Among the big titles the American agents will be talking up in the rights center are the debut novel from Michael Imperioli, a memoir by David Lynch, an update on Cinderella, and a short story collection from Lionel Shriver.
Aevitas Creative Management
The biggest name on Aevitas’s slate is actor and author Neil Patrick Harris, whose debut middle grade series, the Magic Misfits, will see its eponymous first volume released this November. The series, the shingle says, follows “six friends who use magic tricks and teamwork to rid their sleepy town of a band of thieves.” Rights have sold in 15 foreign markets to date. A nonfiction trilogy, by Lore podcast writer, host, and producer Aaron Mahnke, will, the agency notes, collect “scary, true-life stories based on global superstitions and the frightening folklore surrounding them.” Called the World of Lore, its inaugural volume, which published in October, is subtitled Monstrous Creatures. A fiction title, penned by Final Girls author Riley Sager, called The Last Time I Lied, will release in fall 2018 and stars a “damaged young woman” who, Aevitas says, “returns to the summer camp where 15 years before three of her friends disappeared, never to be seen again.” Harvard University junior fellow and Boston University assistant neuroscience professor Steve Ramirez has Project Total Recall, which Aevitas calls “a true adventure story that merges captivating storytelling with personal experience,” exploring “how new tools for controlling memory are reframing everything scientists thought they knew about memory and the mind.”
Baror International
A speculative fiction title The Belles (Freeform, Feb. 2018) by Dhonielle Clayton, Tiny Pretty Things series coauthor and We Need Diverse Books COO, is a top book on Baror’s hot list. Its heroine, Camellia Beauregard, is a member of a class called “Belles” in an alternate world called Orleans, in which, the agency says, “the people are born gray, they are born damned, and only with the help of a Belle and her talents can they transform and be made beautiful.” International Thriller Writers award–winner Nicholas Petrie’s next novel in his Peter Ash series, Light It Up (Putnam, Jan. 2018). The action-packed thriller finds Ash investigating, the shingle says, “a well-planned and flawlessly executed hijacking reveals the hidden dangers of Colorado’s mellowest business.” To Be a Friend Is Fatal author Kirk Wallace Johnson’s The Feather Thief (Viking, Apr. 2018), has already been nabbed in the Dutch market by Atlas Contact, by Droemer Knaur in Germany, and Brombergs in Sweden; the agency bills it as a “rollicking true-crime adventure and a thought-provoking exploration of the human drive to possess natural beauty,” and recommends it for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. Christopher Ruocchio’s Empire of Silence (DAW, July 2018) stars the son of a uranium magnate who, Baror says, “must rise to become either the greatest hero humanity has ever known—or its greatest monster—as an oppressive human empire struggles with the first alien threat in its 6,000-year history.” And Vengeful, Victoria Schwab’s follow-up, five years later, to her first adult novel, Vicious (Tor, Sept. 2018), will continue the author’s Villains series.
Curtis Brown Ltd.
Wendy Mass and Rebecca Stead team up for what Curtis Brown calls “a heartwarming novel about friendship and family, the power of childhood, and a little bit of magic” in Bob (Feiwel & Friends, 2018); foreign rights have gone to Text Publishing in Australia and New Zealand, Complex/Rye Field in China, and De Agostini in Italy. Orphan #8 author Kim van Alkamede’s Bachelor Girl (St. Martin’s, Mar. 2018) is inspired by the story of former New York Yankees owner Jacob Rupert. It’s “a fresh and intimate novel about the destructive power of secrets and the redemptive power of love,” per the shingle. Glenn Cooper’s thriller The Sign of the Cross (Severn, 2018) has been scooped up in the Japanese market by Take Shobo and in Italy by Casa Editrice Nord. It features Cal Donovan, whom the agency bills as “a Harvard professor and reprobate tasked by the Vatican to investigate claims of stigmata by a priest.” A not-entirely-faithful YA retelling of Jane Eyre, co-written by My Lady Jane authors Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows, is called My Plain Jane (HarperTeen, July 2018) and features, the shingle says, “a Jane with terrible taste in men, her determined best friend Charlotte Brontë, and one ghost hunter extraordinaire.” And in nonfiction, Our Own Devices and Why Things Bite Back author Ed Tenner’s The Efficiency Paradox (Knopf, Apr. 2018) hones in on our cultural obsession with efficiency.
The Cheney Agency
A nonfiction title the agency will be talking up in Germany is Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms’s New Power: How Movements Build, Businesses Thrive, and Ideas Catch Fire in Our Hyperconnected World (Doubleday, Apr. 2018). The agency says the book explores “how power has evolved” and confronts a range of issues—from the rise “mega-platforms” like Uber and Facebook to the “out-of-nowhere” victories of Presidents Obama and Trump—“revealing the shift behind them [that the authors] call new power.” Another big nonfiction title on Cheney’s hot list is Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World (Simon & Schuster, out now) about how a little-discussed treaty, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, “gave birth to an international system that has brought unprecedented stability and peace to the world.” And from Jessica Nordell there’s The End of Bias (Metropolitan, 2019), which the agency calls “a solutions-oriented investigation into cutting-edge strategies for eliminating implicit bias from decision making” in everything from our personal lives to “culture at large.” On the fiction front is the latest from The Imperfectionists author Tom Rachman, The Italian Teacher (Viking, Mar. 2018), about “the son of a world-famous painter striving to create his own legacy and come out from beneath his father’s shadow.”
The Clegg Agency
Among the big titles Clegg will be promoting is Lauren Groff’s short story collection Florida (Riverhead, June 2018), which the shingle says is “about the contradictions of motherhood, the savagery within us, and the inscrutability of the natural world.” Another big novel for the agency is Johannes Lichtman’s Such Good Work (on submission), which Clegg calls a “timely and darkly funny work about a 29-year-old American teacher and opiate addict” who moves to Sweden to restart his life. Then there’s Kira Jane Buxton’s Hollow Kingdom (Grand Central, 2019), an epic fantasy featuring “a trash-talking, raised-on-TV, domesticated crow and his loyal bloodhound... who embark on a reluctant quest to save what remains of postapocalyptic Seattle.” On the nonfiction side is H for Hawk author Helen Macdonald’s Midway (Grove Atlantic, no pub date yet), which is “an elegiac and personal exploration of the collision of nature and mankind’s fate on Midway Island.”
DeFiore and Company
DeFiore’s list gets musical and visual with Visualizing the Beatles (Dey Street, 2019), in which authors John Pring and Rob Thomas turn their designers’ eyes toward illustrating the history of the Fab Four through infographics; rights have sold to Knesbeck in Germany and Ediciones B in Spain. Amy Jo Burns’s debut, Shiner (Riverhead, 2018), is, the shingle says, “a contemporary and timely multigenerational Appalachian love story,” as well as “a female coming-of-age story in a land of men”; its author writes for Ploughshares and has placed work in Salon, Good Housekeeping, the Rumpus, and Jezebel. Another marquis title, Coyote Doggirl (Drawn & Quarterly, fall 2018), finds Lisa Hanawalt, the producer and production designer of TV’s Bojack Horseman, making her full-length graphic novel debut. The work, which the agency calls “delightfully absurd and intensely emotional,” is, Defiore says, “an homage to and lampoon of classic westerns as it features a fiercely independent female protagonist who is half dog, half coyote, and a whole lot of attitude.” And Nick Polson and James Scott’s AIQ: How People and Machines Are Smarter Together (St. Martin’s, May 2018) investigates, the agency says, how intelligent machines are changing the world around them, and how they can use this knowledge to make better decisions in their own lives.” Rights have sold to Business Weekly and Gingko in China, Gilbut in South Korea, and Transworld for the U.K. market.
Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
The Dijkstra agency’s top title is Amy Tan’s upcoming memoir, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir (Ecco, Oct.), which received a starred review in PW. “In these pages,” the agency says, “we find hints of trauma in Tan’s past, relationships she has never discussed publicly, and a family mystery that was only solved accidentally, by stumbling on a box of old documents.” The book, Dijkstra adds, “offers unparalleled access into her writing process.” Curt Stager’s Still Waters: Reflections on Lakes in the Age of Humans (Norton, May 2018) finds the lake ecologist returning to Walden Pond—which Thoreau called “Earth’s eye”—among other of the world’s most well-known lakes and using their waters as a case study for the ways in which “we have become inseparably connected to Nature.” Another nonfiction title, by Why Good Girls Don’t Get Ahead but Gutsy Girls Do by author Kate White, is The Gutsy Girl Handbook: Your Manifesto for Success (Grand Central, Apr. 2018). The book, the agency says, is “a sound-bite–filled resource aimed at “a new generation of women, still eyeing the pay gap and glass ceiling,” which “needs its own set of rules for the modern workplace.”
Dystel, Goderich & Bourret
Dystel’s list sees the return of internationally bestselling author Samantha Young with Play On, a Scotland-set romance novel following, the agency says, an American named Nora “who is happily pursuing her dreams of acting when the man who broke her heart, sexy Scottish music producer Aidan, comes back into her life and turns everything upside down.” A self-published title released this September, German rights have already sold to Ullstein. A debut novel, Joy McCullough’s Blood Water Paint (Dutton, Mar. 2018), is YA historical fiction based on the life of 17th-century Roman painter Artemisia Gentileschi, which is, the shingle says, “filled with the soaring highs of creative inspiration as she battles to paint a woman’s timeless truth in the face of unspeakable and all-too-familiar violence.” In fantasy, Jacqueline Carey’s Starless (Tor, June 2018) centers around Khai, who “is trained in the arts of killing and stealth, destined from birth to serve as protector of princess Zariya,” as “a dark prophecy unfolds in this epic world where exiled gods live among us.” A nonfiction title, pastor and blogger John Pavlovitz’s Super-You: Becoming the Kind of Person Who Can Save the World (Simon & Schuster, fall 2018), leads readers on what the agency calls “a journey through 10 superpowers of ordinary heroes for becoming the kind of person the world needs right now.”
Foundry Literary + Media
A major nonfiction title for the agency is Lorin Lindner’s Birds of a Feather (St. Martin’s, May 2018), which chronicles a therapy program conducted on the grounds of a unique facility the author founded: the Serenity Park Sanctuary, located on the grounds of a major veterans hospital in California and, per the agency, “the only place of its kind... where disabled veterans care for traumatized parrots in an idyllic garden-based oasis.” The book documents how the program proves that “just as the common foundation for trauma is exposure to horrific abuse or violence, so is the road to healing paved with compassion, empathy, and unconditional acceptance.” Another big nonfiction title is James Fell’s self-help book The Holy Shit Moment (St. Martin’s, Jan. 2019), which explores how “the power of epiphany” can allow people to break bad habits and actually change. On the fiction side is Kendare Blake’s The Young Queens (HarperTeen, Dec.), a prequel to the author’s bestselling Three Dark Crowns. And from Jenn Lyons is The Ruin of Kings (Tor, no pub date yet), about a “bastard orphan” raised on fairy tales and dreaming of his own happily-ever-after until he witnesses “a prince’s treason” and is then “claimed against his will as the long-lost scion of the same royal house.”
The Gernert Company
On the fiction side, Gernert will be pushing Lisa Halliday’s Asymmerty: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, Feb. 2018). Halliday, who grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Milan, won a 2017 Whiting Award (which celebrates emerging voices); Asymmetry, her debut novel, is, Gernert says, about “love, luck, and the inextricability of life and art.” The other big novel for the agency is Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, out now), which PW called a “brilliant” work “about the limits of faith, the power of sacrifice, and the cost of forgiveness.” On the nonfiction side is Room to Dream: A Life in Art (Random House, Feb. 2018) by David Lynch and Kristine McKenna, the anticipated memoir from the renowned filmmaker; rights have sold in numerous countries. The other big nonfiction title for the agency is Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Penguin Press, Oct.), which offers “a hilariously illustrated investigation into future technologies.” (He is the creator of the popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast, and she is on the adjunct faculty of the bio-sciences department at Rice University.)
Sanford J. Greenburger Associates
A fiction title topping the agency’s hot list is the 10th-anniversary edition of Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of the Wind (DAW, Oct.), the first book in his Kingkiller Chronicle series, which has, to date, sold six million copies worldwide. From Jasmine Warga is the YA novel Here We Are Now (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray) about “music, family, and friendship.” Another big novel for SJGA is Howard Frank Mosher’s Points North (St. Martin’s, Jan. 2018), completed just before the author’s death in January and, once again, focuses on the Kinneson family living in a fictional version of Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Then there’s the graphic work You Look Better Online: Your Life in 150 Unfiltered Cartoons (Abrams, Oct.) by Emmet Truxes. In it, the creator of the popular Instagram @BrooklynCartoons “brilliantly pokes fun at our modern preoccupations and misfortunes.” In the self-help category, the agency has Brooke Alpert’s The Diet Detox: Why Your Diet Is Making You Fat and What to Do About It (BenBella, Dec.), a “practical, non-diet book” from the coauthor of The Sugar Detox.
ICM Partners
(handled by Curtis Brown)
The big novel ICM Partners is bringing to Germany is The Perfume Burned His Eyes (Akashic, Apr. 2018) by actor Michael Imperioli. Arguably best known for his role as Christopher on The Sopranos, Imperioli delivers, in his debut novel, a coming-of-age tale set in 1970s New York; the agency says it is a “beautifully written... homage to the artists and eccentrics of the era.” One of a few major nonfiction titles for the agency is Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence (Penguin, May 2018). ICM calls the book “an exploration of the renaissance of research into psychedelics” from the bestselling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Another big nonfiction title ICM will be touting is Seymour Hersh’s Reporter (Knopf, fall 2018), a memoir from one of the U.S.’s preeminent investigative journalists. Hersh, who’s won a multitude of awards—including one Pulitzer and two National Magazine Awards—wrote the first account of the My Lai massacre in 1969. From Nickel and Dimed author Barbara Ehrenreich there’s Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Control (Twelve, Apr. 2018), which the agency calls “a razor-sharp polemic” that describes “how we over-prepare and worry way too much about what is inevitable.” Then there’s Sinan Aral’s The Hype Machine (Crown, spring 2019), a book from an “MIT technology guru” and professor about “the science and influence of the network of technologies and platforms that drives the breathtaking growth of social media.”
Inkwell Management
Of three notable novels Inkwell will be talking up in the rights center is Dean Koontz’s The Whispering Room (Bantam, Nov.), which is the second novel in the bestselling author’s new series featuring FBI agent Jane Hawk. Another big fiction title is Lionel Shriver’s Property: Stories Between Two Novellas (HarperCollins, Apr. 2018); the agency says the collection, which features 10 stories and two novellas, explores “the idea of ‘property’ in every meaning of the word.” The third major novel on the agency’s hot list is Diane Clehane’s Imagining Diana (on submission), which posits an alternate reality in which Princess Diana survives the fateful car crash on August 31, 1997, and wakes up from a coma “with her famous face—the most photographed in the world—forever changed.” The big nonfiction title for Inkwell is Martin Seligman’s The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism (Public Affairs, Apr. 2018), in which “one of the most important psychologists today tells the story of the transformation of modern psychology through the lens of his own career and change of heart.”
Janklow & Nesbit
(handled by Cullen Stanley International)
One novel handled by Janklow & Nesbit sure to turn heads at Frankfurt is an as-yet-untitled book by Angie Thomas, the bestselling author of this year’s smash YA hit The Hate U Give (HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, fall 2018), which has been sold in 28 languages. Another exciting novel by a big name in the YA space is Becky Albertalli’s follow-up to her novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, called Leah on the Off-Beat (HarperCollins, Apr. 2018). A supporting character from Simon, Leah Burke, is the protagonist, in what the agency calls a “novel of first love and senior-year angst.” Poet Yrsa Daley-Ward’s memoir The Terrible (Viking, June 2018) is a lead title in the nonfiction category for the agency, which it bills as “a brave [work] that captures the pain and thrill of girlhood and what it means to discover the power of being a woman.” It “recounts her growing up black in a poor, white town; navigating her family’s extreme Christianity; questioning her paternity; phases of addiction, and sexuality; and ultimately finding her place in her family and in life.” Another big nonfiction title for the agency is Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jan Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine (Knopf, Nov.).
Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
The Krichevsky Agency’s hot list boasts two Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists, including New York Times correspondent and war journalist C.J. Chivers for his book The Fighters (Simon & Schuster, 2018). The book, the agency says, shares “the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through the experiences of Americans who fought them” and “renders modern combat in vivid detail in a narrative that covers the breadth of the wars and will leave a searing impression on civilians and veterans alike.” Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Jake Bernstein digs into the Panama Papers in Secrecy World: Inside the Panama Papers Investigation of Illicit Money Networks and the Global Elite (Holt, Nov.), which the agency calls “the definitive tour of the world revealed by the Panama Papers, a landscape of illicit money, political corruption, and fraud on a global scale.” Film rights have already sold to Steven Soderbergh and Grey Matter/Anonymous Content. And in The Comedown by Rebekah Frumkin (Holt, Apr. 2018), the author offers “a dark comedy of class, race, sexuality, religion, and time” in a debut novel that, the agency says, “follows two very different families in Cleveland across generations beginning with their patriarchs, whose lives become intertwined one fateful night.”
Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency
At Naggar, Philip Margolin launches a new, three-book series with Third Victim (Minotaur, Mar. 2018), which follows female attorney Robin Lockwood in her first death penalty defense case as she represents Alex Mason, who, the agency says, is “accused of torturing and murdering at least two victims before the third victim escaped and led police to him.” In YA, Gillian French’s follow-up to her debut Grit, called The Lies They Tell (HarperTeen, May 2018), follows, the agency says, “the story of 18-year-old Pearl Haskins, a server at Maine’s exclusive Tenney’s Harbor Country Club, who infiltrates a group of privileged boys who may hold the secret to a mysterious fire that has wiped out a very wealthy family.” Crown Books for Young Readers publisher Phoebe Yeh nabbed at auction picture book author Jennifer Swender’s middle grade debut, Solving for M (May 2018), which Naggar calls “a poignant and heartwarming story about Mika and how her illustrated math journal helps her cope with the challenges of middle school, math, and her mother’s melanoma.” In nonfiction, Arno Michaelis, Pardeep Kaleka, and Robin Gaby Fisher tell the story of a friendship between a Sikh and an erstwhile skinhead in The Gift of Our Wounds: A Sikh and a Former White Supremacist Find Forgiveness After Hate (St. Martin’s, Apr. 2018), which serves, Naggar says, as “a timely reminder of the strength of the human spirit, and the courage and compassion that reside within us all, taking readers deep into two mysterious subcultures—the chilling underworld of neo-Nazi supremacism, and the little-understood culture of the Sikh faith.” Another nonfiction title, by Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words author Ella Frances Sanders, is The Illustrated Guide to the Universe (Penguin, 2018), which, the agency says, “educates and delights with a selection of beautifully illustrated principles, laws, and wonders that rule our universe, solar system, and daily lives.”
Victoria Sanders & Associates
Sanders’s fiction linchpin this season is Sara Blædel’s The Running Girl (Grand Central, Jan. 2018), the next installment of her Louise Rick series and part of a 10-book acquisition. The crime fiction title, the agency says, follows Rick as she finds herself being pulled in several different directions by evidence surrounding a case involving the death of a 12-year-old girl and a “carefully planned act of arson.” The agency is also repping what it calls the first Black Lives Matter Movement memoir, by 2017 Sydney Peace Prize co-winner Patrisse Khan-Cullors with Asha Bandele. The memoir, called When They Call You a Terrorist (St. Martin’s, Jan. 2018), which boasts a foreword written by Angela Davis, is billed as “the emotional and powerful story of one of the cofounders of Black Lives Matter and how the movement was born.” A thriller that Library Journal compares to Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train, is Liv Constantine’s The Last Mrs. Parrish (HarperCollins, Oct.). The agency calls the novel “fresh, juicy, and an utterly addictive thriller from a diabolically imaginative talent” featuring “a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background” and who enters into a scheme to undermine the life of a powerful woman.
Trident Media Group
One of the big fiction titles Trident will be touting in Germany is Andrew Mayne’s The Looking Glass (Thomas & Mercer, Mar. 2018), which is the second book in the author’s Theo Cray series; the agency says the books are ideal “for people who like the problem-solving science of The Martian and the noir tone of True Detective.” Another novel the agency will be pushing is Tiffany Parks’s Midnight in the Piazza (Harper, Mar. 2018), a middle grade title that follows a 13-year-old in a “race through Rome” trying to “solve the mystery of an art theft ring.” From Lisa Scottoline is After Anna (St. Martin’s, Apr. 2018), about a father who must prove his innocence after his stepdaughter’s attempt to “destroy her new stepfamily is cut short when she is murdered.” Mark Greaney, coauthor of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan novels, has Agent in Place (Berkley, Feb. 2018), which is the seventh book in his Gray Man series. And then there’s Abigail DeWitt’s News of Our Loved Ones (HarperCollins, fall 2018), which the agency calls “a haunting and propulsive literary novel told through multiple narrators whose lives are changed by the summer of 1944.”
Writers House
The big titles for WH this year are all fiction, including Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room (Scribner, 2018); the agency says it’s the “ferocious story” of a former stripper living in a San Francisco women’s prison who decides to try to break out. Another big fiction title for WH is Tim Willocks’s Memo from Turner (only U.K. rights sold), a literary thriller about “an honest and skillful black cop in a corrupt South Africa.” From child actor (Once and Again) and audiobook narrator Julia Whelan is the debut novel My Oxford Year (Morrow, 2018), about a 24-year-old American at Oxford who gets off to a rocky start with her professor, but then finds herself falling for him. Sold in a nine-bidder auction is Stepsister (Scholastic, fall 2019) by Jennifer Donnelly; it’s a an “alternative Cinderella story told from the point-of-view of one of the wicked stepsisters.” Finally, from Tim Johnston (Descent) is his sophomore novel, The Current (Algonquin, Jan. 2019). In this literary thriller, a college student traveling home to visit her dying father has an accident that leaves her best friend dead. The heroine, with the help of her father and the local sheriff, then “connects her friend’s death to an unsolved murder investigation, another drowning in the same river, that has haunted the town for years.”
The Wylie Agency
One of the big novels for Wylie is the Swedish work Pappaklausulen (The dad clause), by Jonas Hassen Khemeri, a celebrated and bestselling author in Sweden. The agency says the book is “an addictive saga about contemporary parenthood.” Another big name on the agency’s list is Dave Eggers, who has The Monk of Mokha (Knopf, Jan. 2018), a nonfiction work about a Yemeni-American man brought up in San Francisco who “dreams of resurrecting the ancient art of Yemeni coffee,” but finds himself caught up in a civil war in his homeland. Then there’s Leonard Cohen’s The Flame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), a posthumous collection of poetry and prose from the late singer/songwriter. And from Rachel Cusk is Kudos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2018), the third novel in the Canadian author’s trilogy that began with Outline.
William Morris Endeavor
The big nonfiction book WME will be pushing in the rights center is Kurt Anderson’s Fantasyland (Random House, which the shingle calls a “sweeping, eloquent” take that shows how this “strange, post-truth, ‘fake news’ moment we’re all living through” is not new “but rather the ultimate expression of a country founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by impresarios and their audiences, by hucksters and their suckers.” On the fiction side is Amy Bloom’s White Houses (Random House) about the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok; the agency says the novel explores how “what began as a powerful passion matures into a lasting love, and a life that neither woman expected to lead.” In the novel The New Me (Penguin) by Halle Butler, a young woman named Moddie is dealing with her dead-end life. The agency said Butler (who was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists for 2017) presents a “claustrophobic, hilarious, fever-dream of a novel” in which her heroine’s “hope is both contagious and heartbreaking, and her anger all too real.” From Karen Thompson Walker is The Dreamers (Random House), the new novel from The Age of Miracles author about “a small college town that’s been struck by an epidemic where townspeople are inexplicably falling asleep for long periods of time.” Then there’s Lea Carpenter’s untitled novel (Knopf), which WME described as “a smart and stylish literary spy novel” that switched between the point of view of the daughter of a dead CIA agent and “a conversation between the daughter and her father’s CIA protégé.”
The Jane Rotrosen Agency
A noted entry on the shingle’s hotlist is Iris Johansen’s Shattered Mirror (SMP, May 2018), a new thriller from the bestselling author featuring her forensic sculptor Eve Duncan “who is thrown once more into a deadly game of intrigue.” From Lisa Gardner is Look for Me (Dutton, Feb. 2018) in which “detective D.D. Warren and Find Her’s Flora Dane return in a race against the clock to either save a young girl’s life…or bring her to justice.” The shingle will also be touting Mark Sullivan’s Beneath a Scarlet Sky (Lake Union Publishing, May) which is based on “true events” and “tells the forgotten story of the darkness that fell upon northern ltaly during the Nazi occupation, and the tale of one teenage boy who found abiding love and, through it, the courage to stand alone against evil.” Then from Daniel Palmer and Michael Palmer is The First Family (SMP, Apr. 2018), a medical thriller in which the First Son, a chess prodigy, “inexplicably stops playing the game he loved and becomes withdrawn.” Then the First Lady, convinced his diagnosis is wrong, “demands that Dr. Lee Blackwood be brought on to provide a second opinion.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of author Tim Willocks and the first name of author Julia Whelan. It also misspelled the last names of authors Jeremy Heimans and Tom Rachman. Also, a previously cited book by Helen Macdonald, referred to as an untitled essay collection, is narrative nonfiction and is titled Midway. And Tim Johnston's novel Current has not been optioned for film, as previously stated.
Editor's note: Two agencies, William Morris Endeavor and the Jane Rotrosen Agency, were added to the online version of this article.
