Six publishers in Canada and three in New York vied in separate
auctions for a two-book deal for Canadian author Joseph Boyden, with Penguin emerging as victor in both. Paul Slovak here and Penguin Canada publisher David Davidar and senior editor Barbara Berson made the respective U.S. and Canada rights deals with Nicole Winstanley at Westwood Creative in Toronto (who will be seeking foreign buyers at the London Book Fair). The first book is Three-Day Road, about a young Canadian Indian boy involved in WWI, inspired in part by the true-life story of an Indian sniper in that war; it will be published in 2005, with the second novel, tentatively titled She Takes You Down, a story of family strife, appearing later.
Another recent buy by Slovak was of a literary first novel, The Echo Chamber, by a young Scot, Luke Williams, who studied with the late W.G. Sebald, and whose book is at once a family saga and a look at the dying days of colonialism, set in Nigeria, Scotland and America over the past half century. Jim Auh of the Wylie Agency was the agent; the book has also been bought by Penguin's Hamish Hamilton imprint in the U.K.
