David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected]

DGA

Rights Guide

Frankfurt 2013

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] Fiction FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE by Tash Aw HARVEST by A COOL, DARK PLACE by Supriya Dravid HUNTERS IN THE SNOW by Daisy Hildyard THE GYPSY GODDESS by Meena Kandasamy A BAD CHARACTER by Deepti Kapoor UNEXPLODED by Alison MacLeod THE DEFECTIONS by Hannah Michell THE TABLE OF LESS VALUED KNIGHTS by Marie Phillips THE WILDINGS by Nilanjana Roy A LOVE LIKE BLOOD by Marcus Sedgwick THE BONE SEASON by Samantha Shannon DREAMERS OF THE ABSOLUTE by Anna Sun THEIR LIPS TALK OF MISCHIEF by Alan Warner

Non-Fiction TRACKS by Robyn Davidson THE GREATEST CONSOLATION by Katherine Frank FALLING UPWARDS by Richard Holmes BENJAMIN BRITTEN by Paul Kildea IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE by Lara Pawson ROOTS OF YOGA by James Mallinson and Mark Singleton FEDERER AND ME by William Skidelsky A MAN OF GOOD HOPE by Jonny Steinberg THE LAST ASYLUM by Barbara Taylor TIGER FIRE by Valmik Thapar BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN by ROMANY AND TOM by

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected]

FICTION

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN 2013***

FIVE STAR BILLIONAIRE by Tash Aw

UK: 4th Estate US: Spiegel & Grau UK publication date: February 2013 Finished copies available Length: 150,000 words

‘Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire opens with a bang, not a whimper. Aw is a master storyteller and Five Star Billionaire can be read as The Way We Live Now for our times, for with the global triumph of capitalism, New York and London pale in comparison with the financial behemoth of Shanghai.’ –

Phoebe is a factory girl, who has come to Shanghai with the promise of a job—only to find, when she arrives, that the job doesn’t exist. Gary is a country boy turned pop star who is spinning out of control. Justin is in Shanghai to expand his family’s real- estate empire, only to find that he might not be up to the task. He has long harboured a crush on Yinghui, who has reinvented herself from a poetry-loving, left- wing activist into a successful Shanghai businesswoman. She is about to make a deal with the shadowy figure of Walter Chao, the five-star billionaire of the novel, who— with his secrets and his schemes—has a hand in the lives of each of the characters. Each brings their dreams and hopes to Shanghai, the luminous, shining symbol of the New China, which, like the novel’s characters, is constantly in flux, and which plays its own fateful role in the lives of its inhabitants. Five Star Billionaire, the dazzling, kaleidoscopic new novel by the award-winning writer Tash Aw, offers rare insight into China today, with its constant transformations and its promise of possibility.

Tash Aw was born in Taipei, in the Republic of China, and brought up in Malaysia. He moved to England in his teens and now lives in London. He is the author of The Harmony Silk Factory, which was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Novel and was long listed for the Man Booker Prize, and of Map of the Invisible World.

All rights available excluding: World English language excluding US & Canada (4th Estate), US (Spiegel & Grau), Canada (Penguin Canada), France (Robert Laffont), the Netherlands (Atlas Contact), Norway (Cappelen Damm), Poland (Muza), Taiwan (Linking), Vietnam (Nha Nam Publishing)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013***

HARVEST by Jim Crace

UK: Picador US: Nan A. Talese UK publication date: March 2013 Finished copies available Length: 73,000 words

‘This simultaneously elegiac and unillusioned novel is an achievement worthy to stand alongside those of Crace’s great fictional influence, William Golding.’ – The Sunday Times

‘Harvest is a mesmerising slow-burner of a novel’ – Literary Review

From the Whitbread-winning, Booker-shortlisted, bestselling author of Being Dead and Quarantine, comes the new novel by Jim Crace, Harvest. At the year’s harvest, for the first time, something is deeply wrong. Two plumes of smoke where there shouldn’t be fire, and strangers on the village borders. A man with a chart, mapping the common land. The old ways under threat.

Over the course of seven days, with affection, loneliness, humour and heartbreak, Walter Thirsk tells the story of his village: the story of a scattering, of a migration both mythic and intensely real, of a way of life now lost. Alive with his love of landscape and language, this intensely beautiful novel sees Jim Crace at the height of his powers

Jim Crace is the author of Continent, The Gift of Stones, Arcadia, Signals of Distress, Quarantine, Being Dead, The Devil’s Larder, Six (titled Genesis in the US) and All That Follows. He has won the Whitbread First Novel Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, the Guardian Fiction Award and the GAP International Prize for Literature. Being Dead was shortlisted for the 1999 Whitbread Fiction Prize and won the prestigious US National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award for 2000. In 1997, Quarantine was named Whitbread Novel of the Year and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He lives in .

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Picador), US (Nan A. Talese), Canada (Penguin Canada), Brazil (Globo), France (Payot & Rivages), Portugal (under offer), Romania (Allfa), Turkey (Tual Yayincilik)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] A COOL, DARK PLACE by Supriya Dravid

India: Random House Publication date: August 2013 Finished copies available Length: 110,000 words

‘Sex, lies and family secrets. A Cool, Dark Place is a love song to crazy families. A bold and consummately crafted debut’ – Namita Gokhale

The more I write, the more I revisit memory like this, putting pen to paper, ink to blood, the more the dots seem to connect, and the silences speak.

Following her faux father’s suicide, Zephyr’s life unravels unto a shapeless tapestry woven in the ethanol-hand of her grandfather, Don – an amoral, sensual, manipulative bastard who’s too clever for heaven and too deranged for hell. An alcoholic extraordinaire for whom the clock always struck quarter-past rum; for whom it was always just about the libidinous moment; a man with imperial swagger and disco-ball eyes; the super king of a vast empire of solitude , and permanent resident of his daughter’s wounded heart, Don’s actions shatter Zef’s past into fragments of warring memories. Armed with only her blade of tears, she carves her way through a quagmire of dark, atavistic forces.

Supriya Dravid has worked as a journalist in both print and broadcasting. This is her first novel.

All rights available excluding: Indian Subcontinent (Random House India)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***INCLUDED IN THE NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION’S “5 UNDER 35”***

HUNTERS IN THE SNOW by Daisy Hildyard

UK: Jonathan Cape Publication date: July 2013 Finished copies available Length: 80,000 words

‘Daisy Hildyard is a writer of astonishing intelligence and graceful ambition. I highly recommend this book.’ - Kevin Powers, prize winning author of The Yellow Birds

‘This is a truly dazzling first novel. Every paragraph bristles with cleverness and yet it is a warm-hearted book, at times overpoweringly moving. ... This book is not just a promising first effort by a bright young writer. It is a considerable work of literature.’ - A.N.Wilson, The Spectator

After his death, a young woman returns to her grandfather's farm in Yorkshire. At his desk she finds the book he left unfinished when he died. Part story, part scholarship, his eccentric history of England moves from the founding of the printing press into virtual reality, linking four journeys, separated by the centuries, of four great men. The exiled Edward IV lands in England and marches on London for one final attempt to win back the throne; Tsar Peter the Great, implausibly disguised as a carpenter, follows his own retinue around frozen London; the former African slave Olaudah Equiano takes his book-tour down a Welsh coal-mine; and Herbert, Lord Kitchener, mysteriously disappears at sea in 1916.

These are the stories she remembers him telling her, and others too - about medieval miracles and EU agricultural subsidies; old people and fallen kings; homemade fireworks and invented dogs; Arctic ice cores, sunk ships, drowning horses, salt, sperm, carbon and miners. The history of great men loses its way in the stories of ordinary great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, including the historian's own.

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. This is her first novel.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Jonathan Cape)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] THE GYPSY GODDESS by Meena Kandasamy

UK: Atlantic Publication date: March 2014 India: HarperCollins India Edited manuscript available Length: 50,000 words

The Gypsy Goddess by Meena Kandasamy is a retelling of the Kilvenmani massacre in Tamil Nadu in 1968. A group of striking Dalit village labourers were murdered by a gang sent by their landlords. They were locked in a hut that was then set on fire. Moving, political, uncompromising and passionately angry, this is an astonishing debut novel from on the most original new voices to come out of India.

Meena Kandasamy is a poet, writer, activist and translator. She was the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow at the School of English, , and also served as a Visiting Fellow at the School of Literature, Language & Linguistics, Newcastle University in 2011. In 2009, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program (IWP). Two of her poems, ‘Mascara’ and ‘My Lover Speaks of Rape’ have won first prizes in pan-India poetry competitions, and her poetry has been profiled in several international publications. Previously, she edited ‘The Dalit’, a bi-monthly English magazine. She holds a PhD in socio-linguistics from Anna University Chennai. The Gypsy Goddess is her first novel.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Atlantic), Indian subcontinent (HarperCollins India)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] A BAD CHARACTER by Deepti Kapoor

UK: Jonathan Cape US: Knopf UK publication date: TBC Unedited manuscript available Length: 80,000 words

Set in a rapidly changing Delhi where wealth and poverty, violence and privilege live side by side, A Bad Character is the story of a restless girl and her desire for freedom.

Finding escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a chance encounter with a charismatic and wealthy young man, she is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often illicit pleasures that both the city and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past a point of no return, where grief, love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own.

Told as urgent, often painful memory in hard but luminous prose, the novel shifts through time and space, roaming between the murky and glamorous corners of the city, from junkies in Pahar Ganj, Tibetan refugees in Majnu ka Tila and Sufi qawwalis in Nizamuddin to sex in five-star hotels, marriage meetings in coffee shops and luxury parties among the Delhi elite.

Defying genre and narrative convention, A Bad Character is the story of an affair from the point of view of the pursued, in a city where a woman’s love and freedom rarely come without a price.

Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, India in 1980. She studied journalism and later psychology, both in Delhi, before going on to work in the city's media, writing on culture and trends, later editing magazines. After a decade she moved to Mysore and then Goa to study yoga. A Bad Character is her first novel.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Jonathan Cape), US & Canada (Knopf), India (Penguin India), France (Éditions du Seuil)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013***

UNEXPLODED by Alison MacLeod

UK: Hamish Hamilton Publication date: July 2013 Edited manuscript available Length: 91,000 words

‘Unexploded is like a piece of finely wrought ironwork, uncommonly delicate but at the same time astonishingly strong and tensile; it's a novel of staggering elegance and beauty.’ – the Independent

May, 1940. Brighton. Wartime. On Park Crescent, a sunlit and usually tranquil street, Geoffrey and Evelyn Beaumont and their eight-year-old son, Philip, anxiously await news. The enemy is expected to land on the beaches of Brighton any day.

It is a year of tension and change. Geoffrey becomes Superintendant of the enemy alien camp, while young Philip is gripped by the rumour that Hitler will make Brighton’s royal Pavilion his English HQ. As the rumours continue to fly and the days tick on, Evelyn struggles to fall in with the war effort and the constraints of her role in life, her thoughts become tinged with a mounting, indefinable desperation.

Then she meets Otto Gottlieb, a ‘degenerate’ German-Jewish painter and prisoner in her husband’s internment camp. As Europe crumbles, Evelyn and Otto’s mutual distrust slowly begins to change into something else, which will shatter the structures on which her life, her family and her community rest.

Love collides with fear, the power of art with the forces of war, and the lives of Evelyn, Otto and Geoffrey are changed irrevocably.

Alison MacLeod was raised in Canada and has lived in England since 1987. She is the author of two novels, The Changeling and The Wave Theory of Angels, and of a collection of stories, Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and lives in Brighton.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Penguin), Canada (Penguin Canada)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] THE DEFECTIONS by Hannah Michell

UK: Quercus Publication date: February 2014 Edited manuscript available Length: 86,000 words

‘The Defections is one of the most compelling, haunting and thrilling debuts I have ever read. It is a book of betrayals and borders, real and imagined, and of deceptions and desires which beautifully and dramatically evokes the spectres of Korea's past and the divisions of its present in ways reminiscent of The Quiet American or McEwan's The Innocent.’ - David Peace

Mia is an outsider. The child of an English mother, she has been brought up by her stepmother, and her uncle, who runs a charitable - and controversial - school for North Korean defectors.

In her work as a translator at the British Embassy, she has become infatuated with Thomas, a diplomat with a self-destructive character. When an outrageous indiscretion endangers Thomas' position, she saves him from humiliation and rescues his career.

As a reward for his new-found rectitude, Thomas is asked to produce an audit on security among the Embassy staff. Learning of Mia's connections to the defectors' school, he is forced to dig deeper into the life of the woman who has captivated him...

Suddenly, all that Mia has done to get close to Thomas begins to cause her undoing.

Hannah Michell was born in Yorkshire in 1983 and grew up in Seoul, South Korea. She studied Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, then gained an MA in Creative Writing from City University. She has worked for The Economist and Penguin Books. The Defections is her first novel and will be published by Quercus Books in February 2014.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Quercus)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] THE TABLE OF LESS VALUED KNIGHTS by Marie Phillips

UK: option Jonathan Cape Unedited manuscript available 70,000 words

The exploits of the Knights of the Round Table are famous the world over. But there was another, unsung table at King Arthur’s court, the Table of Less Valued Knights, where sat the elderly, the infirm, the cowardly and the incompetent. And Sir Humphrey “The Ladykiller” du Val.

The biggest day in the Camelot calendar is Pentecost, when all the knights compete to take on the most prestigious quest of the year. But this year there’s a mix up. While sleazy Sir Dorian takes on King Edwin of Puddock’s quest to find his missing wife Martha, Sir Humphrey and his squire steal away with the real Pentecost quest: tracking down the fiancé of damsel in distress Elaine, kidnapped by a Knight in Black.

But what is the secret cause of Elaine’s distress? Was Queen Martha kidnapped, or does she have a secret of her own? And what links these two quests together? Sir Humphrey uncovers the truth behind these mysteries and more, with some help – and more than a little hindrance – from a host of characters including the Lady of the Lake, a magic sword with a mind of her own, and not one but three Men in Iron Masks.

Marie Phillips is the author of the international bestseller, Gods Behaving Badly, soon to be a film starring Christopher Walken and Sharon Stone. She wrote, with Robert Hudson, the BBC Radio 4 series Warhorses of Letters starring Stephen Fry, and is the co-author of the erotic spoof Fifty Shelves of Grey. She co-hosts the Firestation Book Swap in Windsor and London.

Option publishers: UK (Jonathan Cape), US (Little, Brown) Canada (Knopf), Complex Chinese (Metropolitan), Czech (Jota), France (Editions Heloise d’Ormesson), Germany (C. Bertelsmann), Greece (Oceanida), Holland (De Bezige Bej), Hungary (Cartaphilus), Israel (Modan), Italy (Guanda), Japan (Hayakawa Shobo), Poland (Bertelsmann), Portugal (Editorial Presenca), Romania (Rao), Russia (FLC Bertelsmann), Scandinavia: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden (Bazar), Simplified Chinese (Shangshu), Spain (Espasa), Thailand (CV Pak), Turkey (Kronos Yayincilik)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***SHORTLISTED FOR THE COMMONWEALTH BOOK PRIZE 2013***

THE WILDINGS by Nilanjana Roy

India: Aleph Canada: Random House Canada Edited manuscript available Length: 80,000 words

In the labyrinthine alleys and ruins of Nizamuddin, an old neighbourhood in Delhi, lives a small band of cats. Miao, the clan elder, a wise, grave Siamese; Katar, loved by his followers and feared by his enemies; Hulo, the great warrior tom; Beraal, the beautiful queen, swift and deadly when challenged; Southpaw, the kitten whose curiosity can always be counted on to get him into trouble… Unfettered and wild, these and the other members of the tribe fear no one, go where they will, and do as they please. Until, one day, a terrified orange-coloured kitten with monsoon green eyes and remarkable powers, lands in their midst—the first in a series of extraordinary events that threatens to annihilate them and everything they hold dear.

In what is bound to be hailed as the most imaginative and accomplished debut by an Indian novelist in years, Nilanjana S Roy has given us a novel that will be enjoyed by adults and older children alike.

Nilanjana Roy spent most of her adult life writing about humans before realizing that animals were much more fun; The Wildings is her first novel. Her column on books and reading for the Business Standard has run for over 15 years; she also writes for the International Herald Tribune on gender. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Caravan, Civil Lines 6, Guernica, the New York Times’ India blog, Outlook and Biblio. Some of her stories for children have been published in Scholastic’s Spooky Stories, & Science Fiction Stories and BeWitched. She is the editor of A Matter of Taste: The Penguin Book of Indian Food Writing.

All rights available excluding: Canada (Random House), Germany (cbj Verlag), India (Aleph), Italy (Neri Pozza), Spain (Plataforma)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] A LOVE LIKE BLOOD by Marcus Sedgwick

UK: Mulholland Publication date: March 2014 Edited manuscript available Length: 72,000 words

Dogs are barking in the night. He’s somewhere in the broken village on the hilltop opposite me. I can just make out the line of the rooftops against the dark sky. The air is hot and I am tired, but that’s not why I’m waiting. Nor am I waiting to mark any moment of reflection either. Not even to honour Marian. I’ve chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times when I could do nothing but sit and wait, and so now I am only desperate for it to be finished.

A Love Like Blood is the story of one man’s obsession with finding the truth. Told over the course of twenty years from 1944 to 1968 it takes us from Paris, to Cambridge and then throughout Europe Intense and extremely compelling, this is a dark thriller about a ‘cat and mouse’ chase between two men.

Marcus Sedgwick was born in East Kent. Alongside a 16 year career in publishing he established himself as a widely-admired writer of YA fiction; his books have either been shortlisted for or won, over thirty awards, including the Carnegie Medal, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. A Love Like Blood is his first adult novel.

All rights available excluding: World English language (Mulholland)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] *NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER*

THE BONE SEASON by Samantha Shannon

UK: Bloomsbury US: Bloomsbury UK publication date: August 2013 Finished copies available Length: 125,000 words

‘Don’t just suspend your disbelief – send it out to the pictures and sink into this fabulous, epic fantasy thriller…lavish, ebullient, escapist – bring on the sequel’ - The Times

The year is 2059. Nineteen-year-old Paige Mahoney is working in the criminal underworld of London, employed by a man named Jaxon Hall. She works for the Seven Seals, a notorious gang of clairvoyants, as an envoy between secret cells. For Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare type of clairvoyant, and in her world - the world of Scion - she commits high treason simply by breathing.

It is raining the day her life changes forever. On her way home from work, Paige is confronted by Scion police, who suspect her of clairvoyance. She escapes, killing both guards with her spirit. Later that night, she is captured and transported to Sheol I, once known as Oxford - a city that has been kept secret for two hundred years. There she meets Warden, a Rephaite, part of a race that looks uncannily like humans but are somehow very different. He is the single most redoubtable thing she has ever laid eyes on - and he will become her keeper. But can she trust him, and will she ever escape?

Samantha Shannon was born in west London in 1991. Between 2010 and 2013 she studied English Language and Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 2012 the Women of the Future Awards shortlisted her for The Young Star Award. The Bone Season is her first novel and has been sold in over 25 languages.

All rights available excluding: World English language (Bloomsbury), Brazil (Rocco), Catalan (Bromera), China (Sharp Point Press), Czech (Host), Croatia (Profil Knjiga), France (J’ai Lu), Germany (Berlin Verlag), Greece (Platypus), Hungary (Athenaeum), Iceland (Tindur), Israel (Agam), Italy (Salani), the Netherlands (Prometheus), Norway (Kagge Forlag), Poland (SQN), Portugal (Casa das Letras), Romania (Curtea), Russia (Atticus), Serbia (under offer), Slovakia (Vydavatelstvo Tatran), Spain (Random House Mondadori), Sweden (Modernista), Thailand (Post), Turkey (Pegasus), Vietnam (Nha Nam Publishing)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected]

DREAMERS OF THE ABSOLUTE by Anna Sun

UK: Sylph editions Publication: 2014 Edited manuscript available Length: 123 pages

A young woman, dreaming of love and yearning to know what love is, drives up to a Trappist monastery in rural Kentucky, seeking her older brother who has taken the vows of a novice. She spends seven days of unplanned contemplation interspersed between the seven prayers that punctuate the monastery's daily routine. Insights and recollections come and go like the ebb and flow of the tide. In her silent enclosure she asks herself who she is, what she wants, and what she believes. Anna Sun poses seemingly unanswerable questions, but like an illuminated book of hours, this sensitive and beautifully adorned novella, also seems to point to where an answer might lie.

Anna Sun is a bilingual writer of fiction, as well as a scholar of religion. Born and raised in Beijing, she moved to San Francisco at age nineteen, after having participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square student movement. She received her BA from the University of California at Berkeley and her PhD from Princeton University.

Her first book was a collection of short stories in Chinese, entitled The Blue Notebook (Shanghai Literary Arts Press, 2001), published while she was attending Princeton. Her second book is the scholarly monograph Confucianism as a World Religion (Princeton University Press, 2013.Her most recent work of fiction is the short novel Dreamers of the Absolute (Sylph Editions, 2014). Sun has published both fiction and literary criticism in English. The publications she has written for include Paideuma, Harvard Review, London Review of Books, and The Kenyon Review. Her essay in the Kenyon Review on Mo Yan, the Nobel Laureate of Literature in 2012, has sparked extensive responses, including two essays in the New York Times. She is now working on a novel that traces the history of a Chinese aristocratic family from 1911, the year that marked the end of imperial China, to 2011, the beginning of the new Chinese century. It is entitled The Square.

All rights available excluding: World English language

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected]

THEIR LIPS TALK OF MISCHIEF by Alan Warner

UK: Faber Publication date: July 2014 Unedited manuscript available Length: 91,000 words

An unforgettable story of love, literature and betrayal set in 1980s London. Thrown out of university, 21 year old Douglas Cunningham is offered refuge in a west London council flat with the mercurial, flamboyant Lou, his beautiful young wife Aoife and their infant daughter.

Penniless, carefree but ambitious – armed with the charm of youth, Lou and Douglas are obsessed with becoming great writers – though more often they are distracted by the local pub. They stumble from one hilarious farce to another, led on by Lou’s incorrigible insistence of their – or at least his – greatness.

This odd ménage totters as Lou becomes increasingly unstable and Douglas more and more besotted with the gorgeous, sweet-natured Aoife.

A novel by turns humorous and tragic, carefully attuned to the hubris of hot youth, family, and embracing the bohemian tradition, Their Lips Talk of Mischief, in lyrical and minutely observed prose, is also a celebration of the dangers and the romance of the literary calling, a threnody to the passing of youth.

Alan Warner was born in Oban, Argyll. His first novel, Morvern Callar won a Somerset Maugham Award; his second, These Demented Lands, was awarded an Encore Award and his third, The Sopranos, received the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Other works include The Man Who Walks and The Worms Can Carry Me to Heaven. The film of Morvern Callar has been released internationally to great acclaim. Alan Warner was on the list of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2003 and his newest novel, The Stars in the Bright Sky, was long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. His 2012 novel The Deadman’s Pedal has just won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2013.

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected]

Non-fiction

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ***WINNER OF THE THOMAS COOK TRAVEL BOOK AWARD 1980, NOW A MAJOR FILM ***

TRACKS by Robyn Davidson

UK: Bloomsbury US: Vintage UK publication date: April 2013 First published in 1980 by Jonathan Cape Finished copies available

Now a major film starring Mia Wasikowska, produced by The King's Speech duo Emile Sherman and Iain Canning, and directed by John Curran (The Painted Veil). ‘Vivid and vivacious...Davidson is as natural a writer as she is an adventurer’ – New Yorker

‘As eccentric, undisciplined, flashily brilliant and pig-headed as its author ... Davidson is a born writer, her book deeply moving’ – The Telegraph

I experienced that sinking feeling you get when you know you have conned yourself into doing something difficult and there’s no going back.

So begins Robyn Davidson’s perilous journey across 1,700 miles of hostile Australian desert to the sea, with only four camels and a dog for company.

Enduring sweltering heat, fending off poisonous snakes and lecherous men, chasing her camels when they get skittish and nursing them when they are injured, Davidson emerges as an extraordinarily courageous heroine driven by a love of Australia’s landscape, an empathy for its indigenous people and a willingness to cast away the trappings of her former identity. Tracks is the compelling, candid story of her odyssey of discovery and transformation.

Robyn Davidson is an Australian writer. Her career of travelling and writing about her travels has spanned over 30 years. She is currently writing a memoir which will be published by Bloomsbury.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Bloomsbury), US (Vintage), Brazil (Pensamento), France (editions Stock), Germany (Rowohlt)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] THE GREATEST CONSOLATION: UNRAVELING THE MYSTERIES OF SUICIDE by Katherine Frank

UK: Bodley Head Publication date: 2016 20 page proposal available

In this powerful and moving proposal, Katherine Frank explains how her book will explore not just the many faces of suicide and the ‘consolation’ of control and self- determination that it entails, but also the meaning and experience of self-inflicted death for those who choose it. Philosophers, psychiatrists, psychologists, sociologists, historians, biographers, novelists and poets have all written on suicide. But with a few notable exceptions like Sylvia Plath, people who end their lives do so with little if any explanation.

Frank will write about suicide as far as possible from the perspective of the person who commits suicide, and also of those close to them – family, friends, and professionals. The book will be a ‘biography of modern suicide,’ in the sense that Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of all Maladies is a ‘biography of cancer’ and Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon is an ‘anatomy of depression.’

Katherine Frank was born and educated in the United States but now lives in England. She is the author of several acclaimed biographies - of Lucie Duff Gordon, Emily Brontë, Mary Kingsley and Indira Gandhi. She has taught at universities in West Africa and the Middle East as well as Britain.

All rights available excluding: World English language (The Bodley Head), Germany (DuMont), the Netherlands (De Bezige Bij)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] FALLING UPWARDS: HOW WE TOOK TO THE AIR by Richard Holmes

UK: HarperCollins US: Pantheon UK publication date: April 2013 Finished copies available Length: 200,000 words

In this heart-lifting book, best-selling author Richard Holmes floats across the world following the pioneer generation of balloon aeronauts, the enigmatic group of men and women who first risked their lves to take to the air (or fall into the sky), and so discovered a new dimension of human experience. Why they did it, what their contemporaries thought of them and how their flights revealed the secrets of our planet becomes a compelling adventure story of the kind that only Holmes could tell.

Through all these adventures, the narrative lifts off in unexpected literary and scientific directions, exploring the interplay between technology and science fiction, the understanding of the biosphere, and the metaphysics of flight itself. Most of all, through the strange allure of the great balloonists, Holmes offers another of his subtle portraits of human endeavour, recklessness and vision.

Richard Holmes is the author of the prize-winning and bestselling The Age of Wonder, which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books (UK) and the National Book Critics Circle Award (US). He has written many other books including the classic Footsteps and its companion volume Sidetracks. His first biography, Shelley: The Pursuit won the Somerset Maugham Prize; Coleridge: Early Visions won the 1989 Whitbread Book of the Year Award; Coleridge: Darker Reflections won the Duff Cooper and Heinemann Awards; Dr Johnson & Mr Savage won the James Tait Black Prize. He holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of East Anglia, East London and Kingston. He is an Honorary Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, and was awarded the OBE in 1992. He lives in London and Norfolk with the novelist Rose Tremain.

All rights avaiable excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (HarperCollins), US (Pantheon)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] BENJAMIN BRITTEN: A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Paul Kildea

UK: Penguin Publication date: February 2013 Finished copies available Length: 241,000 words

Published to mark the beginning of the Britten centenary year in 2013, Paul Kildea's Benjamin Britten: A Life in the Twentieth Century is the definitive biography of Britain's greatest modern composer.

In the eyes of many, Benjamin Britten was Britain’s finest composer since Purcell (a figure who often inspired him) three hundred years earlier. He broke decisively with the romantic, nationalist school of figures such as Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and recreated English music in a fresh, modern, European form. With Peter Grimes (1945), Billy Budd (1951) and The Turn of the Screw (1954), he arguably composed the last operas - from any composer in any country - which have entered both the popular consciousness and the musical canon.

He did all this while carrying two disadvantages to worldly success - his passionately held pacifism and his homosexuality, specifically his forty-year relationship with Peter Pears, for whom many of his greatest operatic roles and vocal works were created.

Above all, this book helps us understand the relationship of Britten's music to his life, and takes us as far into his creative process as we are ever likely to go. Kildea reads dozens of Britten's works with enormous intelligence and sensitivity, in a way which those without formal musical training can understand. It is one of the most moving and enjoyable biographies of a creative artist of any kind to have appeared for years.

Paul Kildea is a writer and conductor who has performed many of the Britten works he writes about, in opera houses and concert halls from Sydney to Hamburg. His previous books include Selling Britten (2002) and (as editor) Britten on Music (2003). He was Head of Music at the Aldeburgh Festival between 1999 and 2002 and subsequently Artistic Director of the Wigmore Hall in London.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Penguin)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ROOTS OF YOGA by Dr. James Mallinson and Dr. Mark Singleton

UK: Penguin Classics Delivery date: July 2014 Proposal available Length: 120,000 words

Roots of Yoga is an important event in yoga publishing, giving readers a comprehensive and accessible insight into the core texts of the Indian traditions. In Roots of Yoga readers will discover the collected teachings of yoga in the words of their authors, rather than in the secondary versions of modern interpreters. This encounter with the primary sources of the yoga traditions will provide readers with powerful tools to navigate the complex story of yoga through the ages. The book will include complete translations of some of the shorter key texts, and excerpts of varying length from longer texts. Readers will find material on all aspects of yoga practice and philosophy, as conceived by the original practitioners and scholars.

Yoga has become a billion dollar, globalized industry, and yet, the yoga practices that predominate in the world today represent only a tiny sliver of yoga's vast teachings. What's more, knowledge about yoga's roots remains sparse. So much of the material on yoga in today's popular market is inaccurate, vague, or misleading. As a result, yoga practitioners and students are hungry for readable, user-friendly material which can provide deep and reliable access to the to the yoga traditions.

James Mallinson and Mark Singleton are among the foremost scholars of modern and traditional yoga in the world today. Mark Singleton has a PhD in South Asian Religion from Cambridge University and has written and edited books, chapters and articles on the history and practice of yoga for the past decade. His latest book, Yoga Body, the Origins of Modern Posture Practice, was published with Oxford University Press in 2010. James Mallinson is one of the world's foremost authorities on yoga traditions. After leaving school in 1987 at the age of 17, he spent 7 months in India and has returned every year since, spending a total of ten years there, wandering with traditional sadhus and yogis. He read Sanskrit at Oxford, and did an MA at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, for which his prize-winning thesis was on Indian asceticism. He did his PhD at Oxford under the world's leading scholar of Tantra, Professor Alexis Sanderson.

All rights available excluding: World English language (Penguin Classics)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] IN THE NAME OF THE PEOPLE by Lara Pawson

UK: I B Tauris Publication: April 2014 Edited manuscript available Length: 265 pages

A brilliant work of reportage. A massacre, a cover up, corruption and redemption.

On 27th May 1977, a demonstration against the ruling MPLA party of Angola led to the slaughter of thousands. Virtually unheard of outside the country, this book is the story of the author's search to uncover the truth.

In a series of vivid encounters, she talks to eyewitnesses, victims and perpetrators of the violent events that occurred that day and over the following weeks and months. In Lisbon, she hears a woman break three decades of silence about her husband's disappearance. In London, she talks to British journalists whose belief in the nominally socialist MPLA led them to belittle the brutal wave of killings. In Luanda, she meets people still awed by the Orwellian culture of fear that the 1977 purges helped produce, and that has made dissent psychologically impossible for many. The MPLA's arch-propagandist, in the last interview of his life, speaks about his rabble- rousing writings, compared by some to the radio broadcasts that provoked massacres in Rwanda in 1994. And a Cuban doctor tells the terrible secret of how he helped cover up a mass murder in Angola on the 27th May.

All rights available excluding: World English language (I B Tauris)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] FEDERER AND ME: A STORY OF OBSESSION by William Skidelsky

UK: Yellow Jersey Publication date: 2014 Proposal available

Like countless others, William Skidelsky has spent much of the last decade entranced by the spectacle of Roger Federer playing tennis. The strength of his feelings goes well beyond those of an ordinary fan, into the realm of obsession, or even love. In this original and inventive book, Skidelsky offers a compelling dual portrait, simultaneously investigating the nature of his own infatuation, and explaining what it is about the Swiss star’s game that makes it so appealing to millions across the world. Along the way, he situates Federer within the overall history of tennis, examines the role of beauty in sport, considers his rivalry with Rafael Nadal, and reflect on his recent decline. As much about the nature of obsession as it is about tennis, Federer and Me is a reflective, intelligent work that will appeal not only to fans of Federer, but to anyone who loves tennis, or indeed those who simply enjoy entertaining, thought-provoking prose. Beautifully written and by turns funny, poignant and cerebral, it is a genre-defying book that straddles the divide between sports book, biography and psychological self-portrait. To be published in the UK by Yellow Jersey Press in 2014.

William Skidelsky is a well-known journalist and literary editor. From 2008 to 2012, he was literary editor of the Observer. Before that he was deputy editor of Prospect magazine and, before that, literary editor of the New Statesman. He writes on a wide range of subjects, from books and culture to sport and food. He has written about tennis for the Observer and for Prospect, and is the tennis correspondent of the Economist’s sports blog, Game Theory. He played tennis to county level as a junior and now plays at a club in south-east London, where he is the men’s captain. He lives in London with his wife and son. Federer and Me is his first book.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] MAN ON FOREIGN GROUND by Jonny Steinberg

UK: Jonathan Cape US: Knopf UK publication date: 2014 Length: 125,000 words

Separated from his family on the first day of Somalia’s civil war, seven-year-old Asad Abdullahi crossed the border into Kenya and began a childhood alone, moving incessantly across east Africa, striking up temporary alliances with adults and children alike. In his late teens, in Addis Ababa, he made good as a street hustler, seduced a beautiful woman and took his new bride to South Africa, a land where one might make one’s fortune, he was told.

South Africa did indeed possess more riches than he had imagined, but it also simmered with hatred and violence. A Man of Good Hope goes to the heart of human experience – the need to connect to the place in which we live, no matter how harsh or indifferent, the need to leave a legacy in this world.

Johnny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. Two of his previous books, Midlands (2002) and The Number (2004) both won South Africa's premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has worked as a journalist at a national daily, written scripts for television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African government on criminal justice policy. All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Jonathan Cape), US (Knopf)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] THE LAST ASYLUM: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS IN OUR TIMES by Barbara Taylor

UK: Penguin Publication date: February 2014 Edited manuscript available Length: 80,000 words

A haunting memoir about illness and the psychiatric health system.

The Last Asylum begins with Barbara Taylor's visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in Friern Barnet, North London, a picture of luxury and repose. But this is the former site of one of England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney Hatch. At its peak this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients, among them, in the 1980s, Barbara Taylor herself.

The Last Asylum is Taylor's powerful account of her battle with mental illness, set inside the wider story of the end of the asylum system.

Barbara Taylor's previous books include an award-winning study of nineteenth- century socialist feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem; an intellectual biography of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; and On Kindness, a defence of fellow feeling co- written with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. She is a longstanding editor of the leading history journal, History Workshop Journal, and a director of the Raphael Samuel History Centre. She teaches history and English at Queen Mary .

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] TIGER FIRE by Valmik Thapar

India: Aleph Publication: December 2013 Finished copies available Length: 581 pages

The tiger has captured the imagination of human beings from the beginning of recorded history. It has been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalized in art and poetry and enthralled king and commoner alike. Tiger Fire celebrates this magnificent predator by bringing together the very best writing, photography and art on the Indian tiger from the first written description of a real-life encounter by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to photographs and studies of the last of the species suriving.

Conceived and edited by the world’s foremost authority on the Indian tiger, Valmik Thapar the book begins with an overview of Panthera tigris tigris, and then takes the reader through some of the most memorable encounters with wild tigers in our time.

Valmik Thapar is India's foremost wildlife conservationist and an internationally renowned natural historian. The author of twenty-three books, he has also presented several documentaries for the BBC, Animal Planet and Discovery, most notably BBC's The Land of the Tiger (1997). He is a member of the National Board of Wildlife chaired by the Prime Minister of India and is working on the definitive book on tigers, Tiger Fire (to be published by Aleph Book Company). He lives in New Delhi.

All rights available excluding: Indian Subcontinent (Aleph)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN by Tracey Thorn

UK: Virago Publication date: February 2014 Finished copies available Length: 85,000 words

‘The Alan Bennett of pop memoirists. I loved her book so much I wanted to form a band, too. Preferably with Thorn.’ – Caitlin Moran

I was only sixteen when I bought an electric guitar and joined a band…

Tracey Thorn was one half of the band, but her story spans over 30 years in the music industry.

As in her song lyrics, her writing is honest, moving, perceptive and funny, and it offers a vivid and appealing portrait of her personal and artistic journey through the 1980s and 1990s, with the , Everything But The Girl and as a solo artist.

Tracey was just 16 when she bought her first electric guitar and formed a band. Bedsit Disco Queen tells the story of the highs and lows of a pop career, one that is still ongoing. Her latest album was released in 2010 to great critical acclaim.

More than just a memoir, this is also the story of an incredible era in music – from the early 80s DIY indie scene to 90s Britpop and beyond.

All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth (Virago)

David Godwin Associates Ltd -55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG +44 (0) 207 240 9992 - [email protected] ROMANY AND TOM by Ben Watt

UK: Bloomsbury Publication date: 2014 Proof copies available Length: 90,000 words

We only ever see the second half of our parents' lives - the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together.

Ben Watt's father, Tommy, was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician - a politicised left-wing bandleader and composer - whose heyday in the late 1950's took him into the glittering heart of London's West End, where he broadcast live with his own orchestra from the BBC's Paris Theatre and played nightly with his quintet at the glamorous Quaglino's. His mother, Romany, was a RADA-trained Shakespearian actress, schooled at Cheltenham Ladies College, the daughter of a Methodist parson, who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz feature writer and columnist in the sixties and seventies. They were both divorcees from very different backgrounds who came together at a fateful New Year's Day party in 1957 like colliding trains.

Romany and Tom - the follow-up to his acclaimed debut Patient - is Ben Watt's honest, sometimes painful, and often funny portrait of his parents' exceptional lives and marriage, depicted in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents in their old age.

Ben Watt is one half of the extremely successful band, Everything But The Girl. His first book, Patient, was published in 1996 to critical acclaim. Patient detailed his experience with a rare disease and was as the Sunday Times said: 'not so much for the music lover as for lovers of life'. He is a musician, DJ and writer and partner to Tracey Thorn. He is currently a resident DJ on BBC 6Music's 6Mix.

All rights available excluding: World English language (Bloomsbury)

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