Rosen's Intuition
Harper executive editor Sally Kim won an auction for psychic medium Rebecca Rosen's What's Your Damage? Using the Power of Intuitive Thinking to Move Past the Thing That's Holding You Back; Yfat Reiss Gendell at Foundry sold North American rights. Rosen, whose clients include Jennifer Aniston and whose waiting list is currently two years, will share a program that will enable readers to heighten their intuition, connect with spirit energy and get beyond the root cause of whatever's keeping them from moving forward.
Debut to LB's Clain
Little, Brown's Judy Clain preempted world rights to Irene Sabatini's first novel, The Boy Next Door, via Paul Bresnick. The book, a love story set against the tumult of Zimbabwe after independence, is one to which Clain, from pre-independence Rhodesia, felt a personal connection. The author was raised in Zimbabwe and currently lives in Geneva, where she is at work on a second novel. Tentative pub date is January 2010.
First Knight
In her first buy for Shaye Areheart Books, senior editor Sarah Knight acquired world rights to a debut novel by McCann Erickson creative director Nancy Mauro called New World Monkeys; Jamie Brenner at Artists & Artisans made the sale after submitting it to Knight on her first day at Random. Mauro's novel follows an ad exec and a Ph.D. candidate as they negotiate their failing marriage among the bizarre, vengeful residents of an upstate New York community; attempt to cover up their accidental murder of the town's mascot, a wild boar; and unearth the skeleton of a family nanny from the garden. Pub date is 2009.
More Cole for Pocket
Pocket executive editor Lauren McKenna just concluded a major deal for the next three books in the bestselling Immortals After Dark paranormal romance series by Kresley Cole; Robin Rue at Writers House sold world rights. No titles yet, but the three books, numbers eight, nine and 10 in the series, are slated to be published in paperback in consecutive months in 2010.
Clarke Back to Amistad
Dawn Davis at Amistad has acquired a new novel by Canadian author Austin Clarke titled More; Denise Bukowski sold U.S. rights. The book is about a Barbadian domestic worker abandoned by her husband for New York and by her son for a life of crime; Clarke's novel The Polished Hoe, published by Amistad in 2003, won Canada's Giller Prize. Pub date for More is fall 2009; Thomas Allen will publish in Canada this September.
Banks Crosses Genres
St. Martin's senior editor Monique Patterson has bought world rights to three manga by L. A. Banks via Manie Barron at Menza-Barron. The first of the three books will be a prequel to Minion, the first book in Banks's Vampire Huntress series, explaining how heroine Damali Richards became the Vampire Huntress. Patterson also bought world rights to the first three novels in a YA series by Banks, to be a spinoff of Vampire Huntress featuring Richards's daughter and son and set in an exclusive academy for the supernaturally gifted. Pub date is fall 2009 for the first manga title as well as the first YA book.
The Briefing
Cindy Spiegel and Mike Mezzo at Spiegel & Grau bought North American rights to Elaine Beale's novel Another Life Altogether via Eric Simonoff at Janklow & Nesbit. Beale, who won the 2007 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange Contest, met with Spiegel and Simonoff as part of her award, and the novel came out of that meeting.