See page 14 for word of deals made at the busy London Book Fair, reported as they happened in PW Daily. Meanwhile, for those who stayed home—most editors and many agents—there was plenty going on, as you'll see on this page.
Publishers love comparisons as screenwriters love pithy pitches, and Morrow's Meaghan Dowling has just signed a novel about two destroyed marriages on a South Carolina rice plantation, one during the Civil War and the other now. The book has evoked comparisons, for its interweaving of stories a century apart, with the work of John Fowles and A.S. Byatt. The author is David Payne, much admired for Gravesend Light and Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street. The new book is called Wando Passo, and Dowling bought it from Tina Bennett at Janklow & Nesbit. The same agency's Eric Simonoff conducted a hot auction for two novels by English author Eva Rice (sister of Elton John's partner Tim Rice), won by Trena Keating at Dutton/Plume; the lead one, also sold in the U.K., is a 1950s English family fable called The Lost Art of Keeping Secrets.
