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Canongate has acquired the follow-up to Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker-winning novel Life of Pi.
Jamie Byng and Anya Serota negotiated the deal, for UK and Commonwealth rights excluding Canada and India, via Natasha Daneman and Jackie Kaiser at Westwood Creative Artists.
The new book has also been acquired by Knopf Canada, Text in Australia, Fischer Verlag in Germany and most recently Spiegel and Grau / Random House after a “heated auction” in America that was concluded late last week.
Canongate publisher and m.d Byng said: “Writing another book when you have had a success as unexpected and huge as Yann had with Life of Pi is especially challenging. He deals with this very question in his mesmerising and remarkable new novel which is one of the most ingenious, heart-breaking and strangely beautiful books I have read in years.
“The absorbing pair of relationships that lie at the book's heart, one between a donkey and a howling monkey and the other between a writer and an elderly taxidermist, also make this one of the most original books I have ever read. Everyone at Canongate feels similarly and we are all enormously excited at the prospect of helping to bring Yann’s brilliant new book to readers the world over.”
At the start of this month Canongate reissued a new edition of Life of Pi, changing for the first time the original cover that it commissioned Andy Bridge to paint and which was subsequently used by the many of the book’s international publishers.
The publisher is running a world-wide reading group around the book, with readers from 35 different countries already signed up.