Good books don’t die, they just go out of print. That’s a very 20th-century adage, but it applies to Austin Wright, whose 1994 novel, Tony and Susan, is receiving an unexpected second life this summer after being unavailable in the U.S. for nearly 20 years.
Originally published by a small press called Baskerville Books in 1993, Tony and Susan was licensed by then-Warner Books and released the following year in trade paperback. Written by a college professor at the University of Cincinnati, the book, which had middling success in the States, fared only slightly better in the U.K., where it drew a notable amount of critical acclaim after being published by Simon & Schuster. One person who was particularly taken with the work was British editor Ravi Mirchandani.
Mirchandani, who worked at Penguin U.K. in the '90s, was the under-bidder on the novel when it was on submission in England. Although the book didn’t go onto commercial heights across the pond, either, Mirchandani always felt, as a rep at GCP explained, it was “the book that got away.”
About a professor and suburban mom who is pulled into memories and secrets from her past when she receives an unpublished manuscript in the mail from her ex-husband, Tony and Susan, which was the most popular of the seven books Wright published, kept tugging at Mirchandani, enough for him to look it up years later. When he found out the book had fallen out of print, Mirchandani, now publishing director at Atlantic Books, acquired the rights and re-released it in the U.K. last year.
After the British hardcover reprint gained momentum, GCP publisher Jaime Raab decided to give the book another stab in the States. Now GCP is releasing the book, in hardcover only, on August 11 with an announced 10,000-copy first printing.
The new edition features a blurb from its original publication on the cover—Saul Bellow calling the novel “marvelously written”—and GCP is hoping to build on the strong response to the work in England, where papers like the Independent called the book “astute, cunning and thrilling in equal measure.”
That Wright, who died in 2003, will not be around to see his work back on shelves, makes the reissue all the more bittersweet. Nonetheless, the new hardcover edition will give many American readers the first chance to read Wright since his six other novels, including his first (the Doubleday-published 1969 work Camden’s Eyes), remain out-of-print.
