BLACK INC. LONDON RIGHTS GUIDE 2020 BLACK INC. LONDON RIGHTS GUIDE 2020 Factory 19 4 The Inheritors 5 Melting Moments 6 On the Line 7 A Couple of Things Before the End 8 Act of Grace 9 One Hundred Days 10 Sly Fox 11 The Beat of Life 12 We, Hominids 13 Shanghai Acrobat 14 Everything Harder Than Everyone Else 15 Men at Work 16 The Shortest History series 17 The Winter Road 21 Car Crash 22 Muddy People 23 The Town that Told the Story 24 See What You Made Me Do 25 The Honey Factory 26 Writers on Writers series 27 Jacinda Ardern 29 The Mutant Project 30 Contest for the Indo-Pacific 31 China Panic 33 Brothels of Little Lon 34 Animals and the Law 35 My Tongue is My Own 36 Russians, White and Red 37 Black Inc. Agents 38 Black Inc. Contacts 40 BLACK INC. BOOKS LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 | 3 Factory 19 Dennis Glover In the spirit of George Orwell’s Animal Farm comes a darkly funny satire on technology, the gig economy and the smartphone – and what would happen if we re-created a world without them. They tell us that human happiness lies only in the future. But what if it really lies in the past? Hobart, 2022: a city with declining population, in the grip of a dark recession. A rusty ship sails into the harbour and begins to unload its cargo on the site of the once famous but now abandoned Gallery of Future Art, known to the world as GoFA. One day the city’s residents are awoken by a high- pitched sound no one has heard for two generations – a factory whistle. GoFA’s owner, world-famous JULY 2020 tycoon Dundas Faussett, is creating his most LITERARY FICTION ambitious installation yet. He’s going to defeat the Imprint: Black Inc. internet’s dominance over our lives by establishing RRP: AU$32.99 a new Year Zero: 1948. Those whose jobs and lives Paperback | 234 × 153mm | 304pp have been destroyed by Amazon and Uber and Airbnb are invited to fight back in the only way that Manuscript: Available can possibly succeed: by living as if the internet Rights held: World; film/TV and the smartphone had never been invented. Praise for The Last Man in Europe The hold over our lives by Gates, Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and the rest, starts to loosen as the “Dennis Glover has written a novel that revolutionary example of Factory 19 spreads. Can captures George Orwell as he began to write nostalgia really defeat the future? Can the little the book he saw as the culmination of all people win back the world? We are about to find out. he’d learned in a bloody century about DENNIS GLOVER, the son of factory labourers, tyranny, fear, valor, and love.” —NPR grew up in a town just like Factory 19. Educated at Monash and Cambridge universities, he has made a “Rivetingly told . A terrifically assured career as one of Australia’s leading speechwriters and hybrid of fiction and life-writing” political commentators. His first novel, The Last Man —The New Statesman in Europe, was nominated for several literary prizes, including the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. “Engrossing, timely and finely detailed . a Factory 19 is his second novel. must read for lovers of history, literature, or politics” —Library Journal (starred review) RIGHTS SOLD TO THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE: NORTH AMERICA (OVERLOOK PRESS) AND UK/ COMM EX ANZ (POLYGON) BLACK INC. BOOKS LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 | 4 The Inheritors Richesse Oblige Hannelore Cayre Translated by Stephanie Smee An unforgettable new novel by the award-winning author of the international French bestseller The Godmother. “She had been dead now for four days and I had become rich. Unimaginably rich.” Blanche de Rigny has always considered herself the black sheep of the family. And a black sheep on crutches at that. But it turns out her family tree has branches she didn’t even know existed. And many of them are rotten to the core. As Blanche becomes aware of the legacy left by her wealthy Parisian ancestors, she wonders about engaging in a little family tree pruning of her own. SEPTEMBER 2020 LITERARY FICTION However, with great wealth comes great responsibility – a form of richesse oblige, perhaps – Imprint: Black Inc. and Blanche also has a plan to use her inheritance to RRP: AU$29.99 cure the world of its ills. Paperback | 210 × 135mm | 224pp Spanning two centuries, from Paris on the eve of the Manuscript: March 2020 Franco-Prussian war to the modern day, this Rights held: World English-language unforgettable family saga lays bare the persistent Other rights: Éditions Métailié and poisonous injustice of inequality. In her trademark razor- sharp style, Hannelore Cayre again delivers the sardonic humour and devilish creativity that made The Godmother an international bestseller. HANNELORE CAYRE is a French novelist, screenwriter, director and criminal lawyer. Her most recent work, The Godmother (La Daronne), won the European Crime Fiction Prize and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, and featured on the 2019 New York Times List of 100 Notable Books. It has been made into a major film starring Isabelle Huppert. BLACK INC. BOOKS LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 | 5 Melting Moments Anna Goldsworthy A charming, sharply observed first novel from one of Australia’s best writers Sometimes events occur as one might wish but sometimes they do not. So says the ever-practical Ruby, always striving for what is right and proper, from the time we meet her as a striking soldier’s fiancée through to the rather less steady years of her old age. With an eyebrow pencil in one hand and gardening shears in the other, Ruby navigates the intervening years doing her duty as a woman, allowing marriage and motherhood to fill her with purpose and pleasure – and only occasionally wondering, Is this all there is? In her moving, captivating fiction debut, award- MARCH 2020 winning author Anna Goldsworthy recreates LITERARY FICTION Adelaide and Melbourne of half a century ago, Imprint: Black Inc. bringing a family to life as they move through the RRP: AU$29.99 decades, challenging and caring for and loving one Paperback | 234 × 153mm | 240pp another, often in surprising ways. Charming and sharply observed, Melting Moments is, like Ruby Manuscript: Available herself, a gentle powerhouse. Rights held: World English-language Other rights: Curtis Brown Australia ANNA GOLDSWORHY is the award-winning author of Piano Lessons, Welcome to Your New Life and the Quarterly Essay Unfinished Business: Sex, Freedom “A tender evocation of times past, and a and Misogyny. Her writing has appeared in The Monthly, subtle, elegant portrait of one woman’s life The Age, The Australian, The Adelaide Review and and loves as she grows and adapts to a The Best Australian Essays. changing world” —Ceridwen Dovey, “A delightful and beautifully written book, suffused award-winning author of Only the Animals with humour and enquiry into the domestic habits, and In the Garden of the Fugitives social expectations and morals of a period and place” —Joan London, author of The Golden Age, Publisher’s Weekly book of the year 2016 AUTHOR’S PREVIOUS BOOK, PIANO LESSONS, WAS PUBLISHED AROUND THE WORLD IN MULTIPLE EDITIONS BLACK INC. BOOKS LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 | 6 On the Line À la ligne Joseph Ponthus Translated by Stephanie Smee Unable to find work in his field, Joseph Ponthus enlists with a temp agency and starts to pick up casual shifts in the fish processing plants and abattoirs of Brittany. Day after day he records with infinite precision the nature of work on the production line: the noise, the weariness, the dreams stolen by the repetitive nature of exhausting rituals and physical suffering. But he finds solace in a life previously lived. Shelling prawns, he dreams of Alexandre Dumas. Pushing cattle carcasses, he recalls Apollinaire. And, in the grace of the blank spaces created by his insistent return to a new line of text – mirroring his continued return to the JULY 2020 production line – we discover the woman he loves, LITERARY FICTION the happiness of a Sunday, Pok Pok the dog, the Imprint: Black Inc. smell of the sea. RRP: AU$27.99 In this celebrated French bestseller, translated by Paperback | 210 × 135mm | 272pp Stephanie Smee, Ponthus captures the mundane, Manuscript: Available the beautiful and the strange, writing with an Rights held: World English-language elegance and humour that sit in poignant contrast Other rights: Editions La Ronde Table with the blood and sweat of the factory floor. On the Line (À la ligne) is a poet’s ode to manual labour, “Joseph Ponthus has positioned himself as and to the human spirit that makes it bearable. one of the great authors of our times with After studying literature and social work, JOSEPH his arrival on the literary scene” —L’Alsace PONTHUS worked for over ten years as a social worker and special needs teacher in the suburbs of Paris. In 2012 he co-authored Nous . La Cité (The Suburbs are STEPHANIE SMEE is the translator of Ours). He lives and works in Brittany, France. Hannelore Cayre’s prize-winning work of literary crime fiction, The Godmother. Her translation of rediscovered WWII OVER 40,000 COPIES SOLD IN FRANCE memoir, No Place to Lay One’s Head, won the JQ–Wingate Prize. AWARDS INCLUDE: GRAND PRIX RTL / READ 2019; PRIX RÉGINE DEFORGES 2019; JEAN AMILA- MECKERT PRIZE 2019; PRIZE FOR THE FIRST NOVEL FOR LIBRARY READERS OF THE CITY OF PARIS; PRIX EUGÈNE DABIT 2019 BLACK INC. BOOKS LONDON BOOK FAIR 2020 | 7 A Couple of Things Before the End Stories Sean O’Beirne This brilliant collection mixes the storytelling originality of George Saunders and Lydia Davis with a sensibility all its own, taking the reader on an extraordinary tour of an old and a new Australia.