Download Our Latest Catalogue
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Gutkind Hummerens skjold Roman Caroline Albertine Minor SPRING 2021 CONTENTS Literary Fiction - 3-29 Commercial Fiction - 30-41 Non-Fiction - 42-54 Highlights - 54-58 RCW LITERARY AGENCY 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN 020 7221 3717 www.rcwlitagency.com Twitter: @rcwlitagency Instagram: @rcwliteraryagency FOREIGN RIGHTS Laurence Laluyaux, Stephen Edwards Katharina Volckmer, Tristan Kendrick Sam Coates, Natasia Patel, Aanya Dave [email protected] RCW Literary Agency FICTION 3 RCW Literary Agency CHECKOUT 19 Claire-Louise Bennett ‘Yet I couldn’t quite discard the idea that somewhere in the story there might have been a sentence, just one sentence, of such transcendent brilliance it could have blown the world away. And that idea burned in me, on and on.’ fiction With fierce imagination, a woman revisits the moments that shaped her life, and what follows is a mesmerising, adventurous, and at times devastating story of art, love, fantasy and experience. Fusing fantasy with lived experience, Checkout 19 is a vivid and entrancing journey through the small traumas and triumphs that define us - as readers, as writers, as human beings. UK: Jonathan Cape, ed. Michal Shavit US: Riverhead, ed. Becky Saletan Germany: Luchterhand Italy: Bompiani Norway: Pelikanen Sweden: Wahlström & Widstrand laire-Louise Bennett studied literature and drama Sales for previous book, Pond: Cat the University of Roehampton, before moving to Ireland where she worked in and studied theatre for UK: Fitzcarraldo several years. In 2013 she was awarded the inaugural Argentina (World Spanish): Eterna White Review Short Story Prize and her debut book, Pond, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in Cadencia 2016. Claire-Louise’s fiction and essays have appeared Denmark: Turbine in a number of publications including White Review, France: L’Olivier Stinging Fly, gorse, Harper’s Magazine, Vogue Italia, Music & Germany: Luchterhand Literature, and New York Times Magazine. Hungary: Magvető Agent: Peter Straus Italy: Bompiani Film Agent: Emily Hayward-Whitlock, The Artist’s Norway: Pelikanen Partnership Sweden: Natur och Kultur Serbia: Serbia Word Count: 73,000 Turkey: Turkuvaz Publication: August 2021 4 RCW Literary Agency GROUNDSKEEPING fiction Lee Cole An outstandingly mature debut novel that explores, with empathy and humour, the polarized political attitudes within families and across generations. In the run up to the 2016 presidential election, Owen Callahan, an aspiring writer, moves back to Kentucky to live with his Trump-supporting uncle and grandfather. Eager to clean up his act after wasting time and potential in his early twenties, he takes a job as a groundskeeper at a small college in the Appalachian foothills, where he’s permitted to take a few writing courses. It’s here that he meets Alma Hadzic, a Writer-in-Residence, who seems to have everything Owen doesn’t – a prestigious position, an Ivy League education, success as a writer. They begin a secret relationship, and as they grow closer, Alma, who comes from a liberal family of Bosnian immigrants, struggles to understand Owen’s fraught relationship with his own family and home. Exploring the boundaries between life and writing and US: Knopf, ed. Jordan Pavlin how our upbringings affect the people we become, UK: Faber, ed. Angus Cargill Groundskeeping is at heart a love story, a novel about two Germany: Rowohlt very different people navigating the entanglements of Italy: Marsilio class and identity and trying to stay together against a turbulent political backdrop. ee Cole was born and grew up in rural Kentucky. LHe’s a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Maytag Fellow in Fiction, and was recently selected as a 2020 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellow. Groundskeeping is his debut. Agent: Peter Straus Word Count: 110,000 Publication: Spring 2022 5 RCW Literary Agency PARALLEL HELLS Leon Craig The thirteen audacious stories in Parallel Hells take in the worlds of night hags, golems, vampires, warrior women, fairies and corpse brides; living in contemporary London, 18th century Poland and Viking-era Iceland. Threaded throughout are timely fiction and political metaphors about queerness, gender fluidity, kink, otherness and womxnhood. Written with precision and brio they are both incredibly playful and readable gothic and folkloric stories, but simultaneously, vital literary anecdotes for modern times. We meet a golem, made of clay, learning what is expected of her in the world, who witnesses a murder and must contend with its meaning; Asta, an ancient being who feasts on the shame of contemporary Londoners, who now, beyond anything, wishes only to fit in with a group of friends she will long outlive; an historian in bitter competition with the rest of her faculty members, who discovers the secret to invisibility in an ancient tome and uses it to torment her rivals. UK: Sceptre, ed. Francine Toon Parallel Hells draws comparisons to the likes of Angela Carter, Julia Armfield and Carmen Maria Machado, using folklore, horror and the gothic to explore the politics of sexuality, gender, the body, love and loneliness. eon Craig is a member of the Arts Council Funded Lqueer writers’ collective Futures in the Making and a student on the Birkbeck MFA Creative Writing course. Her work has been published by The White Review, TLS, Vice, and the Brixton Review of Books. Leon has performed her work at Brainchild Festival and the Moth, and was shortlisted for the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize. She works in publishing and is writing her first novel,The Decadence. Agent: Matthew Turner Word Count: 64,000 Publication: January 2022 6 RCW Literary Agency LE FILS DE L’HOMME [The Man’s Son] fiction Jean-Baptiste Del Amo After several years of absence, a man reappears in the life of his wife and their young son and takes them to the dilapidated house in the mountains where he grew up with his ruthless father. There, the son discovers a nature unknown to him, wild and bewitching. As the father’s hold over mother and child grows and he dictates the mysterious laws of their new existence, the return to their previous life and home seems increasingly impossible. Haunted by his past and consumed with jealousy, the man slowly sinks into madness and his son has no choice but to challenge his father in an attempt to save something of their humanity. Praise for Règne animal (Animalia): France: on submission ‘Animalia in English has a truly savage quality, all blood and stench and despair. ... Animalia is an important reminder that literature’s task is not necessarily to uplift, but to help us to attain a true understanding of our predicament.’ Ian Sansom, Guardian ‘Del Amo’s multigenerational portrait of a hardscrabble family of pig farmers in Gascony is a lyrical powerhouse, a sophisticated portrait of a fucked-up feedback loop of familial cruelty and disappointment, and a story that, for all its brutality, also reveals something more.’ Emily Nemens, Paris Review ean-Baptiste Del Amo is one of France’s most Sales for the previous novel, Règne Animal Jexciting and ambitious young writers. He is the [Animalia]: author of Pornographia, Le sel, and Une éducation libertine, France: Gallimard Norway: Cappelen which won the Goncourt First Novel Prize. Animalia, Australia: Text Damm his fourth novel, won the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Prix du Livre Inter, Prix Valery-Larbaud, and Croatia: OceanMore Russia: Eksmo the Premier Prix De L’île De Ré. Czech Republic: Slovenia: Cankarjeva Malvern Spain: Cabaret Germany: Matthes Voltaire & Seitz UK: Fitzcarraldo Agent: Laurence Laluyaux Greece: Livani US: Grove Atlantic Italy: Neri Pozza Word Count: 66,000 Delivery: June 2021 7 RCW Literary Agency LOS LLANOS [The Plains] Federico Falco Finalist of the Herralde Prize 2020 ‘In the city the notion of the hours of the day, of the passage of time, is lost. In the countryside that is impossible’, the narrator tells us. He goes on to recount his day-to-day life in fiction the house with garden where he has isolated himself in an attempt to cut off contact with everything and everyone and, possibly, to flee from himself. Time is almost palpable here, it advances without haste and allows you to feel even the tiniest details around you: insects, noises, a falling leaf, the smell of damp earth. This story begins in January, and is told in chapters that span several months. The protagonist forges minimal ties with people from the rural environment in which he has exiled himself. He recalls his childhood and the many stories that peppered it: that Italian veteran of some war who hanged himself by mistaking the lights of the town for cannon flashes; the stories his grandmother told, perhaps real, perhaps taken from a movie. He remembers his arrival in the city as a Spain: Anagrama student, muses over the structure we give to the stories Italy: Sur we tell, the effort to unravel the secret of how they Sweden: Aska work; and evokes his relationship with Ciro and their UK & US: Charco break up which prompted his move away from the city. This subtle, elusive and beautiful novel addresses the grief caused by a breakup. A book about time that passes and about the plain where a man lives, cultivates a garden, looks and remembers and writes. ‘A literature to which it is possible to entrust ourselves in order to reconcile ourselves with who we are’ Juan Pablo Villalobos ederico Falco is an Argentinian writer and poet. Sales for previous book, Cemeterio Perfecto [A FHe holds an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish Perfect Cemetery]: from New York University. He won the Young Writers Argentina (world Spanish): Eterna Award by the Spanish Cultural Centre of Córdoba, Cadencia and was selected as a Best of Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010 by Granta.