Calmann Levy (France), Gyldendal (Denmark), Angle (Catalan), Schibsted (Norway), Siren (Turkey), Algoritam (Croatia), Yilin (China), China Times (Taiwan), Eksmo (Russia), WSOY (Finland), Cartaphilus (Hungary), Laguna (Serbia), Pergament (Bulgaria), Patakis (Greece), Arab Scientific Publishers (Arabic – World), Argo (Czech Republic), Forlagid (Iceland), Baltos Lankos (Lithuania), Drzewo Babel (Poland), Erein (Basque), Mladinska (Slovene), RAO (Romania), Buybook (Bosnia), Matica (Macedonia), Shinchosha (Japan), Fortuna (Slovak), Morava (Albania)

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Rachel Kadish, THE WEIGHT OF INK

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, June 2017 Agent: Sarah Burnes

An Amazon Best Book of the Month • More than 30,000 copies in print

• “This astonishing third novel from Kadish introduces readers to the 17th-century Anglo-Jewish world with not only excellent scholarship but also fine storytelling. The riveting narrative and well-honed characters will earn a place in readers’ hearts.” —Library Journal, starred review • “A gifted writer, astonishingly adept at nuance, narration, and the politics of passion.” - Toni Morrison, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize Winning Author • “An unforgettable quest… Kadish’s characters are memorable, and we’re treated to a host of them…From Shakespeare’s Dark Lady to Spinoza’s philosophical heresies, Kadish leaves no stone unturned in this moving historical epic. Chock-full of rich detail and literary intrigue.” —Kirkus Reviews • “Full of suspense, surprises and characters we care passionately about. A beautiful, intelligent and utterly absorbing novel.”—Margot Livesey, author of Mercury • “Rarely have I read a contemporary novel that so immersed me in its world and drew me so deeply into the lives of its characters. Rachel Kadish is a brilliant story-teller, with a mystery writer’s instinct for pacing and a willingness to take on the largest human questions. The Weight of Ink is astonishing.” — Carol Gilligan, author of Joining The Resistance

Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope yet intimate in tone, The Weight of Ink is a sophisticated work of historical fiction about women separated by centuries, and the choices and sacrifices they must make in order reconcile the life of the heart and mind.

Rachel Kadish is the author, most recently, of the novel Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story. Among her many honors are a Koret Award, a Pushcart Prize, and citations in the 1997 and 2003 editions of The Best American Short Stories. Her work has been published in Zoetrope: All-Story and Tin House among many others. Kadish, a graduate of Princeton University, earned her MA in fiction writing at New York University. She lives in Newtonville, Massachusetts.

• Sold to: Neri Pozza (Italy), Host (Czech Republic), Luitingh Sijthoff (The Netherlands), Czarna Owca (Poland)

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Alice McDermott, THE NINTH HOUR

Publisher: FSG, September 2017 Agent: Sarah Burnes

One of Publishers Weekly Top 10 Literary Fiction Picks for Fall 2017 • Starred reviews from Booklist, Kirkus and Publishers Weekly • Film rights sold to Scott Rudin Productions

• “Like Alice Munro, McDermott is profoundly observant and mischievously witty, a sensitive and consummate illuminator of the realization of the self, the ravages of illness and loss, and the radiance of generosity." ―Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review • “Everything that her readers, the National Book Award committee, and the Pulitzer Prize judges love about McDermottt’s stories of Irish-Catholic American life is back.” ―Kirkus Reviews, starred review • “National Book Award winner McDermott (Someone) delivers an immense, brilliant novel about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review • “National Book Award winner McDermott is simply one of the finest living Catholic writers. A generational novel sure to appeal to longtime McDermott fans, and to bring in new readers as well.” ―The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great Second Half 2017 Book Preview

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. He is determined to prove—to the subway bosses who have recently fired him, to his badgering pregnant wife— “that the hours of his life belong to himself alone.” In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun and Little Sister of the Sick Poor, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man’s brief existence, and yet his suicide, although never spoken of, reverberates through many lives—testing the limits and the demands of love and sacrifice, of forgiveness and forgetfulness, even through multiple generations.

Alice McDermott is the author of six previous novels, including After This; Child of My Heart; Charming Billy, winner of the 1998 National Book Award; At Weddings and Wakes; That Night; and Someone. That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This were all finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University.

• Sold to: Bloomsbury (UK & BC), La Table Ronde (France), Libros del Asteroide (Spain), Editorial Minuscula (Catalan), Stile Libero (Italy)

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Robin Sloan, SOURDOUGH

Publisher: MCD/FSG, September 2017 Agent: Sarah Burnes

Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was an international bestseller with more than 500,000 copies worldwide • Amazon Best Book of September ’17 • 18 city author tour

• "Filled with crisp humor and weird but endearing characters...At once a parody of startup culture and a foodie romp...[A] delight, perfect for those who like a little magic with their meals." ― Booklist, starred review • Since best-selling author Robin Sloan has already proven himself worthy in the adventure genre, he recently moved on to writing about another topic many love: food. In his second novel, Sloan serves his audience a culinary delight in “Sourdough.” .” ―The Washington Post • “How many novels can boast an obstreperous sourdough starter as a key character? A delightful and heartfelt read.” ―Library Journal • "It is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book. It knows as much about the strange extremes of food as 'Mr. Penumbra' did about the dark latitudes of the book community."—National Public Radio

Lois Clary is a software engineer at a San Francisco robotics company where she codes all day and collapses at night - her human contact limited to the two brothers who run the little neighborhood restaurant from which she orders dinner every evening. When the brothers are forced to close up shop, they have one last delivery for Lois: their culture, ie the sourdough starter used to bake their special bread. She must keep it alive, they tell her – feed it daily, play it music, and learn to bake with it. Lois is no baker, but soon, she’s providing loaves daily to her company’s cafeteria which eventually leads her to a secret group that fuses food and technology. A special, moving tale where Robin Sloan does for food what he’s done previously (and wonderfully) for the world of books.

Robin Sloan grew up near Detroit and now splits his time between San Francisco and the internet. His debut novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, was a winner of the Alex Award, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction, named a Best Book of the Year by National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, and has been licensed in 30 languages. www.robinsloan.com

• Sold to: Atlantic (UK&BC), Text (ANZ), Corbaccio (Italy), Blessing Verlag (Germany), Livebook (Russia), Host (Czech), Ciela (Bulgaria)

www.thegernertco.com 30 more opportunities in… commercial fiction

Karen Cleveland, NEED TO KNOW

Publisher: Ballantine/Transworld, January 2018 Agent: David Gernert

North American rights to Ballantine in a seven-figure pre-empt for two books • Film rights to Universal (with Charlize Theron attached) for seven figures • 30 foreign deals with auctions and pre-empts around the globe • Super lead title

• “Perhaps there will be two or three readers out there who manage to finish the first chapter of this terrific debut and put it down for more than an hour. But they’ll be back. And they’ll devour Need to Know like the rest of us, skipping lunch, losing sleep, turning pages until the end, where we’re all left waiting for more.”—John Grisham • “[A] pulse-hammering first novel…This suspenseful espionage tale is a rousing Act 2 to the excitement of TV’s The Americans and the novels of Chris Pavone.”—Library Journal ( starred review) • “The Russia page-turner that should be on everyone’s list.”—New York Post • “Perfect for fans of Shari Lapena’s thrillers and Chris Pavone’s The Expats (2012), and for just about everyone who loves the thrill of finding themselves in a book that can’t be put down.”—Booklist ( starred review) • “Prediction: If you read chapter one, you’ll read chapter two. If you read chapter two, you’ll miss dinner, stay up far too late, and feel tired at work tomorrow. This is that kind of book. Superb.”—Lee Child • “Karen Cleveland is the real deal—an exciting new voice in thrillers. Scarpetta would call her friend.”—Patricia Cornwell, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Perfect husband. Perfect father. Perfect liar? A debut novel that’s impossible to describe without spoilers. #NeedtoKnowBook. www.karen-cleveland.com.

Karen Cleveland spent eight years as a CIA analyst, the last six in counterterrorism. She has master’s degrees from Trinity College Dublin, where she studied as a Fulbright Scholar, and from Harvard University. She lives in northern Virginia with her husband and two young kids.

• Sold to: Transworld (UK & BC), BTB (Germany), DeA Planeta Libri (Italy), Planeta (World Spanish), Columna (Catalan), Laffont (France), Bruna (Netherlands), Norstedts (Sweden), Hr. Ferdinand (Denmark), Gyldendal Norsk (Norway), Gummerus (Finland), Planeta (Portugal), Planeta (Brazil), Obsidian (Bulgaria), Vulkan (Serbia), Agave Konyvek (Hungary), China South Booky (China), Foksal (Poland), Modan (Israel), Epsilon (Turkey), Ranok (Ukraine), Hayakawa (Japan), Albatros (Czech), Albatros (Slovak), Sharp Point (Taiwan), Profil (Croatia), Ucila (Slovenia), RAO (Romania), Eesti Raamat (Estonia), Kontinents (Latvia), Ars Lamina (Macedonia)

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Ann Leckie, THE IMPERIAL RADCH TRILOGY and PROVENANCE

More than 500,000 copies sold worldwide • 15 option publishers • Ann Leckie is the winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Locus Awards (and was the first person to win all four awards in a single year)

The Imperial Radch Trilogy: Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword, Ancillary Mercy Publisher: Orbit, October 2013, 2014, 2015 (respectively) Agent: Seth Fishman

On a remote icy planet, the soldier Breq is close to completing her quest. Years ago, she was the Justice of Toren— a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of corpse soldiers serving the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. An act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with only one fragile human body. And only one purpose—to revenge herself on Anaander Mianaai, many-bodied, near-immortal Lord of the Radch.

Provenance Publisher: Orbit, September 2017 Agent: Seth Fishman

• "The intricacies and oddities are a delight . . . A thrill for fans of heists and capers.” ― Washington Post • "A perfect follow-up to the trilogy… Should please those who like tea with their space opera." ―The New York Times • "Character-centered space opera from one of SF's brightest stars."―Library Journal

Ann Leckie returns with an enthralling new novel of power, theft, privilege and birthright. A power-driven young woman, Ingray has just one chance to secure the status she craves and regain priceless lost artifacts prized by her people. She must free their thief from a prison planet from which no one has ever returned. Ingray and her charge will return to her home world to find the planet at the heart of an escalating interstellar conflict. Together, they must make a new plan to salvage Ingray's future, her family, and her world before they are lost to her for good.

Check out www.annleckie.com for more information!

Sold to: Editions J'ai Lu (France), Ithaki Yayinlari (Turkey), Shanghai Dook (China), Tokyo Sogensha (Japan), Orbit (UK&BC), Heyne (Germany), Muza (Poland), Ediciones B (Spain), Luitingh Sijthoff (Netherlands), SiAl (Israel), Gabo (Hungary), Fantastika (Russia), Albatros Media (Czech), Editora Aleph (Brazil), Varrak (Estonia)

www.thegernertco.com 32 more opportunities in… non-fiction

Carina Chocano, YOU PLAY THE GIRL: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, & Other Mixed Messages

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Virago, August 2017 Agent: Sarah Burnes

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism • Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay • Amazon's "Best Books of 2017: Nonfiction" • iBook's "Best Books of August" starred reviews in Publishers Weekly & Library Journal

Writer and critic Carina Chocano blends formative personal stories with insightful and emotionally powerful analysis to understand how the stories the culture tells us about what it means to be a girl limits our lives and shape our destinies.

• "Carina Chocano's You Play the Girl reads like a war cry. With dazzling clarity, her commentary exposes the subliminal sexism on our pages and screens." —O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE • "If Hollywood's treatment of women leaves you wanting, you'll find good, heady company in Carina Chocano's essay collection, You Play the Girl. Why, Chocano asks, does the ingenue have to choose between marriage and death?"—ELLE • “The cultural formulas that Chocano identifies are frustrating, but her readings don’t deny them their fun…In the tradition of a long line of women writers, Chocano wants to make sense of this sort of enchantment and understand what kind of education it is offering up, and to whom.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW • "Carina Chocano is a first-rate cultural critic whose specialty is constructing dead-on feminist analyses of such sinister artifacts as the relentless 'Frozen' and the various horrifying iterations of Barbie. And Chocano demolishes the dismal shibboleth that feminists can’t be funny, wielding abundant wit with a devastating sardonic edge."—WASHINGTON POST • "Chocano draws out brilliant insights from across the decades...witty and sharp...[Chocano] weaves her observations into a fascinating history of women’s economic and social progress."—THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK)

Carina Chocano is a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Elle, Rolling Stone, and many others. A former staff film and TV critic at the Los Angeles Times, she has been a TV and book critic at Entertainment Weekly and a staff writer at Salon. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Garry Kasparov, DEEP THINKING: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins

Publisher: Public Affairs/John Murray, September 2017 Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb

North American rights to Public Affairs in a six-figure deal • UK Sunday Times bestseller • May 2017 marked the 20th anniversary of Kasparov’s loss to IBM supercomputer Deep Blue

• “Thoughtful reading for anyone interested in human and machine cognition and a must for chess fans." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) • "The great Garry Kasparov takes on the key economic issue of our time: how we can thrive as humans in a world of thinking machines."― Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Innovators • "Garry Kasparov's perspectives on artificial intelligence are borne of personal experience - and despite that, are optimistic, wise and compelling."― Charles Duhigg, bestselling author of Smarter Faster Better

In May 1997, the world watched as Garry Kasparov, the greatest chess player in the world, was defeated for the first time by the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue. Machine intelligence had arrived at the point where it could best human intellect. In DEEP THINKING, Kasparov tells his side of the story for the first time—but more than that, he makes a unique contribution to the story of artificial intelligence, taking part in an urgent debate with philosophers worried about human values, programmers creating self-learning neural networks, and engineers of cutting-edge robotics. He surveys the questions facing a world that is becoming increasingly reliant on AI, making a reasoned and urgent case for why we should embrace it.

Garry Kasparov is a business speaker, global human rights activist, author, and former world chess champion. A frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, he is the author of two books, How Life Imitates Chess and Winter is Coming, each of which has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

• Sold to: John Murray (UK & BC), Alpina (Russia), Across Publishing (Korea), China Renmin (China), Nikkei Business (Japan), Pegasus (Turkey), PT Elexmedia (Indonesia), Insignis (Poland), Faces (Taiwan), Fandango Libri (Italy)

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Randall Munroe (creator of xkcd)

WHAT IF? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2014 Agent: Seth Fishman

#1 New York Times Bestseller • #1 Bestseller on Amazon • #1 Non-fiction book in the UK • #2 bestseller on Der Spiegel list in Germany • More than 1,000,000 copies in print worldwide

Millions of people visit xkcd.com each week to read Munroe’s iconic webcomic. His stick-figure drawings about science, technology, language, and love have an enormous, dedicated following, as do his deeply researched answers to his fans’ strangest questions. Responses are masterpieces of clarity and wit, explaining everything from the relativistic effects of a baseball pitched at near the speed of light to the horrible ways you could die while building a periodic table out of all the actual elements.

THING EXPLAINER: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, November 2015 Agent: Seth Fishman

#1 New York Times bestseller • North American rights sold in a seven-figure deal

Have you ever tried to learn more about some incredible thing, only to be frustrated by incomprehensible jargon? In Thing Explainer, Randall uses line drawings and only the thousand (or, rather, “ten hundred”) most common words to provide simple explanations for some of the most interesting stuff both on earth and beyond. “Brilliant…a wonderful guide for curious minds.”—Bill Gates

Randall Munroe, a former NASA roboticist, is the creator of the webcomic xkcd and the author of xkcd: volume 0. The International Astronomical Union recently named an asteroid after him; asteroid 4942 Munroe is big enough to cause a mass extinction if it ever hits a planet like Earth.

• Xkcd publishers: John Murray Press (UK &BC), Knaus (Germany), Bompiani (Italy), Companhia das Letras (Brazil), Unieboek (Netherlands), Flammarion (France), Aguilar (Spain), Prah (Czech Republic), AST (Russia), Sigongsa (Korea), Hayakawa (Japan), Klidarithmos (Greece), Athenaeum (Hungary), Czarna Owca (Poland), United Sky (China), Commonwealth (Taiwan), Pegasus (Turkey), Saída de Emergência (Portugal), WSOY (Finland), WeLearn (Thailand), Heliks (Serbia), Modan (Israel), Volante (Sweden), Font Forlag (Norway), Ikar (Slovak Republic), Nha Nam (Vietnam), Loxodonta (Denmark), Aripaev (Estonia), PT Gramedia (Indonesia), Publica (Romania), Fokus (Croatia), Vivat (Ukraine), Al-Ahlia (Arabic)

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Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, ZERO TO ONE: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Publisher: Crown Business, September 2014 Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb

#1 New York Times bestseller • Sold to Crown Business for seven figures in a heated auction • Sales in 35 foreign territories • Huge bestseller in China

• “This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.” —Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook • “Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.” —Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla • "The first and last business book anyone needs to read; a one in a world of zeroes." —Neal Stephenson, New York Times best-selling author of Cryptonomicon

Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Progress comes from monopoly, not competition. Competition destroys profits for individuals, companies, and society as a whole. Zero to One is about how to build companies that create new things. What valuable company is nobody building?

Peter Thiel, an entrepreneur and investor, co-founded PayPal and the data analytics firm Palantir Technologies. He made the first outside investment in Facebook, funded companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, and started the Thiel Foundation, which nurtures tomorrow’s tech visionaries. Blake Masters co-founded Judicata, a technology startup that builds tools for legal research and analysis. • Sold to: Virgin Books (UK & BC), Campus Verlag (Germany), Lattes (France), RCS Libri (Italy), Ediciones Deusto (World Spanish), Objetiva (Brazil), Atlas-Contact (The Netherlands), China CITIC (China), NHK (Japan), CommonWealth Magazine Publishing (Taiwan), Korea Economic Daily (Korea), Alpina (Russia), Modan (Israel), WeLearn (Thailand), Aripaev (Estonia), Lua de Papel (Portugal), Gabo (Hungary), Tre (Vietnam), Jan Melvil (Czech Republic), Kastaniotis (Greece), MT Biznes (Poland), Publica (Romania), PT Gramedia (Indonesia), iSquare Publishing (Mongolia), Pegasus (Turkey), Nash Format (Ukraine), Jarir Bookstore (Arabic), Citadella (Slovak Republic), Vecernji List (Croatia), Eugrimas (Lithuania), Buzuku (Albania), Knigomania (Bulgaria), Palitra (Georgia), Laguna (Serbia), Madhushree (Marathi)

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Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, SOONISH: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

Publisher: Penguin Press / Penguin Press (UK), October 2017 Agent: Seth Fishman

Shot to #1 on Amazon when pub date was announced on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal • Eleven foreign deals • More than 17,000 pre-orders

• “The Weinersmiths deliver a fascinating look at the most provocative and promising research going on today and how it could alter the way we work and live.” ―Publishers Weekly, starred review • Popular-science writing has rarely been so whip-smart, captivating, or hilarious (albeit occasionally terrifying).” ― Booklist, starred review • "Soonish will make you laugh and—without you even realizing it—give you insight into the most ambitious technological feats of our time. You should read this book, sooner than soonish." – Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit • "I love this book so much I 3D printed myself a second heart so I could love it more." – Dr. Phil Plait, astronomer, author, writer of the Bad Astronomy Blog

In this smart and funny book, celebrated cartoonist Zach Weinersmith and noted researcher Dr. Kelly Weinersmith give us a snapshot of what's coming next—from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered- toasters to space elevators to robotic construction. By weaving their own research, interviews with the scientists who are making these advances happen, and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these technologies are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is Adjunct Faculty in the BioSciences Department at Rice University, where she studies parasites that manipulate the behavior of their hosts. A respected researcher, she cohosts Science...Sort Of, which is one of the top 20 natural science podcasts. Her work has been featured in The Atlantic, Science, and Nature.

Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. His work has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Boingboing, the Freakonomics Blog, the RadioLab blog, Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones, CNN, and more. http://smbc-comics.com/soonish/

• Sold to: Penguin Press UK (UK & BC), Carl Hanser Verlag (Germany), Hunan Science and Technology Press (China), Sigongsa Co. (Korea), Atticus-Azbooka (Russia), Arab Scientific (Arabic), Intrinseca (Brazil), Commonwealth (Taiwan), Kagaku-Dojin (Japan), Domingo (Turkey), Insignis (Poland)

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THE GERNERT COMPANY INTERNATIONAL CO-AGENTS

For queries concerning John Grisham in all territories, please contact Ms. Rebecca Gardner [email protected]

TRANSLATION CO-AGENTS

German Mr. Christian Dittus & Ms. Antonia Fritz, Paul & Peter Fritz AG [email protected]; [email protected]

French Ms. Eliane Benisti, Agence Eliane Benisti [email protected]

Italian Ms. Erica Berla, Berla & Griffini Rights Agency [email protected]

Dutch, Flemish Ms. Marianne Schönbach, Marianne Schönbach Literary Agency [email protected]

Spanish Ms. Teresa Vilarrubla, The Foreign Office [email protected]

Portuguese Ms. Tassy Barham, Tassy Barham Associates [email protected]

Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic Ms. Trine Licht, Licht & Burr Literary Agency [email protected]

Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, Macedonia, Bosnian and Albanian Ms. Anna Droumeva, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Sofia [email protected]

Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Ukrainian Ms. Tatjana Zoldnere, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Baltic [email protected]

Czech, Slovak and Slovene Ms. Petra Tobiskova, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Prague [email protected]

www.thegernertco.com 38 Hungarian and Croatian Ms. Judit Hermann, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Budapest [email protected]

Greek Mr. William Roberts, The Gernert Company [email protected]

Russian Ms. Ludmilla Sushkova, Andrew Nurnberg Associates Moscow [email protected]

Hebrew Ms. Efrat Lev, The Deborah Harris Agency [email protected]

Polish Mr. Lukasz Wrobel, Graal Ltd [email protected]

Turkish Mr. Atilla Turgut or Mr. Mustafa Ürgen, Akcali Copyright Agency [email protected] [email protected]

Japanese Mr. Ken Mori, Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc. [email protected]

Complex and Simplified Chinese Ms. Yu-Shiuan Chen, Bardon-Chinese Media Agency [email protected]

Korean Ms. Sue Yang, Eric Yang Agency [email protected]

Thai Ms. Pimolporn Yutisri, Tuttle-Mori Agency [email protected]

Indonesian Mr. Santo Manurung, Maxima Creative [email protected]

For all other markets contact Rebecca Gardner ([email protected]) or Will Roberts ([email protected])

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