Volume 270
Issue 39
09/25/2023
At Frankfurt this year, U.S. agents will be talking up works by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tess Gerritsen, Kristin Hannah, Terry Hayes, Anthony Hopkins, Walter Isaacson, Rachel Kushner, Michael Lewis, Alice McDermott, Dinaw Mengetsu, Ben Mezrich, Rich Roll, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, and many others.
Aevitas Creative Management
Deep Listening: How to Listen When It Matters Most
Emily Kasriel. Morrow, 2025
This guide “to better understanding others through transformational listening” from BBC executive and journalist Kasriel outlines “an eight-step deep listening process rooted in mindfulness and self-awareness,” the agency says.
A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
Raul Palma. Dutton, Oct.
In this “genre-bending” debut “with a fierce political heart,” a “reluctant Santeria priest is forced to confront his demons when called upon to cleanse evil spirits from the home of his debt collector,” according to the agency.
Practical Rules for Cursed Witches
Kayla Cottingham. Delacorte, fall 2024
A teen witch must break a powerful family curse in this sapphic YA romance-fantasy from librarian Cottingham (My Dearest Darkest), which the agency likens to Kiki’s Delivery Service and in which “magic is channeled through the creative arts.”
Vagabond
Tim Curry. Hachette, 2025
This memoir from English actor and singer Curry “traces his life and beloved career,” the agency says. Its release will coincide with big anniversaries of two of his films—The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Clue.
Baror International
I Hope This Finds You Well
Natalie Sue. Morrow, summer 2024
This novel follows a socially awkward woman who, after an IT mix-up at the office, gets access to her coworkers’ email messages and “starts to learn more about her colleagues than she could ever have imagined,” the agency says.
Navola
Paolo Bacigalupi. Knopf, July 2024
Pitched by the agency as Game of Thrones meets The Godfather, this novel from Hugo Award winner Bacigalupi concerns a boy, the “sole heir to his family’s merchant banking empire,” who’s expected to take the reins of power but is ill-suited for the job.
The Outsider Advantage
Ciera Rogers. Portfolio, June 2024
This memoir from fashion designer Rogers, founder of the Los Angeles–based body positive brand Babes, is about “turning what makes you different into the foundation of your success,” per the agency, and is aimed at the “dreamers, doers, and go-getters that society continuously overlooks.”
Pride or Die
C.L. Montblanc. Wednesday Books, fall 2024
Pitched by the agency as One of Us Is Lying meets I Kissed Shara Wheeler, this YA mystery from Montblanc concerns a 17-year-old who “just wants to finish senior year” but learns that “it’s kind of hard to graduate high school when you’re the prime suspect in an attempted murder.”
The Cheney Agency
2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed
Eric Klinenberg. Knopf, Feb. 2024
Sociologist Klinenberg looks back at 2020 in this “deeply reported, character-driven” investigation that explores “how the pandemic and the crises it spawned reveal the true character of our societies,” according to the agency.
The Light Eaters
Zoe Schlanger. Harper, May 2024
Described by the agency as a “paradigm-shifting” work, this book about the life of plants by science journalist Schlanger brings readers “deep into the emerging science of plant intelligence” as it “uncovers plants’ complex and unimaginable capabilities and calls into question what we consider to be conscious agents in the natural world.”
Strangers on Earth
Elisa Gonzalez. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (no pub date at press time)
This “genre-defying” memoir, per the agency, about the murder of poet Gonzalez’s brother is “an investigation of grief, estrangement, art, and how feeling like a stranger—to ourselves and to others—is not only essential to surviving loss, but can also radically enrich our lives.”
Time Bomb: How TikTok Captured The West’s Culture, Commerce, and Attention
Emily Baker-White. Norton (no pub date at press time)
Tech reporter Baker-White’s book about TikTok charts “the rise of the largest and most effective attention algorithm ever invented,” the agency says, “and the superpower struggle to control it.”
The Clegg Agency
Bad Animals
Sarah Braunstein. Norton, Mar. 2024
The agency calls this a “sexy, propulsive” novel about “a buttoned-up, small-town librarian who is publicly disgraced and fired from her job after being accused of spying on teenage romantic escapades in the mezzanine bathroom,” and how she schemes to get her job back.
Molly
Blake Butler. Archway Editions, Dec.
This memoir recalls Butler’s life with his wife, the poet and author Molly Brodak, and reckons “with her suicide and the rash of revelations that followed her death,” according to the agency.
Plastic
Scott Guild. Pantheon, Feb. 2024
This surrealist debut novel from Marian University professor Guild, the former guitarist for the new wave band New Collisions, centers on a VR-addicted woman who finds herself “at the unlikely flashpoint of impending crisis in a future America wracked by terrorist attacks and peopled entirely with plastic dolls,” the agency says.
Creative Artists Agency
Anita Del Monte
Xochitl Gonzalez. Flatiron, Mar. 2024
This novel from bestselling author Gonzalez concerns “a first-generation Ivy League student who uncovers the genius work of a female artist decades after her suspicious death,” according to the agency, and is a “witty examination of power, love, and art.”
Coram House
Bailey Seybolt. Atria, 2025
In this debut novel from a tech reporter in Vermont, a true crime writer is tapped to pen a book about an eerie Vermont orphanage and becomes obsessed with the death of a boy there 60 years earlier, and questions “whether he ran away or was purposely drowned,” per the agency.
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster, out now
From bestselling biographer Isaacson (Steve Jobs), this “astonishingly intimate” look at the life of inventor and businessman Elon Musk is the culmination of two years of research, during which Isaacson “shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries,” the agency says.
The Wealth of Shadows
Graham Moore. Random House, May 2024
A “Midwestern tax attorney joins a secret mission to crash the Nazi economy,” per the agency, in this “mind-expanding” historical thriller, based on a true story, from the Academy Award–winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game.
DeFiore & Company
Chamber Divers: The Untold Story of the D-Day Scientists Who Changed Special Operations Forever
Rachel Lance. Dutton, Apr. 2024
This history from biomedical engineer Lance concerns “the previously classified story” of researchers whose work “made possible the reconnaissance vessels and underwater breathing apparatuses that led to the Allies’ dramatic, history-making success at D-Day,” according to the agency.
Dr. Neal Barnard’s Power Foods Diet
Neal Barnard. Grand Central, June 2024
Aimed at people looking for “easy, effective, and permanent” weight loss solutions, per the agency, this book from bestselling author Barnard (21-Day Weight Loss Kickstart) highlights foods that promote weight loss, “with no need for the deprivation and planning that most weight-loss regimens require.”
Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are
Rebecca Boyle. Random House, Jan. 2024
This book about the moon from Boyle, a contributing editor at Scientific American, “takes us on a dazzling cultural and scientific tour to reveal the intimate role our 4.51-billion-year-old companion has played in our biological and cultural evolution,” the agency says.
Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
The Backyard Bird Chronicles
Amy Tan. Knopf, Apr. 2024
In this celebratory book about birds, Tan (The Joy Luck Club) views “the avian world through the lens of a novelist who studies ‘characters’ and their ‘stories,’ ” according to the agency. With a foreword by David Allen Sibley.
Feather So Black
Lyra Selene. Orbit, Mar. 2024
This romantic fantasy, YA author Selene’s adult debut, is set “in a world of perilous magic and moonlit forests,” per the agency, and concerns a changeling whose mission to save her sister is complicated by her feelings for her sister’s betrothed.
Savor It
Tarah Dewitt. St. Martin’s, May 2024
In this romance novel, a small-town woman living in Oregon and a chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant “forge a fake-dating scheme to help navigate their problems,” but “things get cooking in an unexpected way,” the agency says.
The Gernert Company
Absolution
Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct.
This novel from National Book Award winner McDermott (Charming Billy) is described by the agency as a “riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War.”
Blood over Bright Haven
M.L. Wang. (No U.S. publisher at press time.)
Pitched for fans of Leigh Bardugo, V.E. Schwab, and the Japanese manga series Fullmetal Alchemist, this standalone novel “brimming with mystery, tragedy and the damning echoes of the past,” per the agency, is set in the magical city of Tiran, where “magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling.”
Death Valley
Melissa Broder. Scribner, Oct.
From poet and novelist Broder (Milk Fed), this is a “darkly funny novel about grief that becomes a desert survival story,” the agency says.
Read Write Own
Chris Dixon. Random House, Jan. 2024
From California entrepreneur and technology investor Dixon, this is a “potent exploration of the power of blockchains to reshape the future of the Internet—and how that affects us all,” the agency says.
Sanford J. Greenburger Associates
Blue Graffiti
Calahan Skogman. Unnamed Press, fall 2024
From actor Skogman, this debut novel is “a love letter to and portrait of middle-of-nowhere Midwestern America,” per the agency, “about the summer a stranger blows through town, changing everything.”
Clickbait
Holly Baxter. HarperCollins, summer 2024
Pitched by the agency as being for fans of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and All Grown Up, this debut novel is a “darkly humorous take on the media, about a disgraced journalist who has to leave a plum assignment in the U.K. as her marriage falls apart.”
Love by Design: 6 Ingredients to Build a Lifetime of Love
Sara Nasserzadeh. Grand Central, Feb. 2024
Couples therapist Nasserzadeh draws upon her clinical research and work with couples in a book that aims “to help those who feel disillusioned, disconnected, or unfulfilled to redefine their relationship to romance,” the agency says.
Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton, and Me
Bernie Taupin. Hachette, out now
This memoir from English lyricist and longtime Elton John collaborator Taupin, who is a 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, is described by the agency as a “multi-decade whirlwind” that “whizzes around the world as we ride shotgun with Bernie on his extraordinary life.”
InkWell Management
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life
Jason Roberts. Random House, Mar. 2024
This history from Roberts (A Sense of the World) about 18th-century scientific rivals Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis de Buffon focuses on “their mission to survey all life—a clash of ideas that had profound consequences for humanity,” according to the agency.
Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See
Bianca Bosker. Viking, Feb. 2024
The bestselling author of Cork Dork “takes readers on another fascinating, hilarious, and revelatory journey—this time burrowing deep inside the impassioned, secretive world of art and artists,” the agency says.
The Paleontologist
Luke Dumas. Atria, Oct.
In this novel, a troubled paleontologist who is haunted by dark memories “returns to the museum where his sister was abducted years earlier,” per the agency, “and is faced with a terrifying and murderous spirit.”
Janklow & Nesbit Associates
Someone Like Us
Dinaw Mengestu. Knopf, June 2024
This novel from Ethiopian American MacArthur fellow Mengestu concerns the son of Ethiopian immigrants, who “seeks to understand a hidden family history,” the agency says, “and uncovers a past colored by unexpected loss, addiction, and the enduring emotional pull toward home.”
The Stone Witch of Florence
Anna Rasche. Park Row, fall 2024
A woman “draws upon the strange and ancient magic of gemstones to investigate a series of shocking crimes in plague-stricken Florence,” the agency says, in this historical debut novel from gemologist Rasche.
The Teller of Small Fortunes
Julie Leong. (No U.S. publisher at press time.)
In this fantasy novel from Chinese Malaysian American author Leong, a traveling fortune teller needs to confront “the very talents she has spent a lifetime avoiding,” the agency says, as “two kingdoms stand on the brink of war.”
Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency
House of Bone and Rain
Gabino Iglesias. Little Brown, summer 2024
From the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Devil Take You Home comes a supernatural thriller about a group of friends who get mixed up with a drug lord “with deep connections to otherworldly powers,” per the agency.
I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science and Art
Emily C. Bloom. St. Martin’s, Apr. 2024
Bloom’s debut memoir charts her path to and through motherhood, “a journey both supported and complicated by medical devices and data, buoyed by friendship and art, and made richer and fuller by the birth of her exceptional child,” per the agency.
The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Friendship, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History
Karen Valby. Pantheon, Apr. 2024
Highlighting “the glamour and grit of professional ballet,” this is a history of five Black ballerinas, who, beginning in 1969 at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, “performed some of ballet’s most iconic works to international acclaim—and who found, decades later, almost no record of their accomplishments,” the agency says.
Whoever You Are Honey
Olivia Gatwood. Dial, summer 2024
From poet and screenwriter Gatwood, this is “a seductive, prescient, and feminist” debut novel, according to the agency, that follows “two lonely women living among the tech elite on Santa Cruz’s glamorous cliffside, whose journeys of self-discovery blur the line between dystopia and reality.”
Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary Agency
Anniversary of the Unexplained
Ada Calhoun. Viking, 2025
A middle-aged woman has “a transformational affair that upends her marriage and her life,” per the agency, in this novel from bestselling author Calhoun (Why We Can’t Sleep).
The Ones We Love
Anna Snoekstra. Dutton, 2025
This psychological thriller concerns a woman “who wakes up from a night of partying that she can’t remember, covered in bruises and struggling to understand why her best friend is not answering her messages,” the agency says, “and why her parents have put a padlock on her bedroom door.”
The Vampire Diaries: An Oral History
Samantha Highfill. Plume, 2025
This history of the cult CW show The Vampire Diaries from EW senior TV editor Highfill features exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes stories “about the series that years after its finale is still selling out conventions, garnering new fans, and taking over TikTok,” according to the agency.
What You Need to Know About Microdosing
James Fadiman and Jordan Gruber. St. Martin’s, 2025
Pitched as What to Expect When You’re Expecting for microdosing, this guide to “the science and pragmatics of microdosing” is presented in a conversational q&a format, per the agency, and is cowritten by researcher Fadiman, “who has been called ‘the Father of Microdosing.’ ”
Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency
The False Flat
Melissa Collings. Montlake, June 2024
This debut novel follows a financial planner who, after discovering that her boyfriend is married, moves across the country for a fresh start and meets a new man, but “just as her barriers start to break down, everything she hopes for begins to crumble,” the agency says.
The Moorings of Mackerel Sky
MZ. Hyperion Avenue, Feb. 2024
This fairy tale debut novel from Maine choreographer and dancer MZ (otherwise known as Emily Zack) “marries fantasy with the everyday” in a story about “a Maine lobstering town whose local myths come to life,” according to the agency.
The Mother of All Things
Alexis Landau. Pantheon, May 2024
Described by the agency as an “electrifying page-turner about female rage, grief, and creativity,” this novel from Landau (Those Who Are Saved) concerns a mother who “immerses herself in ancient Greco-Roman female mystery rites while on a summer journey in Bulgaria with her family.”
The Resurrectionist
Kathleen Allen. Roaring Brook, 2025
Pitched for fans of The Corpse Queen, this gothic YA novel is “a Frankenstein retelling with a feminist twist that ingeniously meshes the genres of mystery and horror,” according to the agency, and concerns a girl who, upon the death of her surgeon father, discovers “a journal with the translation of an ancient book on resurrection.”
Jane Rotrosen Agency
The Spy Coast
Tess Gerritsen. Thomas & Mercer, Nov.
A retired CIA operative in Maine “tackles the ghosts of her past in this fresh take on the spy thriller,” per the agency, from perennial bestseller Gerritsen.
A Step Past Darkness
Vera Kurian. Park Row, Feb. 2024
This novel is a “thrilling tale of six classmates, one terrifying night, and a murder 20 years in the making,” the agency says, from the bestselling author of Never Saw Me Coming.
The Story Edge
Kindra Hall. Harper Leadership, May 2024
This guidebook is aimed at business leaders “hoping to harness the power of storytelling to better communicate with and inspire their teams and organizations,” the agency says.
The Women
Kristin Hannah. St. Martin’s, Feb. 2024
From bestselling author Hannah, this novel “of a turbulent, transformative era in America: the 1960s,” per the agency, focuses on “one woman’s experience of war in Vietnam while it sheds light on the story of all women whose sacrifices and commitment to their country have all too often been forgotten.”
Sterling Lord Literistic
Great Expectations
Vinson Cunningham. Hogarth, Mar. 2024
A “historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man’s life,” per the agency, in this debut fiction about “politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family” that’s “both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas.”
Nobody Broke Your Heart: Elliott Smith in Ten Songs
Jamie Fisher. Dutton, 2025
This book “will explore Elliott Smith’s music through the arc of his life, starting with his childhood outside Dallas and following him through his artistic development,” the agency says, while “detailing his relationships, his depression, and his struggles with sobriety.”
Some Strange Music Draws Me In
Griffin Hansbury. Norton, Mar. 2024
This “gorgeous” novel, per the agency, considers “what it means to be a flawed and forgivable human being amid constantly changing social norms.”
Trident Media Group
Above the Salt
Katherine Vaz. Flatiron, Nov.
Vaz, a former Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University, tells “an irresistible and sweeping love story that follows two Portuguese refugees who flee religious violence and reignite their budding romance in Civil-War America,” according to the agency.
All You Need Is Love
Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. St. Martin’s, Apr. 2024
The Beatles take center stage in this oral history that includes “intimate interviews with Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono, and their families, friends, and business associates,” which Brown and Gaines conducted in 1980 and 1981 in preparation for writing their hit Beatles biography The Love You Make, according to the agency.
The Direction of Rented Spirits
John A. McDermott. Atria, 2025
This debut novel, set “amid the glitz and glamour of a party hosted by Alfred Hitchcock,” per the agency, concerns “two young cousins—one alive, one a ghost—who forge an unlikely bond, unraveling family secrets and discovering how to change their destinies.”
United Talent Agency
Untitled memoir
Anthony Hopkins. Little, Brown, 2025
Academy Award winner Hopkins “looks back on his life and reflects in writing, for the first time, on his remarkable story,” the agency says, in a memoir that’s “bookended by the defining legacy of his complex relationship with his father, one full of expectation, ambition, regret and love.”
Game Change
Rich Roll. (No U.S. publisher at press time.)
From Roll, an endurance athlete, wellness advocate, and host of The Rich Roll Podcast, this book is an “all-encompassing exploration of how to create change in your life,” the agency says, “following in the footsteps of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act.”
Mattering: Building a Life of Value at Home, at Work, and in the Larger World
Jennifer Breheny Wallace. Portfolio, 2026
Journalist Breheny Wallace (Never Enough) considers what really matters in life in this “flag-planting” book in the vein of Angela Duckworth’s Grit and Susan Cain’s Quiet, per the agency, “that will help individuals, families, and organizations build the framework to apply it where most needed.”
One Bad Apple: The Surprising Impact of a Rotten Few, and How to Contain Their Toxicity
Leanne Ten Brinke. Simon & Schuster, 2025
This study from University of British Columbia professor Brinke “delves into how bad actors wreak havoc on entire communities,” the agency says, and offers readers “the history and science behind psychopathic people, how they can be clearly identified, and most importantly, what we can do to neutralize their destructive power.”
William Morris Endeavor
Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History
Ben Mezrich. Grand Central, Nov.
This “rollicking” narrative about Elon Musk and Twitter from Mezrich (The Antisocial Network) pulls back the curtain on “the biggest business story of our time,” the agency says.
The Leftover Woman
Jean Kwok. Morrow, Oct.
This novel is an “evocative family drama and a riveting mystery about the ferocious pull of motherhood for two very different women,” according to the agency.
The Little Book of Aliens
Adam Frank. Harper, Oct.
From astrophysicist and University of Rochester professor Frank, this compact book considers “the biggest questions in our search for extraterrestrial life, questions we stand ready to answer,” the agency says.
The Year of the Locust
Terry Hayes. Atria/Bestler, Feb. 2024
This thriller from internationally bestselling author Hayes (I Am Pilgrim) follows “a rule-avoidant CIA officer set to exfiltrate a man amid the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan,” the agency says.
Writers House
Capitana
Cassandra James. HarperCollins, 2025
Pitched by the agency as Pirates of the Caribbean meets Latinx magic, this debut YA pirate adventure, the start of a fantasy series, brims with “adventure, danger and just the right amount of mystery.”
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner. Scribner, Sept. 2024
This “taut and propulsive noir” from Kushner (The Flamethrowers) features “a remorseless and seductive American woman, a secret agent doing dirty work in France,” the agency says, and is both “comedic and contemporary, but with profound and shocking thoughts on human origins.”
Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon
Michael Lewis. Norton, Oct.
Lewis (The Big Short) chronicles the “spectacular collapse” of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange and hedge fund, and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, in a book that, the agency says, is both “a psychological portrait and a financial roller-coaster ride.”
Head Cases
John McMahon. Minotaur, 2025
This opening installment of a new crime series concerns a team of “brilliant but out-of-left-field agents,” the agency says, “who have all been thrown out of mainstream FBI offices but are too extraordinary to fire from the bureau.”
The Wylie Agency
Age of Revolutions
Fareed Zakaria. Norton, fall 2024
This survey from Zakaria, the host of Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN, explores how “the wisdom of the past can help us pave a path forward,” per the agency, as the author “visits previous eras of dramatic change” to illuminate the modern world and the changes—technological, economic, and beyond—that it has undergone.
Dream Count
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Knopf, fall 2024
This “exquisite jewel of a novel” from Nigerian writer Adichie (Americanah) features four intersecting stories, each told from the perspective of a woman “striving to love and to live on her own terms,” the agency says.
Knife
Salman Rushdie. Random House, May 2024
This work from Booker Prize winner Rushdie (Midnight’s Children) will address the attack he sustained in August 2022 on a stage in Chautauqua, N.Y., that nearly killed him and left him blind in one eye. “I can still see the moment in slow-motion,” Rushdie recalls in a snippet released by the agency.
Parade
Rachel Cusk. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2024
Described by the agency as a “path-breaking” novel “of art, womanhood, and violence,” this work from Guggenheim fellow Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy, features “a voice that operates on the border between fiction and reality.”
Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.
