Frankfurt Book Fair 2015 The Robbins Office, Inc. For further information on all clients and titles in this catalogue, please contact: SALLY RILEY France, Germany, Holland, Italy, and Scandinavia. Email: [email protected] NISHTA HURRY Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and all Indian territories. Email: [email protected] ANNA WATKINS Brazil, China, Greece, Japan, Korea, Portugal, Russia, Spain and all Asian territories and all Arabic territories. Email: [email protected] Literary Agents Centre Tables 17A, 18A, 17B and 18B Film and Television Rights For information please contact: Lesley Thorne for dramatic rights [email protected] Leah Middleton for factual/ documentary and stage rights [email protected] Aitken Alexander Associates Ltd. 18-21 Cavaye Place London SW10 9PT Telephone (020) 7373 8672 www.aitkenalexander.co.uk @AitkenAlexander FICTION A Country Road, A Tree by Jo Baker From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a stunning new novel that follows an unnamed writer – Samuel Beckett – whose life and extraordinary literary gift are permanently shaped in the forge of war. When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the mael- strom. With him we experience the hardships yet stubborn vibrancy at the heart of Europe during the Nazis’ rise to power; his friendships with James Joyce and other luminaries; his quietly passionate devotion to the Frenchwoman who will become his lifelong companion; his secret work for the French Resistance and narrow es- capes from the Gestapo; his flight from occupied Paris to the countryside; and the rubble of his life after liberation. And through it all we are witness to the workings of a uniquely brilliant mind strug- gling to create a language that will express his experience of this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the ex- tremes of human experience alchemized into timeless art. UK Publication date: May 2016 UK Doubleday (Jane Lawson) US Knopf (Diana Miller) Canada Knopf (Louise Dennys) Germany Knaus Italy Einaudi Noonday by Pat Barker In Noonday, Pat Barker - the Man Booker-winning author of the definitive WWI trilogy, Regeneration - turns for the first time to WWII. ‘Afterwards, it was the horses she remembered, galloping towards them out of the orange- streaked darkness, their manes and tails on fire...’ London, the Blitz, autumn 1940. As the bombs fall on the blacked-out city, ambu- lance driver Elinor Brooke races from bomb sites to hospitals trying to save the lives of injured survivors, working alongside former friend Kit Neville, while her hus- band Paul works as an air-raid warden. Once fellow students at the Slade School of Fine Art, before the First World War destroyed the hopes of their generation, they now find themselves caught in another war, this time at home. As the bombing intensifies, the constant risk of death makes all three of them reach out for quick consolation. Old loves and obsessions re-sur- face until Elinor is brought face to face with an almost impossible choice. Completing the story of Elinor Brooke, Paul Tarrant and Kit Neville, begun with Life Class and continued with Toby’s Room, Noonday is both a stand-alone novel and the climax of a trilogy. Writing about the Second World War for the first time, Pat Barker brings the besieged and haunted city of London into electrifying life in her most powerful novel since the Regeneration trilogy. UK Publication date: August 2015 UK Hamish Hamilton (Simon Prosser) US Doubleday (Gerry Howard) Beatlebone by Kevin Barry ‘He will spend three days alone on his island. That is all that he asks . . . John is so many miles from love now and home. This is the story of his strangest trip.’ John owns a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland. Maybe it is there that he can at last outrun the shadows of his past. The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It’s a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work.’ Kevin Barry is the author of the novel City of Bohane and two short story collec- tions, Dark Lies the Island and There Are Little Kingdoms. He has won the IM- PAC Dublin City Literary Award, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, the European Union Prize for Literature and many other prizes, and is published in 14 languages. ‘The most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’ – Irvine Welsh UK & US Publication date: October 2015 UK Canongate (Francis Bickmore) US Doubleday (Gerry Howard) Holland De Bezige Bij Spill Simmer Falter Wither by Sara Baume Longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2015 ‘You find me on a Tuesday, on my Tuesday trip to town. A note sellotaped to the inside of the jumble-shop window: COMPASSIONATE & TOLERANT OWNER. A PERSON WITHOUT OTHER PETS & WITHOUT CHILDREN UNDER FOUR.’ A misfit man finds a misfit dog. Ray, aged fifty-seven, ‘too old for starting over, too young for giving up’, and One Eye, a vicious little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved, outcast – but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship. As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon the precarious life they’d established, and take to the road. Spill Simmer Falter Wither is a wholly different kind of love story: a devastating portrait of loneliness, loss and friendship, and of the scars that are more than skin- deep. Written with tremendous empathy and insight, in lyrical language that sur- prises and delights, this is an extraordinary and heartbreaking debut by a major new talent UK Publication date: October 2015 UK William Heinemann (Jason Arthur) US Houghton Mifflin (Jenna Johnson) Ireland Tramp Press France Editions Noir sur Blanc Germany Rowohlt Holland Querido World Spanish Turner Mexico Swallowed by the Cold by Jensen Beach Set in a Swedish village on the Baltic, these interlocking stories portray charac- ters besieged by disasters both national and personal—a fatal cycling accident, a drowned ice-skater, a marina set aflame, the assassination of the foreign minister, and, years ago, the Soviet bombing of Stockholm. Reeling from these tragedies, Beach’s characters again and again find themselves estranged from those they’re closest to, and drawn to the comfort of strangers. A drunken, lonely mother wishfully believes her new neighbor to be the daugh- ter of her dead lover. A one-armed tennis player and a motherless girl reckon with death amid a rainstorm. And, happening upon a car crash, a young woman becomes unaccountably close with the victim, even as he slides into a coma and her marriage falls into jeopardy. By turns tender and austere, these stories evoke Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son in their moments of intimacy forged by calamity. For their interplay between individual and collective memory, they recall the work of W.G. Sebald. Most of all, though, they confirm the arrival of a distinctive and devastatingly talented voice in contemporary fiction. ‘Jensen Beach is a master of linguistic restraint, a writer whose precision, empathy, and relentless honesty form the spine of this extraordinary work of fiction.’ – Jack Livings US Publication date: May 2016 US Graywolf (Ethan Nosowsky) House of Dreams by Fanny Blake It’s only a long weekend – what could possibly go wrong? In the hilltop villa with its spectacular views across rolling countryside to the straits of Gibraltar, Lucy anxiously awaits the arrival of her brother and sister. They’re spending the weekend together to say farewell to Casa de Sueños, the house in the mountains of southern Spain where they grew up. Her sister, Jo, landing at the airport with her fractious four-year-old, dreads the prospect of this time with her family, fulfilling their mother’s last instructions that they celebrate her birthday party together – only this time their mother won’t be there. Tom, their brother, is filled with dread, remembering only the chaos of his bohemi- an upbringing and wanting nothing more than for their stay to go without a hitch. Then a beautiful face from his past appears at the villa... Over one long, hot week weekend, past secrets will spill out, making the siblings question themselves, the choices they’ve made and where their future lies in this gorgeous new novel from Fanny Blake. ‘House of Dreams is a heart-warming tale of family secrets slowly revealed in a beautiful Spanish setting. A compelling and delightful read.’ – Santa Montefiore UK Publication date: November 2015 UK Orion (Kate Mills) Addlands by Tom Bullough ‘addlands (i.e., headlands): the border of plough land which is ploughed last of all.’ - W. H. Howse, Radnorshire. Addlands tells of two generations of the Hamer family working The Funon Farm. From the ancient blue silence in the hills to the encroaching roar of modernity, Addlands tells of human and animal, Bora and fauna, and it speaks of the land and lets the land speak for itself. There is Idris, stubborn, strong, a man of the plough and the prayer-sheet, haunted by the war. Then comes Oliver, a near mythic giant bestriding the landscape, a fighter, a man of the hills as hard as the prehistoric stone. Then there is Etty, Oliver’s mother, the centre of this close constellation, watching new technologies and old ways converge on the farm and on the life of her son. Addlands is instantly a classic of rural British fiction. It is as vast and complex as a symphony but as pure and moving as a solo voice in an empty church. Addlands is a map of the efforts and customs that bind a community together, but also threaten to drive it apart. It shows hidden power lines of superstition, tradition and belief, strung above a humming cross-stitch of family secrets and woven into the cables, wires, tracks and roads of an agricultural community. As much a book about birdsong as it is about closing time brawls, Addlands’ beauty is in the clear truth of its language and the sheer humane depth of its inquiries. It is a miraculous book which unfurls at the speed of life and bathes its reader in a rare golden light. UK Publication date: Spring 2016 UK Granta (Max Porter) US Random House (Noah Eaker)