A SEAL, Revealed
Bruce Nichols at HarperCollins has nabbed world English rights to Eric Greitens’s memoir, Carry You Home: The Making of a Navy SEAL and the Education of a Humanitarian. Greitens, a Rhodes scholar turned Navy SEAL who fought in Afghanistan and did aid work with Mother Teresa’s Home for the Destitute and Dying, tracks his war-time experiences—among other things heading up a team targeting al Qaeda—and current work as an advocate for wounded veterans. Agent E.J. McCarthy brokered the deal.
Suite Judy
Folk singer Judy Collins has sold her new memoir to John Glusman at Harmony via Susan Raihofer of the David Black Agency. In Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, slated for fall 2011, Collins distills her music career from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s, highlighting her encounters and collaborations with everyone from Leonard Cohen to Carly Simon and Joan Baez, focusing on her various romances, including her relationship with CSN’s Stephen Stills (who penned “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” about her). The book marks Collins’s second memoir, after Sanity and Grace (Tarcher, 2003), about surviving the 1992 suicide of her 33-year-old son. Glusman took North American rights.
Viking Takes Amazon Finalist and Italian Bestseller
Carol DeSanti at Viking bought world rights to Brandi Lynn Ryder’s debut mystery, In Malice, Quite Close, which follows a kidnapped girl who has a folie à deux (i.e., a delusion shared by two people) with a rich art collector and then mysteriously dies. Ryder was one of three finalists in Amazon’s 2009 Breakthrough Novel competition. Elyse Cheney and Nicole Steen brokered the deal, and pub is slated for winter 2011.
Also at Viking, Alessandra Lusardi acquired world English rights to Margaret Mazzantini’s Venuto al Mondo. Scout Maria Campbell did the deal on behalf of the book’s Italian publisher, Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. A bestseller in Italy, the book, with no U.S. title yet, is a love story “with a twist” (per Viking) that shuttles between present-day Rome and war-torn early 1990s Sarajevo. The novel, currently in development as a film, is now being translated, and pub is slated for 2011.
Boudreux Buys “Scrapbook” and Essay Book
Henry Dunow of Dunow, Lerner and Carlson sold world rights to Caroline Preston’s graphic novel The Scrapbook of Carrie Pratt to Lee Boudreaux at Ecco. Preston (Jackie by Josie) fashions the coming-of-age of a Vassar student as a vintage scrapbook, following the heroine’s trajectory from her small New England hometown through her bohemian life in Greenwich Village, then Paris in the 1920s. The deal also includes a second graphic novel about the first year of marriage for a newlywed bride in 1953.
Larry Doyle, author of the YA bestseller turned forthcoming movie, I Love You, Beth Cooper, has sold a collection of essays, some previously published and some not, to Boudreaux and Abigail Holstein at Ecco. Boudreaux and Holstein took North American rights from Sarah Burnes at the Gernert Company; pub is scheduled for 2011.
Missionary Marriage
Holt’s Helen Atsma acquired world rights, in a pre-empt, to Bo Caldwell’s sophomore novel, The City of Tranquil Light. Caldwell, who won Best Book of 2001 from the L.A. Times for his debut, The Distant Land of My Father (also a Book Sense pick), follows a missionary couple in China in the early 20th century, focusing both on their marriage and that moment in Chinese history as the country was emerging from 2,000 years of dynastic rule. Paul Cirone at the Friedrich Agency brokered the deal; pub is slated for fall 2010.
