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'Lazarus' Fever
Judy Quinn -- 10/13/97
Over the past two weeks, buzz has been building about The Lazarus Child, a novel by Robert Mawson repped by Christopher Little's U.K literary agency that publishing insiders haven't seen the likes of since Nicholas Evans's The Horse Whisperer became the talk of Frankfurt a few years ago.
On October 1, the day after the agency sent out Mawson's manuscript, Transworld publisher Patrick Janson-Smith offered 250,000 pounds for the book, a bid he later upped to nearly 420,000 pounds -- close to $1 million -- in auction. Rumored to have been tipped off by sister Bertelsmann division Transworld, Bantam is said to have made a $1 million preemptive offer for U.S. rights -- and was refused, with the house instead holding the $1.3 million floor in the U.S. auction that was taking place at press time.

Little's colleague Patrick Walsh told PW Little had just closed a record-breaking 100,000-pound deal with a Dutch publisher and is now conducting auctions in Italy and Germany, both with significant six-figure floors already in place, and with movie interest building as well.

So what's all the fuss about? It's that The Horse Whisperer comparison, which seems to be the looked-for bestseller formula nowadays. Walsh told PWThe Lazarus Child captures just "the emotional tone" of Whisperer; it's not about horses but instead is centered around an American doctor who has a mysterious power to bring people out of comas. Like Whisperer, the book begins with a dreadful accident, this one involving a beloved child of a British family.

Walsh told PW that these deals are particularly opportune for Mawson, a 41-year-old former commercial pilot, trade journalist and co-owner of a public relations firm, who sold his share of the firm and, eventually, even his house to go off and write this book. He previously wrote a darker novel, A Ship Called Hope, which was published only in the U.K. and Germany.
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