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MJ wins French bestseller

12.11.07 Alison Flood

Michael Joseph has seen off six other publishers in a heated auction for French bestseller Anticancer: A New Way of Life by David Servan-Schreiber. Kate Adams bought UK rights from Susanna Lea of Susanna Lea Associates.

Anticancer is a number one bestseller in France, with over 200,000 copies sold in less than a month according to Lea. Rights have already sold in 13 languages, including the US at auction to Viking, HarperCollins in Canada, and Scribe in ANZ. Five other territories are currently under negotiation.

Part memoir and part prescriptive, Anticancer explores ways to reduce our chances of developing cancer, and how to tackle it if we have the illness or have had it. Servan-Schreiber is half American, half French; a neuroscientist, he is also a cancer survivor.

Michael Joseph plans to publish in 2008. Adams said: "Colleagues who are not involved in my area of Penguin have been coming to me since I presented the book in our acquisitions meeting saying how much they want us to publish it, how important it is. To be honest, this doesn't happen all that often. This book manages to be compelling, insightful and very humane, all at once."

Rights deal Michael Joseph Alison Flood David Servan-Schreiber

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