DEAL OF THE WEEK
Rooney’s New Novel Goes to FSG
Mitzi Angel at Farrar, Straus and Giroux took U.S. rights to Sally Rooney’s third novel, in a two-book deal brokered by Tracy Bohan and Andrew Wylie at the Wylie Agency. Beautiful World, Where Are You is set for September. It follows four people in Ireland, FSG said, who “are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart.... Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?” Rooney (Normal People) made the longlist for the Booker Prize in 2018.
FROM THE U.S.
Archer Returns to HC
Jeffrey Archer has left St. Martin’s Press to publish with HarperCollins. A three-book, world English rights agreement was negotiated between HC UK’s Charlie Redmayne, Kate Elton, and Kimberley Young and Archer’s representatives, James Archer and Alan Mitchell at Mitchell Rights Management. As part of the deal, Archer will pen a new title in his William Warwick series, Over My Dead Body, which is set for later this year. Archer, per HC, has sold more than 275 million print copies of his books around the world.
SMP Preempts Nance’s ‘Insurgency’
For St. Martin’s Press, Elisabeth Dyssegaard preempted Malcolm Nance’s They Want to Kill Americans: The Radical Militias, Fanatical Terrorists, and the Deranged Ideology of the Coming Trump Insurgency. The publisher said it’s a “chilling and deeply researched” work about the hold Donald Trump may have on a large portion of the electorate after he leaves office. Nance—a bestselling author, MSNBC analyst, and executive director of TAPSTRI, a research institute focused on extremism—predicts that support for Trump will increasingly be expressed by white supremacist groups that are “armed and primed for violence.” Tanya McKinnon at McKinnon Literary brokered the North American rights agreement.
Iowa Fellow’s Debut Lands at Viking
Iowa Writers Workshop Rona Jaffe fellow Sarah Thankam Mathews sold her debut novel to Viking. Lindsey Schwoeri took North American rights to All This Could Be Different from Bill Clegg at the Clegg Agency. Viking said the book, set for 2022, is about a recent college grad who “tries to forge a new life in Milwaukee during Obama’s second term—navigating precarious employment, queerness, immigration, a dizzying romance with a ballet dancer, and the pulls of blood and chosen family.”
HQN Lassos Yates for 10
Bestselling romance author Maisey Yates inked a 10-book, world rights deal with HQN’s Flo Nicoll. The agreement, which was brokered by Helen Breitwieser at Cornerstone Literary Agency, will see Yates pen six mass market originals, two trade paperbacks, and two novellas. They will include a new western romance series titled Four Corners Ranch, as well as the standalone novel The Miraculous Ruby McKee, which is set for spring 2022. The latter, HQN said, is about a woman who was abandoned as a newborn and has “lived a charmed life since” but needs to find out why her parents left her. Yates has written more than 100 romance novels.
Konkle Gets ‘Sane’ at Random House
In a North American rights deal, Ben Greenberg at Random House nabbed Anna Konkle’s memoir The Sane One, in a deal brokered by Daniel Greenberg at Levine Greenberg Rostan. The book, RH said, is about the author’s coming of age “in a highly dysfunctional household, with her erratic parents separated but living on different sides of the home.” It explores many of the themes mined in Pen15, the Hulu series that Konkle cowrites and stars in.
