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Independent critic sells novel

14.04.08

Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape has bought a first novel by Independent film critic Anthony Quinn set in Liverpool just before, and during, the Second World War.

Franklin bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Peter Straus at Rogers, Coleridge and White in a two-book deal, after making "a very strong offer," said Straus.

The Rescue Man is described as a "tour de force of imaginative, historical and empathetic reconstruction", and involves a historian, Tom Baines, researching the work of a mid-Victorian Liverpool architect, Peter Eames.

Baines explores Eames' unpublished diaries and discovers echoes in the man's personal story of his own unpredictable romantic life, seeing an unrecognised visionary in the dead man. As war breaks out and bombs threaten the architect's buildings, Baines must struggle both to save human lives, and to protect Eames' legacy, facing difficult moral choices.

Straus compares The Rescue Man to Birdsong, Possession and Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. Franklin is set to publish the novel in the summer of 2009.

Quinn has been film critic of the Independent since 1998 and last year judged the Man Booker Prize.

Media Rights deal independent Jonathan Cape

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