Summit Goes All In on Debut Novel
In a preempt, Summit executive editor Laura Perciasepe has acquired North American rights to debut novelist Erin Singer’s Dangerland. Marya Spence at Janklow & Nesbit brokered the deal. Summit described the book as a “screwball romantic comedy” about “Eugenie and Kurt, whose will-they-won’t-they story has upended the lives of everyone they love, set against the squalor and glamor of Las Vegas, its professional poker players, 24-hour daycares, and rundown gated communities.” Singer is the winner of a Pushcart Prize and the 2019 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. A pub date has not yet been set.
Crown Picks Up Guide to a Better Brain
Libby Burton at Crown has picked up world rights to Unburdened: The Power of Neuroplasticity to Erase the Score Your Body and Brain Have Been Keeping by Ben Ahrens, a fitness trainer turned neuroscience researcher and cofounder of the brain retraining app Re-origin. Heather Jackson at Heather Jackson Literary Agency negotiated the deal, in a preempt. Jackson said the book “offers practical tools to transform cognition and self-regulate the mind and body while equipping readers with a concrete, actionable road map to dismantling the foundations of their stress response.” The book will be published in 2026.
CrimeReads Editor Sells Thriller to Viking
Ibrahim Ahmad at Viking bought North American rights to CrimeReads editor-in-chief Dwyer Murphy’s psychological thriller The House on Buzzards Bay. Duvall Osteen at UTA negotiated the deal. Viking said the book is about “a group of old college friends whose seaside reunion at an eerie family beach house in coastal Massachusetts takes a sinister turn after a sudden disappearance and the arrival of a seductive stranger.” Buzzards Bay is set for a summer 2025 publication.
Mulhern Heads to Grand Central
After an auction, Alex Logan at Grand Central won world rights to Anything Goes by Julie Mulhern, the author of The Country Club Murders. Gordon Warnock at Fuse Literary handled the two-book deal. Warnock said Anything Goes is “a feminist historical mystery inspired by ‘Lipstick,’ the pseudonymous 1920s New Yorker nightlife columnist.” The book is scheduled for publication in fall 2025, with the second, as-yet-untitled book to follow in 2026.
Bestler Lands Skye’s New Novel
Lara Jones at Emily Bestler Books has taken world rights to The Incredible Kindness of Paper by Evelyn Skye (The Hundred Loves of Juliet). Thao Le at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency negotiated the deal. The publisher said the book is a contemporary love story that follows “a woman who’s just lost her job as she launches a project to spread kindness in New York City through inspirational messages folded inside origami roses, only to inadvertently begin an anonymous epistolary exchange in the paper flowers with her first—and lost—love.” The book is set to publish in 2025.
Rose Sells Two to Mira
Dina Davis at Mira Books landed world rights to two books by author Jeneva Rose (The Perfect Marriage). Sandy Lu at Book Wyrm Literary Agency agented the deal. (Rose is now represented by Celeste Fine at Park & Fine Literary and Media.) Mira said the first book, The Girl I Was, set for a summer 2025 release, is a previously self-published speculative novel “about a woman who wakes up in the year 2002, believing she’s been given a second chance to do her life over—until she meets her unruly 18-year-old self.” The second book, The Grass Is Always Bloodier, scheduled for a fall 2026 publication, is a horror novel that tells the story of “a family trying to escape a complicated past by moving into a secluded house, only to realize it might be haunted and that something is off with their closest neighbors.”
