foreign rights February 2017 www.thegernertco.com JOHN GRISHAM #1 New York Times bestseller • Published in 40 languages • 375+ million books in print 6 June 2017 Bestselling author John Grisham stirs up trouble in paradise in his endlessly surprising new thriller: Camino Island unspools over one long summer, when a daring group of thieves pilfer five priceless handwritten F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscripts from Princeton University’s Library and send them into the rare books black market. As the FBI and a secret underground agency race to hunt them down, a young writer embarks on her own investigation into a prominent bookseller who is believed to have the precious documents. A daring heist; a young woman recruited to recover them; a beach-resort bookseller who gets more than he bargained for—all in one long summer on Camino Island. John Grisham is the author of thirty novels, one work of nonfiction, a collection of stories, and six novels for young readers. He lives in Virginia and Mississippi. www.thegernertco.com 2 fiction Jessie Chaffee, FLORENCE IN ECSTASY A visceral, vivid debut inspired by the novels of Jean Rhys, Elena Ferrante, and Catherine Lacey, that follows a troubled woman’s attempt to find herself in an unstable world Literary fiction Publisher: Unnamed Press – May 16, 2017 Editor: Chris Heiser Agent: Sarah Burnes Material: Advanced Reader’s Copy • “Jessie Chaffee's luminous debut is a hypnotic, addictive read. The shade of E. M. Forster stalks the heels of this story of one American woman at a crossroads in her life, in prose as lyrical and precise as it is evocative and haunting.” – Katherine Howe, author of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane • “Be ready to be provoked and transported by FLORENCE IN ECSTASY, a haunting, beautiful novel of womanhood, the saints, and the mysteries of the body. Jessie Chaffee writes all this, and more, with a lyrical, fierce fragility.” – Krys Lee, author of How I Became a North Korean Hannah arrives in Florence from Boston, knowing no one and speaking little Italian. But she is isolated in a more profound way, estranged from her own identity after a bout of starvation that left her life and body in ruins. She is determined to recover in Florence, a city saturated with beauty, vitality, and food— as well as a dangerous history of sainthood for women who starved themselves for God. Hannah joins a local rowing club, where Francesca, a welcoming but predatory Milanese, and Luca, a seemingly steady Florentine with whom she becomes involved, draw her into Florence’s vibrant present but Hannah is also rapt by the city’s past. Both sides pull Hannah in: challenging her, defeating her, lifting her up. And when a figure from her past life in Boston reappears, threatening the delicate balance of her present, Hannah’s feverish personal excavation becomes caught up with the long history of women’s contention with body and spirit, desire and death. Jessie Chaffee was awarded a 2014-2015 Fulbright Grant in Creative Writing to Italy and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Florence University of the Arts. Her fiction and nonfiction has been published in The Rumpus, Bluestem, Global City Review, Big Bridge, and The Sigh Press, among others. She is an editor of Words Without Borders and lives in New York City. www.JessieChaffee.com. www.thegernertco.com 3 Daryl Gregory, SPOONBENDERS A charming, hilarious and tender novel about a completely unusual yet utterly normal family of psychics and the invisible forces that bind us. Upmarket commercial fiction Publisher: Knopf – June 27, 2017 Editor: Tim O’Connell Agent: Seth Fishman Material: 2nd pass pages North American rights sold at auction for a mid-siX figure advance • Lead title with 75,000 copy print run and 8-city author tour • Television deal with Paramount • 10 foreign deals A generations-spanning family of psychics--both blessed and burdened by their abilities--must use their powers to save themselves from the CIA, the local mafia, and a skeptic hell-bent on discrediting them. The Telemachus family is known for performing inexplicable feats on talk shows and late-night television. Teddy, a master conman, heads up a clan who possess gifts he only fakes: there's Maureen, who can astral project; Irene, the human lie detector; Frankie, gifted with telekinesis; and Buddy, the clairvoyant. But when, one night, the magic fails to materialize and the family withdraws to Chicago where they live in shame for years. As they find themselves facing a troika of threats (CIA, mafia, unrelenting skeptics), Matty, grandson of the family patriarch, discovers a bit of the old Telemachus magic in himself. Now, they must put past obstacles behind them and unite like never before. But will it be enough to bring The Amazing Telemachus Family back to its amazing life? Daryl Gregory is the author of Afterparty, The Devil's Alphabet, and other novels for adults and young readers. His novella We Are All Completely Fine won the World Fantasy Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in Oakland, California. • Sold to: Riverrun/Quercus (UK & BC), Eichborn (Germany), Lattes (France), Rocco (Brazil), CITIC (China), China Times (Taiwan), Frassinelli (Italy), Libri (Hungary), Czarna Owca (Poland), La Campana (Catalan) www.thegernertco.com 4 Lisa Halliday, ASYMMETRY A novel about what makes art meaningful, and possible, in an unjust world--sure to be one of the most original literary debuts in recent memory, from a startlingly fresh and exciting new voice. Literary fiction Publisher: Simon & Schuster (US) / Granta (UK&BC) – January 2018 Editor: Ira Silverberg Agent: Chris Parris-Lamb Material: Edited manuscript in Spring 2017 US rights sold to S&S in a two-book deal, at auction • 7 Foreign Deals • UK & BC rights to Granta at auction ASYMMETRY is comprised of two distinct sections —“Folly” and “Madness”—that are completed by a short coda that reprises a character from the first. “Folly” is the story of Alice, a young American editor in a relationship with a famous and much older writer in New York City during the early years of the Iraq War. “Madness” is narrated by Amar, a young 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. The sections are very different stylistically—one might call them asymmetrical—and the experience of moving from “Folly” to “Madness” is initially a disorienting one. But as a subtle connection between the two emerges, the book becomes an original and unusual Künstlerroman – an artist’s journey towards maturity. The book is also a meditation on the asymmetries on which our world is built: power, money, fame, talent, luck, injustice, history and—perhaps most acutely of all—the question of what any individual can do with the aleatory brevity of life in the face of the certain eternity of death. Lisa Halliday’s only published piece of fiction, “Stump Louie,” appeared in 2005 in The Paris Review, for which she also interviewed Louise Erdrich in 2009. She now works as a freelance editor and translator in Milan, where she lives with her husband. • Sold to: Granta (UK & BC), Gallimard (France), Atlas-Contact (Netherlands), Hanser (Germany), Feltrinelli (Italy), Alfaguara (Spain), Politikens Forlag (Denmark) www.thegernertco.com 5 Rachel Kadish, THE WEIGHT OF INK An intellectual and emotional jigsaw puzzle of a novel for readers of A.S. Byatt’s POSSESSION and Geraldine Brooks’ PEOPLE OF THE BOOK. Literary fiction Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt - June 6, 2017 (World English rights) Editor: Lauren Wein Agent: Sarah Burnes Material: Advanced Readers Copies • “Full of suspense, surprises and characters we care passionately about. A beautiful, intelligent and utterly absorbing novel.”—Margot Livesey, author of Mercury • "Rachel Kadish draws us deep inside the vivid, rarely-seen world of 17th century Jewish London, conjuring the life and legacy of an extraordinary woman with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and education. A vital testament to the importance of books and ideas, The Weight of Ink unfolds like a revelation.”— Kate Manning, author of My Notorious Life 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. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of Aaron Levy, an American graduate student as impatient as he is charming, and in a race with another fast-moving team of historians, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.” Electrifying and ambitious, sweeping in scope and 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.