DGA LBF 2014

DGA
Rights Guide
London 2014
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
THE MIME ORDER by Samantha Shannon
UK: Bloomsbury
Publication date: October 2014
Manuscript available
Length: 368pp
In the internationally bestselling The Bone Season, Paige Mahoney escaped
the brutal penal colony of Sheol I, but now her problems have only just begun: many of the fugitives are
still missing and she is the most wanted person in London.
As Scion turns its all-seeing eye on Paige, the mime-lords and mime-queens of the city’s gangs are invited
to a rare meeting of the Unnatural Assembly. Jaxon Hall and his Seven Seals prepare to take centre stage,
but there are bitter fault lines running through the clairvoyant community and dark secrets around every
corner.
Then the Rephaim begin crawling out from the shadows. But where is Warden? Paige must keep moving,
from Seven Dials to Grub Street to the secret catacombs of Camden, until the fate of the underworld can
be decided. Will Paige know who to trust? The hunt for the dreamwalker is on.
Samantha Shannon was born in west London in 1991. Between 2010 and 2013 she studied English
Language and Literature at St Anne’s College, Oxford. In 2012 the Women of the Future Awards
shortlisted her for The Young Star Award. Her first novel The Bone Season has been sold in over 25
languages.
Praise for The Bone Season:
“Fabulous, epic fantasy thriller” – The Times
“Dark, embattled, highly wrought fantasy ... there is no doubt that Shannon is the real thing” – Observer
“Slick and vivid ... Gives the fantasy genre a refreshing lease of life. The Bone Season is enough to transport
even hardened sceptics of the fantasy genre into its imaginative realm” – Metro
Rights in The Bone Season sold to: Brazil (Rocco), Bulgaria (under offer), Catalan (Bromera), China
complex (Sharp Point Press), China simplified (under offer), Czech (Host), Croatia (Profil Knjiga), France
(J’ai Lu), Germany (Berlin Verlag), Greece (Platypus), Hungary (Athenaeum), Israel (Agam), Italy (Salani),
Latvia (Zvaigzne), the Netherlands (Prometheus), Norway (Kagge Forlag), Poland (SQN), Portugal (Casa
das Letras), Romania (Curtea), Russia (Atticus), Serbia (Laguna), Slovakia (Vydavatelstvo Tatran), Spain
(Random House
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
A LOVE LIKE BLOOD by Marcus Sedgwick
UK: Mulholland
US: Pegasus
Publication date: March 2014
Finished copies available
Length: 72,000 words
Dogs are barking in the night. He’s somewhere in the broken village on the
hilltop opposite me. I can just make out the line of the rooftops against the dark sky. The air is hot and I am tired, but
that’s not why I’m waiting. Nor am I waiting to mark any moment of reflection either. Not even to honour Marian. I’ve
chased him for over twenty years, and across countless miles, and though often I was running, there have been many times
when I could do nothing but sit and wait, and so now I am only desperate for it to be finished.
A Love Like Blood is the story of one man’s obsession with finding the truth. Told over the course of
twenty years from 1944 to 1968 it takes us from Paris, to Cambridge and then throughout Europe Intense
and extremely compelling, this is a dark thriller about a ‘cat and mouse’ chase between two men.
‘Classy, elegant and gripping...A novel for a chilly night with a cup of tea and a warm blanket where you start reading and
then go on and on, unable to stop.’
John Ajvide Lindqvist
‘ A Love Like Blood manages to play with vampire tropes while lifting the novel to stranger, more compelling heights. A
great read.’
Joe.R. Lansdale
‘it’s an unsettling exploration of obsession wrapped up in 20-year manhunt’ ‘if you’re looking for a fast-paced commuter
read, A Love Like Blood will eat up the time between stops.’
Stylist
‘This macabre fantasy follows a trail of blood across Europe over 50 years. As a soldier in Paris in l944, Charles sees a
vampire draining the life of a woman – and dedicates his life to hunting the monster. Stylish, thrilling and fast, you needn’t
be a horror fan to enjoy this.’
Sunday Mirror
Marcus Sedgwick was born in East Kent. Alongside a 16 year career in publishing he established himself
as a widely-admired writer of YA fiction; his books have either been shortlisted for or won, over thirty
awards, including the Carnegie Medal, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Guardian Children’s Fiction
Prize. A Love Like Blood is his first adult novel.
All rights available excluding: World English language (Mulholland)
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
THE TABLE OF THE LESS VALUED KNIGHTS by Marie
Phillips
UK: Cape
Publication Date: 7th August 2014
Manuscript available
Length: 80,000 words
The exploits of the Knights of the Round Table are famous the
world over. But there was another, unsung table at King Arthur’s
court, the Table of Less Valued Knights, where sat the elderly, the
infirm, the cowardly and the incompetent. And Sir Humphrey “The
Ladykiller” du Val.
The biggest day in the Camelot calendar is Pentecost, when all the knights compete to take on the most
prestigious quest of the year. But this year there’s a mix up. While sleazy Sir Dorian takes on King Edwin
of Puddock’s quest to find his missing wife Martha, Sir Humphrey and his squire steal away with the real
Pentecost quest: tracking down the fiancé of damsel in distress Elaine, kidnapped by a Knight in Black.
But what is the secret cause of Elaine’s distress? Was Queen Martha kidnapped, or does she have a secret
of her own? And what links these two quests together? Sir Humphrey uncovers the truth behind these
mysteries and more, with some help – and more than a little hindrance – from a host of characters
including the Lady of the Lake, a magic sword with a mind of her own, and not one but three Men in
Iron Masks.
Marie Phillips is the author of the international bestseller, Gods Behaving Badly, soon to be a film starring
Christopher Walken and Sharon Stone. She wrote, with Robert Hudson, the BBC Radio 4 series Warhorses
of Letters starring Stephen Fry, and is the co-author of the erotic spoof Fifty Shelves of Grey. She co-hosts the
Firestation Book Swap in Windsor and London.
All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Jonathan Cape),
Canada (Knopf Canada), Italy (Guanda)
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
CHRONICLE OF A CORPSE BEARER by Cyrus Mistry
** Winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature**
India: Aleph
Publication Date:
Finished copies available
Length: 248 pp
At the very edge of its many interlocking worlds, the city of Bombay
conceals a near invisible community of Parsi corpse bearers, whose job it is
to carry bodies of the deceased to the Towers of Silence. Segregated and shunned by society, often
wretchedly poor, theirs is a lot that nobody would
willingly espouse. Yet that's exactly what Phiroze Elchidana, son of a revered Parsi priest, does when he
falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of an ageing corpse bearer.
Derived from a true story, Cyrus Mistry's extraordinary new novel is a moving account of tragic love that,
at the same time, brings to vivid and unforgettable life the degradation experienced by those who inhabit
the unforgiving margins of history.
Cyrus Mistry began his writing career as a playwright, freelance journalist and short-story writer. His
play Doongaji House, written in 1977 when he was twenty-one, has acquired classic status in contemporary
Indian theatre in English. One of his short stories was made into a Gujarati feature film. His plays and
screenplays have won several awards. His first novel, The Radiance of Ashes, was published in 2005.
Rights sold: Italy (Metropoli D’asia)
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
THEIR LIPS TALK OF MISCHIEF by Alan Warner
UK: Faber
Publication date: July 2014
Unedited manuscript available
Length: 91,000 words
An unforgettable story of love, literature and betrayal set in 1980s
London. Thrown out of university, 21 year old Douglas Cunningham
is offered refuge in a west London council flat with the mercurial,
flamboyant Lou, his beautiful young wife Aoife and their infant
daughter.
Penniless, carefree but ambitious – armed with the charm of youth,
Lou and Douglas are obsessed with becoming great writers –
though more often they are distracted by the local pub. They stumble from one hilarious farce to another,
led on by Lou’s incorrigible insistence of their – or at least his – greatness.
This odd ménage totters as Lou becomes increasingly unstable and Douglas more and more besotted
with the gorgeous, sweet-natured Aoife.
A novel by turns humorous and tragic, carefully attuned to the hubris of hot youth, family, and embracing
the bohemian tradition, Their Lips Talk of Mischief, in lyrical and minutely observed prose, is also a
celebration of the dangers and the romance of the literary calling, a threnody to the passing of youth.
Alan Warner was born in Oban, Argyll. His first novel, Morvern Callar won a Somerset Maugham Award;
his second, These Demented Lands, was awarded an Encore Award and his third, The Sopranos, received the
Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. Other works include The Man Who Walks and The Worms Can
Carry Me to Heaven. The film of Morvern Callar has been released internationally to great acclaim. Alan
Warner was on the list of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists, 2003 and his newest novel, The Stars
in the Bright Sky, was long listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. His 2012 novel The Deadman’s Pedal has
just won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2013.
Rights Sold: France (Bourgoise Editeur)
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
A BAD CHARACTER by Deepti Kapoor
UK: Jonathan Cape
US: Knopf
UK publication date: July 2014
Final Proofs available
Length: 50,000 words
Set in a rapidly changing Delhi where wealth and poverty, violence and privilege
live side by side, A Bad Character is the story of a restless girl and her desire for
freedom.
Finding escape from the arranged marriage and security that her middle-class world has to offer through a
chance encounter with a charismatic and wealthy young man, she is quickly exposed to the thrilling, often
illicit pleasures that both the city and her body can hold. But as the affair continues, and her double life
deepens, her lover’s increasingly unstable behaviour carries them past a point of no return, where grief,
love and violence threaten to transform his madness into her own.
Told as urgent, often painful memory in hard but luminous prose, the novel shifts through time and
space, roaming between the murky and glamorous corners of the city, from junkies in Pahar Ganj,
Tibetan refugees in Majnu ka Tila and Sufi qawwalis in Nizamuddin to sex in five-star hotels, marriage
meetings in coffee shops and luxury parties among the Delhi elite.
Defying genre and narrative convention, A Bad Character is the story of an affair from the point of view of
the pursued, in a city where a woman’s love and freedom rarely come without a price.
Deepti Kapoor was born in Moradabad, India in 1980. She studied journalism and later psychology, both
in Delhi, before going on to work in the city's media, writing on culture and trends, later editing
magazines. After a decade she moved to Mysore and then Goa to study yoga. A Bad Character is her first
novel.
All rights available excluding: UK & British Commonwealth excluding Canada (Jonathan Cape), US &
Canada (Knopf), India (Penguin India), France (Éditions du Seuil)
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
INCOMPATIBLE GODS: LIFE AND DEATH ROW IN PAKISTAN by
Isabel Buchanan
UK: On submission, offers being accepted.
Proposal available
Length: Expected word count 70,000-80,000 words
With 13,000 people sentenced to death in the past decade, Pakistan’s death row is the largest in the world.
This condemned community is of Pakistani and foreign nationals; men, women and children; suspected
terrorists and petty thieves; the innocent and the guilty. All spend decades in the same cells.
Incompatible Gods tells the story of Pakistan through the lives of its condemned. It is based on the author’s
practice as a 23 year old defence lawyer in Lahore. In four parts and thirteen chapters, the book draws
out aspects of the cases of men and women awaiting execution to tell a broader story of Pakistan. From
Mohammed Asghar, a Scottish Pakistani chip shop owner on death row for blasphemy, to Rubina Malik,
a Pakistani Christian sentenced to death after borrowing her Muslim neighbour’s cooking oil. These lives
present a spectrum of existence—tragic, comic and prosaic—in Pakistan.
To study Pakistan’s legal system is to tap into its spinal cord. Through blasphemy cases, the book
considers the role of religion: the creation of Pakistan as a religious homeland; the development of
Shari’ah law; the tensions of Muslim and Christian. Through terrorism cases and the arrests of British
Pakistanis, it presents the lived experience of Pakistan’s international relations: the British-Pakistani
diaspora and its multi-million pound remittances industry; drones strikes and village politics; Pakistani
shepherds and great power machinations. Through the cases of Pakistan’s poorest prisoners, the book
meditates on authority and power: the legacy of Empire; the gulf between the haves and the have-nots;
the corruption of police and politicians. And through my experience of being a young, foreign, female
lawyer living in Lahore, the book offers glimpses of a Pakistan little seen: of courts and prisons, rural and
urban homes, and the texture of everyday life.
Isabel Buchanan read Law as an undergraduate and subsequently gained an MPhil in Jurisprudence
from the University of Glasgow. She has spent two years working in Pakistan, first in 2011 to 2012, as a
capital defence lawyer in Pakistan, funded by a fellowship from the legal charity, Reprieve. She then spent a
year at Harvard Law School, as a law student and Urdu-Hindi Language Tutor and then in 2013 re-joined
the Justice Project, Pakistan – Project Manager and Case Worker
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
PACKING UP by Brigid Keenan
UK: Bloomsbury
Publication Date: 10th April 2014
Finished copies available
Length: 320pp
Brigid Keenan was a successful young London fashion journalist when she fell in love with a diplomat
and left behind the gilt chairs of the Paris salons for a large chicken shed in Nepal. Her bestselling
account of life as a ‘trailing spouse’, Diplomatic Baggage, won the hearts of thousands in countries all over
the world.
Now, in her further adventures, we find Brigid in Kazakhstan, where AW, her husband, contracts Lyme
disease from a tick, the local delicacy is horse meat sausage and Brigid’s visit to a market leads to a fullscale riot from which she requires a police escort. Then, as the prospect retirement looms, Brigid finds
herself on the cusp of a whole new world: shuttling between London, Brussels and their last posting in
Azerbaijan, navigating her daughters’ weddings while coping with a cancer diagnosis, and getting a crash
course in grand-motherhood as she helps organise a literature festival in Palestine.
Along the way, dauntless and wildly funny as ever, Brigid learns that packing up doesn’t mean packing in
as she discovers that retiring and moving back home could just be her biggest challenge yet.
“So funny and frank and moving” – Deborah Moggach
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
THE LAST ASYLUM by Barbara Taylor
UK: Penguin
Publication date: February 2014
Finished copies available
Length: 80,000 words
A haunting memoir about illness and the psychiatric health system.
The Last Asylum begins with Barbara Taylor's visit to the innocuously named Princess Park Manor in
Friern Barnet, North London, a picture of luxury and repose. But this is the former site of one of
England's most infamous lunatic asylums, the Middlesex County Pauper Lunatic Aslyum at Colney
Hatch. At its peak this asylum housed nearly 3,000 patients, among them, in the 1980s, Barbara Taylor
herself.
The Last Asylum is Taylor's powerful account of her battle with mental illness, set inside the wider story of
the end of the asylum system.
Barbara Taylor's previous books include an award-winning study of nineteenth-century socialist
feminism, Eve and the New Jerusalem; an intellectual biography of the pioneer feminist Mary Wollstonecraft;
and On Kindness, a defence of fellow feeling co-written with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. She is a
longstanding editor of the leading history journal, History Workshop Journal, and a director of the Raphael
Samuel History Centre. She teaches history and English at Queen Mary University of London.
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
DGA
2014
Sade Adeniran
Aravind Adiga
Segun Afolabi
Antony Altbeker
Simon Armitage
Will Atkins
Diane Atkinson
Tash Aw
Doreen Baingana
Patrick Barlow
Clementine Beauvais
Ronan Bennett
Richard Benson
Xandra Bingley
Caroline Bird
Estate of Harold Brodkey
Isabel Buchanan
Alex Campbell
Richard J. Carwardine
Michael Collins
Matthew Collings
Charlotte Cory
Peter Culshaw
Jim Crace
Robert Crawford
William Dalrymple
David Davidar
Robyn Davidson
Norman Davies
Josephine Dickinson
Roselyn D’Mello
Supriya Dravid
Lucy Ellmann
Martin Ellory
Helen Emmott
Stephen Emmott
Ekow Eshun
Andrew Feinstein
Naresh Fernandez
Michael Fishwick
Aminatta Forna
Richard Fortey
James Fox
Katherine Frank
Sarah Fraser
Martin Gayford
Nikki Gemmell
Mark Gevisser
Janine di Giovanni
Anthony Gottlieb
Nick Groom
Helon Habila
Marybeth Hamilton
Aidan Hartley
Peter Hennessy
Daisy Hildyard
Rosemary Hill
Richard Holmes
Mark Hudson
Michael Hutchinson
Lucy Inglis
Stephen Inwood
Erwin James
Ruchir Joshi
Deepti Kapoor
Meena Kandasamy
Shehan Karunatilaka
Fergal Keane
Brigid Keenan
Paul Kildea
Michael Kustow
Goretti Kyomuhendo
Christina Lamb
Julia Leigh
Tim Lewis
Cathy Scott Clark and Adrian Levy
Alison Light
Estate of Christopher Logue
Jim Mallinson
Alison MacLeod
NS Madhavan
Sejal Mandalia
Sarita Mandanna
Judy Marks
Andy Martin
James McConnachie
Ved Mehta
Hannah Michell
Sam Miller
Cyrus Mistry
Miles Morland
Alistair Moffat
Moni Mohsin
Charlotte Moore
Paul Morley
Graham Morse
Kumi Nadoo
Jade Ngengi
Charles Nicholl
Monica Arac de Nyeko
Timothy O'Grady
Suzanne O’ Sullivan
Estate of Tony Parker
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
Adam Parr
Judy Pascoe
Lara Pawson
Rowan Pelling
Marie Phillips
Dom Phillips
Christopher Plumb
Suzanne Power
Michael Pye
Craig Raine
Monisha Rajesh
Ben Rice
Susan Richards
Michael Symmons Roberts
Nicholas Roe
Jacob Ross
Nilanjana Roy
Arundhati Roy
James Runcie
Sukhdev Sandhu
Lisa Samson
Donald Sassoon
Ken Saro-Wiwa
Miranda Sawyer
Gill Schierhout
Robyn Scott
Matt Seaton
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore
Marcus Sedgwick
Julian Sedgwick
Mimlu Sen
Robert Service
Vikram Seth
Aman Sethi
Samantha Shannon
Will Skidelsky
Ed Smith
Sebastian Smith
Charles Sprawson
Bob Stanley
Jonny Steinberg
Tristram Stuart
Anna Sun
Daniel Swift
Barbara Taylor
Jeet Thayil
Franziska Thomas
Tracey Thorn
Pamela Timms
Claire Tomalin
Emma Townsend
Frank Trentmann
Isabella Tree
Salil Tripathi
Stephen Tuck
Jojo Tulloh
Jack Turner
Peter Wadhams
Mirza Waheed
John Walsh
Alan Warner
Ben Watt
Richard Webster
Katy Whitehead
Patrick Wilcken
Emma Williams
Bob Woffinden
Adrian Woolfson
Amy Yee
David Yelland
Daniella Zamir
Peter Zimonjic
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]
David Godwin Associates Ltd- 55 Monmouth Street, London WC2H 9DG
+44 (0) 207 240 9992 – [email protected]