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Knopf Takes 'Taking Lives' for Near Mil
Judy Quinn -- 9/22/97
A man kills people to take their lives -- and live them better than they could themselves. Then he discovers he's taken on a dangerous life, that of an art historian being tracked to a small Portuguese village, in the season of fires, by a security man from a great museum. And to complicate matters, the two men fall in love with the same woman. That's just a taste of the new British journalist/novelist Michael Pye's Taking Lives, a literary thriller just acquired by Knopf rights director and editor Carol Janeway from agent Irene Skolnick on a preemptive, one-book, world rights (excluding U.K.) bid. U.K. rights already have been sold to Ph nix House/Orion, bringing the advances for the book into the seven figures. Readers will remember Pye from his last novel, The Drowning Room, the fictional recreation of the 17th-century Amsterdam and New York life of Gretje Reyniers, a known prostitute and moneylender, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1996 and published by Granta/Viking/Penguin as part of a world rights deal that originated in the U.K.

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