PICADOR INTERNATIONAL RIGHTS GUIDE FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR 2017 Devon Mazzone Director, Subsidiary Rights [email protected] 18 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011 (212) 206.5301 Amber Hoover Foreign Rights Manager [email protected] 18 West 18th Street, New York, NY 10011 (212) 206.5304 2 FICTION 3 Donohue, Keith THE MOTION OF PUPPETS A Novel October 2016 (finished copies available) In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside. The next morning Theo wakes up to discover his wife is missing. Under police suspicion and frantic at her disappearance, he obsessively searches the streets of the Old City. Meanwhile, Kay has been transformed into a puppet, and is now a prisoner of the back room of the Quatre Mains, trapped with an odd assemblage of puppets from all over the world who can only come alive between the hours of midnight and dawn. The only way she can return to the human world is if Theo can find her and recognize her in her new form. So begins a dual odyssey: of a husband determined to findhis wife, and of a woman trapped in a magical world where her life is not her own. Keith Donohue is the national bestselling author of the novels The Stolen Child, The Angels of Destruction, and Centuries of June. His work has been translated into two dozen languages, and his articles have appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other publications. A graduate of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Donohue also holds a Ph.D. in British rights: Picador English from The Catholic University of America. He lives in Maryland. Translation rights sold: Indonesian/Mizan Praise for THE MOTION OF PUPPETS: Polish/Proszynski “At once old and new, borrowed and original, The Motion of Puppets Portuguese (Br.)/ disdains both genre and mainstream expectations to turn readers’ Darkside Books attention to the permeable boundary between life and its mimicry.” --The Washington Post Turkish/Nemesis "A masterpiece of psychological horror...Intricately plotted, absorbing, Rights sold, The Boy Who and suspenseful, this is a moving, modern story set in what feels like a Drew Monsters: fairy-tale world but is actually terrifyingly realistic." –Booklist, starred review Chinese (Complex)/ Delightpress “Donohue shifts between the two worlds of the mundane and the Indonesian/Mizan magical so readily that the boundary between them begins to fade. Underneath all the changes, his story has the emotional depth, the love Polish/ Proszynski and grief of the old myth, only transposed to the sad, leaves-falling Portuguese (Br.)/ ‘October country’ of the mind.” Darkside Books --The Wall Street Journal Turkish/Nemesis 4 Goldberg, Paul THE CHATEAU A Novel February 2018 (galleys available) It is January 2017 and Bill has hit rock bottom. Yesterday, he was a successful science reporter at The Washington Post. Today, fired from his job, with exactly $1,219.37 in his checking account, he learns that his college roommate, a plastic surgeon known far and wide as the “Butt God of Miami Beach,” has fallen to his death under salacious circumstances. With nothing to lose, Bill heads for Florida, ready to begin his own investigation— a last ditch attempt to revive his career. There’s just one catch: Bill’s father, Melsor. Melsor Yakovlevich Katzenelenbogen (so-named in tribute to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and the October Revolution)—poet, literary scholar, political dissident, small-time-crook—is angling for control of the condo board at the Chateau Sedan Neuve, a crumbling high-rise populated mostly by Russian Jewish immigrants. The current board is filled with fraudsters, and Melsor will use any means necessary to win the election. And who better to help him—through legal and illegal means—than his estranged son? Featuring a colorful cast of characters, THE CHATEAU injects the crime novel genre with surprising idiosyncrasy, subverting it with dark comic farce in a setting that becomes a microcosm of Trump’s America. Paul Goldberg is the author of The Yid and two books on the Soviet human All rights: Picador rights movement, and has co-authored (with Otis Brawley) the book How We Do Harm. He is the editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, a Rights sold, The Yid: publication focused on the business and politics of cancer. French/Sonatine “The Yid is about Stalin’s worst enemy as well as his favorite prey. Mr. Goldberg fuses these characters and all that they suggest to Stalin—Paul Robeson for Lewis, Anna Akhmatova for one of the book’s women—into one hellish vision to haunt that dictator during his last hours on earth.” — Janet Maslin, The New York Times “The Yid is darkly playful and generous with quick insights into the vast weirdness of its landscape.… We are most immersed in the past, I think, when we watch someone manipulate it. This might be, ironically, a lesson Stalin taught too, but it’s still an apt one for readers to consider when engaged with such a fine enterprise as this one.” —Glen David Gold, The Washington Post “The Yid [is a] rollicking romp of a novel… In something like the mode of writer-director Quentin Tarantino in his films Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained, Goldberg offers The Yid as a literary score-settling machine: a way for one of history's most brutal villains to receive a kind of cosmic comeuppance at the hands of those he victimized in real life. The difference is that unlike Tarantino, whose revenge fantasies undercut their higher purpose with an excess of sensational violence, Goldberg is less interested in the body than he is in the soul…. The Yid is as hilarious as it is appalling, and vice versa.” —Kevin Nance, Chicago Tribune 5 Mak, Geoffrey LORDS A Novel August 2018 (manuscript available) Geoffrey Mak’s LORDS explores the fluid nature of identity and the British rights: Picador subversive power of protest through the story of Lou, a young Asian Translation rights: Curtis American expatriate journalist stationed in Ankara during the Arab Spring Brown, Ltd. who becomes intrinsically entangled in all sides of political upheaval through his involvement with a promiscuous government official, a whistleblowing hacker and an ambassador’s disillusioned daughter. Each pursue their own agendas as Lou struggles to find stability in a world falling apart around him. Blending reportage with brave and heartbreaking characters of his own invention, Mak’s LORDS is a roman à clef of unique perspective and clear prescience. Much like The Flamethrowers and Leaving the Atocha Station, LORDS tackles questions of the morality of dissent, the erosion of reasoned discourse and the politics of basic human relationships. Geoffrey Mak is a writer and designer based in Brooklyn. The founding Fiction Editor of The Offing, hi writing has appeared in Guernica, Flavorwire, Forbes, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions, among other publications. 6 Shelby, Ashley SOUTH POLE STATION A Novel July 2017 (finished copies available) Do you have digestion problems due to stress? Do you have problems with authority? How many alcoholic drinks do you consume a week? Would you rather be a florist or a truck driver? These are the questions that decide who has what it takes to live at South Pole Station, a place with an average temperature of -54°F and no sunlight for six months a year. Cooper Gosling is adrift at thirty, unmoored by a family tragedy and floundering in her career as a painter. So she applies to the National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Program and flees to Antarctica—the bottom of the Earth—where she encounters a group of misfits motivated by desires as ambiguous as her own. There’s Pearl, the cook whose Carrot Mushroom Loaf becomes means toward her Machiavellian ambitions; the oxymoronic Sal (he is an attractive astrophysicist); and Tucker, the only gay black man on the continent who, as station manager, casts a watchful eye on all. The only thing they have in common is the conviction that they don’t belong anywhere else. Enter Frank Pavano—a climatologist with unorthodox beliefs. His presence will rattle this already unbalanced community, bringing Cooper and the Polies to the center of a global controversy and threatening the 800-million-year- old ice chip they call home. In the tradition of And Then We Came to the End and Where’d You Go Bernadette?, SOUTH POLE STATION is a warmhearted comedy of errors set in the world’s harshest place. Ashley Shelby is a former editor at Penguin and a prize-winning writer and British rights: Picador journalist. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is the author of Translation rights: ICM Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City, a narrative nonfiction account of the record-breaking flood that, in 1997, devastated Grand Rapids, North Dakota. The short story that became the basis for South Pole Station is a winner of the Third Coast Fiction Prize; this is her first novel. "[An] enjoyable first novel...Shelby is very good on social interactions at the end of the earth, and South Pole Station crackles with energy whenever science takes center stage"."—Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post "Few places evoke feelings of isolation and existential crisis like the South Pole.