BLOOMSBURY RIGHTS GUIDE LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 HIGHLIGHTS CONTENTS FICTION 1 FICTION: RAVEN BOOKS 6 NON-FICTION 8 Bright Burning Transitional This Is How They Tell Things Thinking Me the World Ends Lisa Harding Munroe Bergdorf Nicole Perlroth MEMOIR & PAGE 1 PAGE 8 PAGE 9 BIOGRAPHY 21 SMART THINKING & PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT 23 MENSCH PUBLISHING 24 SIGMA 26 Sway The Unreasonable Sweat Pragya Agarwal Virtue of Fly Fishing Bill Hayes TRAVEL & Mark Kurlansky PAGE 26 PAGE 17 NATURE WRITING 31 PAGE 14 COOKERY & LIFESTYLE 36 GREEN TREE 58 SPORTS 64 NATURAL HISTORY 78 NAUTICAL & OUTDOORS 87 The Ethical Avocado No Time to Breathe Ripe Figs Louise Gray Bill Mitchell Yasmin Khan PAGE 17 PAGE 58 PAGE 48 FICTION Bright Burning Things A novel that deals with alcoholism, mental health, foster care and domestic abuse from the inside, Bright Burning Things is a raw, artful Lisa Harding portrait of a woman at the mercy of addiction. Sonya, a failed actress, uses alcohol to deflect her childhood trauma and to mask her failure to take care of her young son. Emerging from nights of drinking into self-awareness, she is haunted by self-doubt, loneliness and grief for her mother and the life she has lost. 352pp When her estranged father steps in, Sonya is sent to rehab. She must 216 x 135mm complete it to get back her son Tommy and her rescue dog, Herbie, and Hardback to stand a chance of a life with her own family… £14.99 Written in blistering and honest prose, this is a beautiful, deeply human March 2021 novel about one woman’s struggle with addiction, mental health and trauma. Material available: Manuscript Rights sold: French (Editions Lisa Harding is a writer, actress and playwright. Her previous novel, Joëlle Losfeld) Harvesting, was nominated for the Newcomer of the Year award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards 2017 and has been optioned by Out of Orbit films, to be directed by Michael Lennox, director of ‘Derry Girls’. She lives in Dublin. Beneath the In 1967, a couple embark on a journey across the motorways and landscapes of Britain in this beautiful, expansive and arresting Trees of Eden portrait of a life outside social convention. Tim Binding She’d never thought of a motorway before, its strange effect, never appreciated the magnetic pull of it, how it emptied you out then filled you up with a sort of nothing You could be anyone on a motorway, whatever you wanted. Alice is just twenty when she becomes involved with Louis, a brooding, older man who has spent his life building some of the first motorways 368pp to stretch across the landscapes of England. With a child on the way, the couple set off on the road together, determined to carve out a life for 234 x 153mm themselves off the beaten track. Hardback But as their son grows older, he begins to question his parents’ £16.99 philosophy and the sacrifices they make in order to live on their own August 2020 terms. Caught between the draw of the past and a dream of new Material available: Manuscript community, their fates are transformed by chance encounters, patterns unfolding like lines across a map. Told in searing, lyrical prose, Beneath the Trees of Eden is a powerful rumination on the possibility for salvation, the people and places we find ourselves tethered to, and the things that get left behind. Tim Binding was born in Germany in 1947. He is the author of In the Kingdom of Air, A Perfect Execution, Island Madness, On Ilkley Moor, Anthem, Man Overboard, The Champion and the children’s book Sylvie and the Songman. He lives in Kent with his wife and daughter. 1 FICTION There’s No Such Convenience Store Woman meets Not Working in this strange, compelling, darkly funny tale of one woman’s search for meaning in Thing as an Easy Job the modern workplace. Kikuko Tsumura A young woman walks into an employment agency and requests a job that has the following traits: it is close to her home, and it requires no reading, no writing, and ideally, very little thinking. She is sent to a tall office building and tasked with examining footage of a middle-aged novelist who is being surveilled 24/7, in order to detect the ‘contraband’ that has been planted in his house. But watching someone 300pp for hours can be so inconvenient – when can you go to the bathroom, 216 x 135mm and how can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, more Paperback importantly – how did she find herself in this situation? £12.99 As she moves from job to job, announcing adverts on buses for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker November 2020 wrappers that create thousands of devoted followers, it becomes Material available: Manuscript due increasingly apparent that she’s not searching for the easiest job at all, but March 2020 something altogether more meaningful . Kikuko Tsumura was born in Osaka, Japan, where she still lives today. In her first job out of college, Tsumura experienced workplace harassment and quit after ten months to retrain and find another position, an experience that inspired her to write stories about young workers. She has won numerous Japanese literary awards, including the Akutagawa Prize, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Dazai Osamu Prize, the Kawabata Yasunari Prize, and the Oda Sakunosuke Prize. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology recognized Tsumura’s work with a New Artist award in 2016. There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job is her first novel to be translated into English. Polly Barton is a translator of Japanese literature and non-fiction. Stories she has translated have appeared in Words Without Borders, Granta and The White Review. Full-length translations include Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki and Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda. She was the winner of the Inaugural JLPP International Japanese Translation Competition held by the Japanese Ministry of Culture in 2012, the recipient of the 2016 Kyoko Selden International Translation Prize, and most recently, the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. She lives in Bristol. Rest and Be Thankful A darkly shimmering novel of a nurse on the edge of burnout, by ‘an immensely talented young writer ... Her fearlessness renews one’s Emma Glass faith in the power of literature’ (George Saunders). Laura is a nurse in a paediatric unit. On long, quiet shifts, she and her colleagues, clad in their different shades of blue, care for sick babies, handling their exquisitely frangible bodies, carefully calibrating the mysterious machines that keep them alive. 144pp Laura may be burned out. Her hands have been raw from washing as long as she can remember. When she sleeps, she dreams of water; when 216 x 135mm she wakes, she finds herself lying next to a man who doesn’t love her any Hardback more. And there is a strange figure dancing in the corner of her vision, £12.99 always just beyond her reach. March 2020 Dark yet luminous, sensual yet chilling, ringing with strange music and laced with dread, Rest and Be Thankful is an unforgettable novel that Manuscript available: final files confirms Emma Glass as a visionary new voice. Rights sold: Danish (Jensen & Dalgaard); Italian (Il Saggiatore) Emma Glass was born in Wales in 1987 and is now based in London, where she writes and works as a children’s nurse. Her debut novel Peach was published by Bloomsbury in 2018, has been translated into seven ALSO AVAILABLE languages and was long-listed for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. @Emmas_Window Peach Emma Glass £8.99 Manuscript available: final files Rights sold: Armenian (Guitank Publishing); French (Flammarion); German (Edition Nautilus); Italian (Il Saggiatore); Spanish (Sexto Piso); Swedish (Modernista); Turkish (Borges Yayinevi) 2 FICTION Georgina Harding is the author of five previous novels: The Gun Room, The Solitude of Thomas Cave, The Spy Game, which was shortlisted for the Encore Award, Painter of Silence, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2012, and Land of the Living. Georgina Harding lives in London and on a farm in the Stour Valley, Essex. Harvest An exquisite story of family, trauma, love and redemption by the Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Painter of Silence. Georgina Harding An English woman and a Japanese girl stand in a garden, both a little unsure, and a young man watches them from inside the house. But amid the bright orderliness of the garden’s colours, there is pain buried, and trauma; and the young woman’s arrival will unearth a buried and terrible violence, one far beyond their comprehension. Deft and delicate, darkly profound, Harvest is a novel of disquieting powers; 240pp about the violence that shapes us, the secrets we bury, and the love we hope will redeem us. 216 x 135mm Hardback £16.99 April 2021 Material available: Manuscript The Gun Room A beautiful, powerful and utterly devastating new novel from Orange Prize-shortlisted author Georgina Harding. Georgina Harding The memory of war will stay with a man longer than anything else. Dawn, mist clearing over the rice fields, a burning Vietnamese village, and a young war photographer gets the shot that might make his career. The image, of a staring soldier in the midst of mayhem, will become one of the great photographs of the war. But what he has seen in that village is more than he can bear, and he flees. 224pp Jonathan drifts on to Japan, to lose himself in the vastness of Tokyo, where 216 x 135mm there are different kinds of pictures to be taken: peacetime pictures of crowds and subways and cherry blossom.