DEAL OF THE WEEK
McTiernan Lands Bumper Deal at HC
Irish author Dervla McTiernan, who lives in Australia and is a bestseller there, inked a seven-figure agreement with HarperCollins for a trio of standalone novels set in the U.S. Shane Salerno at the Story Factory brokered the world rights agreement with HC’s Judy DeGrottole, Liate Stehlik, and Emily Krump (who will be editing). McTiernan, Salerno said, has sold more than 400,000 copies of her Cormac Reilly series. (In the U.S., Penguin published her Reilly novels The Ruin and The Scholar. And The Ruin is currently in development as a limited TV series.) McTiernan’s longtime editor at Harper Australia, Anna Valdinger, will be working with Krump on the new books. The first title under contract is scheduled for summer 2021.
FROM THE U.S.
Holt Wins Kravitz’s ‘Love’
Henry Holt recently announced that Serena Jones bought Lenny Kravitz’s autobiography, Let Love Rule. The U.S. rights agreement for the book, which Kravitz is writing with biographer David Ritz (When I Left Home), was handled by David Vigliano at Vigliano Associates. Vigliano said Let Love Rule “paints a portrait of an artist as a young man, covering a vast canvas stretching from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, L.A.’s Baldwin Hills, Beverly Hills, and finally France, England, and Germany.” Let Love Rule is set for fall 2020.
Buttigieg Puts ‘Trust’ in Norton
For Norton’s Liveright imprint, Robert Weil took U.S., Canadian, and open market rights to Pete Buttigieg’s Trust: America’s Best Chance. The book, sold by CAA and Brillstein Entertainment Partners, is set for October 6 and follows up the politician’s 2019 bestseller, Shortest Way Home (also published by Liveright). The publisher said the new book “explores in urgent and soul-searching ways why trust is a foundational value for democracy.”
Blow Chases ‘Devil’ for Harper
Jonathan Burnham at Harper bought world rights to New York Times opinion columnist Charles M. Blow’s The Devil You Know. The book, subtitled A Black Power Manifesto, was sold by David Kuhn at Aevitas Creative Management and is set for February 2021. Jennifer Barth, who acquired with Burnham, will edit it. Harper said The Devil You Know draws on “history, political observations, and Blow’s personal experience as a Black son of the South” to propose “the most audacious power play by Black people in the history of this country.”
Little, Brown Bets on Carraway 2.0
Nick, a novel about The Great Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway, was acquired by Joshua Kendall at Little, Brown. Trident Media Group’s Ellen Levine handled the North American rights agreement for author Michael Farris Smith (Blackwood). LB is calling Nick a prequel to Gatsby, whose U.S. copyright expires at the end of 2020. The novel, set for January 2021, follows Carraway before he meets Jay Gatsby and, the publisher said, “breathes new life into a character that many know but few have pondered deeply.” Kendall added that Nick is, in many ways, “the story of all of us, waylaid and in search of love and meaning.”
Dixon Takes ‘The Other Side’ to HMH
Record producer Drew Dixon sold The Other Side to Rakia Clark at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Regina Brooks at Serendipity Literary Agency, who handled the North American rights agreement, said the book is an inside look at the effects of “silence breaking against predatory behavior within the Black community” and chronicles Dixon’s “dilemma as a victim of abuse by powerful, influential men she admired.” The title is set for spring 2022.
Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Drew Dixon's The Other Side was slated for fall 2021; the book is set for spring 2022.
