The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

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Darwin evolves at Little, Brown

31.08.07 Anna Richardson

Little, Brown has acquired Steve Jones’ Darwin’s Garden, and will publish in 2009 to coincide with two of the evolutionist’s anniversaries. The book, which commissioning editor Stephen Guise bought for a “significant” sum from agent Peter Robinson, will be published in January 2009, marking 200 years since Darwin’s birth and 150 years since the first publication of The Origin of Species.

Jones, who moved to Little, Brown from Transworld with c.e.o. Ursula Mackenzie, will be involved in a number of events and media projects celebrating Darwin over the course of 2009, including a three-part BBC2 documentary and a six-part Radio 4 series on Darwin at Down House in Kent, where he lived and wrote. Jones will also give the inaugural lectures at the International Darwin Conference in Melbourne and at Darwin College, Cambridge.

Darwin’s Garden is billed as the culmination of Jones’ writings on the scientist, which include Almost Like a Whale and Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise. It will be an account of Darwin’s life and work, and will begin with the standing of Darwinism in the 21st century. Little, Brown will also use the occasion to rejacket and repromote its Jones backlist, which also includes The Single Helix and Y: The Descent of Men.

Other books coinciding with the anniversaries include one by Michael Boulter, also entitled Darwin’s Garden (Constable & Robinson).

“Of course, the Darwin anniversaries are far from a secret, and competition is inevitable,” acknowledged Guise. “We can comfort ourselves with the fact that we’ll have the best author and the best book to satisfy what we expect to be a tremendous hunger to know more about a man whose thinking is no less significant today than it was 150 years ago.”

Anna Richardson Rights deal Little Brown